THE BEST
OF YOUR LIFE
INSPIRING PEOPLE
Funny
Business
A comedian plots to
leave corporate
America—forever
Toastmasters) in her spare time.
But as the years passed, volunteer-
ing wasn’t enough. When her father
died in mid-2007, she remembered
what he’d always told her: “Don’t
ever let your dreams go.” She says,
“I just knew I had to make the move.”
So in March 2008, soon after her
50th birthday (and with enough
money saved to cover 18 months of
expenses), she finally left her job.
JJ SULIN
When Mary Ellen DePetrillo Rinaldi
was a producer at a Toastmasters
International conference in 2004, her
job was to run the show, not steal it.
So she was surprised when the head-
liner—Darren LaCroix, a renowned
public speaker—told her a few weeks
beforehand, “You’re doing 20 min-
utes. I’ll call your name, so be ready.”
Rinaldi, now 53, had worked the Bos-
ton comedy circuit from the late 1980s
into the ’90s, but that was a long time
ago. She felt sick to her stomach—but
exhilarated. “I sat down and wrote
from scratch,” she says, eventually
banging out a 20-minute set about
corporate America, marriage, and par-
enting. Despite the years off, Rinaldi—
as comedians would say—“killed.”
The show was a rim-shot reminder
that she still loved to perform. “I had
a genuine, deep-in-my-heart feeling
that the stage is where I needed to
be,” she says.
A native of Cranston, Rhode Island,
Rinaldi had left the stage years
earlier for a more stable job—she’d
felt burned out and wanted to help
support her family. She eventually
earned six figures as a global-accounts manager for a technology-training company. And when she
missed comedy, she volunteered
to produce shows (like the one for
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