I’ve always considered myself a collector of interesting experiences. Perhaps to my detriment, my résumé looks more like a roster of Whose Line Is It Anyway sketches than a sequence of interrelated experiences leading up to a stable professional life. Never-a-dull-moment has been the goal, and most moments have remained gratifyingly un-dull. So when a local medical school asked me to serve as a simulated patient for their training sessions, I jumped at it. I had absolutely no acting experience, and most of my medical knowledge is on the level of Dr. Phil. But maybe this is how stars are born. You’re Pertussis Patient #3—until a blotto Bradley Cooper walks into the ER and overhears your beautiful coughing fit. Some of my fellow med-school thespians are, like me, simple university students looking to make a buck. But some are actors manqués who’d apparently been doing this for decades: elderly men and women who put on makeup, affect accents, and invent their own evocative pseudonyms and back stories that go way beyond the simple patient scripts …