Nancy St. Alban
		MY BATTLE TO BE NOTICED Growing up with seven brothers and sisters, Nancy St. Alban (Michelle) had to get creative to get attention

	As the seventh child in a line of eight, GUIDING LIGHT’s Nancy St. Alban (Michelle) got quite used to being picked on by her older siblings. “My brothers and sisters babied me a bit. Abused me, mostly,” she jokes, “but babied me. It was always, ‘Oh, don’t throw the ball to Nancy; she’s too young to catch it.’ They always made me feel like I couldn’t [succeed in sports], just because they were being kids.”    In a highly athletic and competitive family, her siblings’ negative taunts stuck in the young girl’s head. But then, Haswell and Madge’s second-to-youngest discovered, at the tender age of 7, her passion for dance. “I loved ballet class,” St. Alban fondly recalls. “My best friend was a ballet dancer, too. While everyone else in school was playing kickball during gym class, she and I would come out in our little ballet outfits — leotards and tights and everything — and we’d be doing grand jetés down the playground.” Dancing Queen So as her brothers and sisters carved out their niches in football, wrestling and softball, the future actress made her way from ballet to pointe to jazz and eventually, to the Irish art of clogging, all along keeping dreams of perhaps one day starring in Swan Lake. “I wanted to be a ballerina,” she declares.    What made St. Alban’s love for ballet even sweeter was that none of her siblings shared the same interest: It was solely hers. So she took that inspiration and ran. (Or, as the case may have been, jumped). “I remember my mom saying that when she took my older sisters to ballet class, they hated it and would stick their leotards up their butts,” the Baltimore native laughs. “With me, my mom says that she saw a huge difference. I couldn’t wait to go back.” Child Star St. Alban’s after-school activity took on a life of its own when she began attending the Baltimore Actors’ Theatre Conservatory, a small school for the performing arts where she also picked up acting, from seventh grade through high school. “I actually graduated in a class of three!” she exclaims. “So I had intensive training there. And if you went to the school, you had the opportunity to audition for performances at this dinner theater that the same people ran. Every single weekend, I was doing a show.”    A B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University soon followed, and St. Alban was on her way to receiving professional paychecks for what was once her means of standing apart from her siblings. “I got to be good at something, and it was different than what everybody else was into,” she observes. “That inspired me to go further with it. And then there was a point where I’d done it for so long, I didn’t know how to do anything else!”    In hindsight, St. Alban admits that performing in the arts may have been her way of getting attention and not becoming lost in the family shuffle. “I never thought about it that way [until recently],” she notes. “And now, I’m thinking it MUST have been.” —Michelle Ann Moro