Syosset

Idina Kim Menzel is an American actress, singer and songwriter. She rose to prominence for her performance as Maureen Johnson in the Broadway... musical Rent, a role which she reprised for the 2005 film adaptation. In 2004 she won the Tony Award for originating the role of Elphaba in the hugely successful Broadway blockbuster Wicked. Menzel was born in Queens, New York. Her mother, Helene, is a therapist, and her father, Stuart Mentzel, worked as a pajama salesman. Her family is Jewish; her grandparents immigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe. Her family lived in East Brunswick, Somerset and Marlboro, New Jersey from when she was in kindergarten to third grade, but she considers herself raised in Syosset, New York, with her younger sister Cara. Idina changed her last name to Menzel to better reflect the pronunciation the Mentzel family had adopted in America. When Menzel was 15 years old, her parents divorced and she began working as a wedding and bar mitzvah singer, a job which she continued throughout her time at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
more

Judd Apatow is an American film producer, director, and screen and comedy writer. He is well known for his work in comedy films, especially for... films he has been involved with throughout the latter half of the 2000s. He is the founder of Apatow Productions, a film production company that also developed the cult television series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. In 2007, he was Ranked #1 on Entertainment Weekly's The 50 Smartest People in Hollywood. Judd Apatow was born in Flushing, New York to a Jewish family, and raised in Syosset, New York. His father, Maury Apatow, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Tami , worked at a comedy club in Southampton. Apatow has an older brother, Robert, and a younger sister, Mia; His maternal grandfather was music producer Bob Shad. When Apatow was twelve years old, his parents divorced. Robert went to live with his maternal grandparents, and Mia went to live with her mother. As a child, Apatow lived mainly with his father, and visited his mother on weekends. Apatow's sense of humor provided access to friends during his teen years; obsessed with comedy, his childhood hero was Steve Martin.
more

Vanessa Sanchez is a retired professional wrestler and valet. She also was a member of WCW's Nitro Girls Sanchez began dancing at age two, and by... age sixteen she was doing some professional dancing with bands in local clubs. She also appeared in videos on MTV. She left New York after high school and enrolled at Atlanta's Oglethorpe University, where she studied accounting. She also started her own dance company. After graduation she worked as an assistant controller with J.W. Marriott in Atlanta, and two years later passed the CPA exam before going to work for an accounting firm in Atlanta. She eventually learned from her dance instructor about World Championship Wrestling looking to hire Nitro Girls as dancers for their weekly television series WCW Monday Nitro. She contacted Melissa Bellin, whom she had worked with in the past, and received an audition with the company. She joined WCW's Nitro Girls dance troupe in 1997 as Nitro Girl Tygress but left them in 2000 to become a wrestler and valet for The Filthy Animals stable. She also began training at the WCW Power Plant under the tutelage of Madusa to become a wrestler.
more

Shannon MacMillan is a former American professional soccer player. She was a member of the U.S. Women's National Team that won the gold medal at the... 1996 Summer Olympics and at the 1999 Women's World Cup. She was US Soccer's Female Athlete of the Year for 2002. In 2007, MacMillan became an assistant coach for the UCLA women's soccer team. MacMillan attended San Pasqual High School in Escondido, California, and then played for the University of Portland, where she won the Hermann Trophy for the best female collegiate soccer player of the 1995 season. While still in college, she joined the US National Team in 1994 as a midfielder. By 2000, she moved to forward. In the Olympic semifinal against Norway in 1996, she scored the game-winning goal in overtime. In the Olympic final against China, she collected a Mia Hamm shot that rebounded off the post and put it in for the first goal of the match. She was a "super-sub" on the US WNT's 1999 Women's World Cup team and the 2000 Olympic team.
more

Marnie Alexenburg is an American actress. She graduated from Syosset High School in Syosset, New York.