"I’m sure I get my intellect from my mother," she continues. "If she weren’t as intellectual and as smart as she was, she wouldn’t have been in so much pain.								"She married my father when she was 18. All the couples in my family are happily married. My older sister and her husband have been married 20 years. That’s why I’m single, because I know what a good marriage is." When Lisa came to New York, she was 18. "I really needed to leave my home. A friend invited me to go with her to the city, and I said, ‘When are you leaving?’ She said, ‘In a couple of hours,’ and I said, ‘Okay.’ " She never turned back. Within days she landed work at a nearby coffee shop, and soon she was living a life of film fantasy made real. "I was here for a week when this guy came in and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He came back after work and took me up to Rockefeller Center." The next day she started working at their outdoor café as a hostess. "I never saw the guy again. I don’t know who he was or where he came from." The adventure continued. "Then a guy came in for dinner and of course he threw me a line. ‘You should be an actress. I’m producing a movie.’ " She took the cue and went to acting school. "Someone told me about Lee Strasberg. I had no idea who he was. I was so naïve." She got accepted in his master class and studied with him several years. During a brief stint in L.A. she also got a scholarship to Beverly Hills Playhouse, but she gave it up to return to the city. NEXT PAGE