Nick Bakay, Class of 1981, thought he was well prepared. He studied under Tom Turgeon and Harlene Marley, Kenyon's professorial dynamic duo of drama. He earned a master of fine arts degree in drama at Southern Methodist University. Next stop - stardom. "In your twenties, you've got to roll the dice and head for New York," he says. "If you don't think you're the exception then you should wonder why you're even trying."

Then a funny thing happened. Nothing. "The first five or six years were brutal," he remembers.

Things are different now. Bakay may not get stopped for autographs, but he's a busy man in Hollywood, with a successful career that defies easy categorization.

He is the well-paid voice of Salem, the talking black cat on the WB's Sabrina theTeenage Witch; a consulting producer and writer with CBS's The King of Queens; a regular contributor on various ESPN sports shows; and the voice of Norbert, a talking beaver, on Nickelodeon's animated show The Angry Beavers. His resumé includes an early stint as a writer for National Lampoon magazine, where he invented the comic-book character The Evil Clown. He worked on Comedy Central's Night After Night and Sportsmonster. He was a writer and actor during the final season of In Living Color and shared an office with Jim Carrey.

Bakay credits Kenyon's professors for giving him what he needed to succeed in various areas of "the business."

"I came out of Kenyon knowing a lot of things my fellow actors didn't know," He explains. "I'd learned how to read a play and direct. I was fluent in writing and understood so much about what I was doing as an actor. And that can be applied to Hamlet or a talking cat. Really, what I learned from Tom and Harlene was how to be a professional."