Julia was born in an American army hospital on Okinawa. When she was three years old, her father, an officer in the Foreign Service, was transferred to Benghazi, Libya and five years later, to Somalia. Julia loved Mogadishu, which in those days was a dusty, sleepy little place. She went to an Italian missionary school and had a pet baboon. Their house was full of foundlings—a monkey, a lynx, fragile little dik-diks, a gerenuk, a giant tortoise, various dogs and two chickens. Julia was ten when the family moved to Rome, Italy. She still went to an Italian school, but this time at the top of the Spanish steps. She wore an itchy blue wool dress with a plastic clip-on collar. When she told her parents she wanted to become a nun, they took her out of the Sacred Heart and put her in the English School. At nineteen, Julia came to the States. She worked in a health food store on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge and, clueless about what to do with her life, applied to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. During her first month in Washington, she auditioned for a play on campus. She fell in love with the theatre, and spent the rest of the year holed up in the black box, rehearsing or performing. By the end of the year she transferred to a theatre program in New York. As an actor, Julia supported herself 'between engagements' as an interpreter for Italian manufacturers. She worked at trade shows, selling everything from gold jewelry to shoes, fabric, wine, silk ties and cheese. One company she worked for made hair products, permanent wave devices that they insisted the interpreters wear during the show—two-foot high cones that looked like dunce caps. Throughout all this, she did get some acting gigs—in regional theatres in Oregon, Michigan and Massachusetts, in workshop productions in NYC. She shot a film called OVER THE EDGE with Matt Dillon in Colorado, where she finally got her SAG card. Eventually, Julia went back to college. At the School of General Studies at Columbia, she got a degree in Literature/Writing. Soon after, she and her family moved to a small town in the country. Within six months, they bought a building at auction from a bank, and the next spring opened a restaurant. It did well, and three years later, feeling ten years older, they sold it. Since then, Julia has focused on her writing. Design images: Blue Plate painting: Roger Mason Julia Pomeroy photo: John Gregory