Waitress by Day Is Also a Working Actress by Night

Lana Turner was not really spotted at Schwab’s, but someday they may tell stories about how Nancy Rubin was discovered at Ed Debevic’s Short Orders Deluxe.

Rubin is a waitress by day at the 1950s-style diner on La Cienega and a comedy star by night in “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” the long-running, environmental theater hit at the Park Plaza Hotel.

As the show’s new Tina, Rubin’s brash, New York Italian-American bride is a manipulative party girl with a brassy mouth. That also describes her job at Debevic’s, where her real-life waitress (known as Lupe last week and now Fortuna) whips around the vinyl and Formica tabletops in a lipstick red uniform with a gleaming black pageboy bob, a Po-Peep red ribbon and a field of buttons on her busty chest that say “Read My Chest.”

“I’m not quitting my waitress job,” she asserts. “I make more money working here than I do acting in the show.”

The town is loaded with people who wait on you who want to act, but Rubin is probably the first actor who likes to sling burgers. For her it’s another acting gig, and it got her Tina. She’s never even had an agent.

“It was probably my volume--my loud New York mouth--that accounted for my break,” she said between customers at Debevic’s. “I open my mouth and you can hear me. This place is a barn, and I’m blessed with open tunnels.”

The show’s original Tina, Nancy Cassaro, spotted Rubin as her likely replacement when she overheard her barking at a patron at the restaurant.

It didn’t hurt that Rubin is a lookalike for Cassaro, who left the production for other projects with the theatrical group Artificial Intelligence (young players out of Hofstra University), which originated “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding” and brought it here from New York last fall.

Rubin, 28, arrived in L.A. at the same time with a theater arts degree from the University of South Florida and a comedy improv background in Tampa clubs--not a great calling card. “But I chose Hollywood because there are a lot of girls like me in New York, but none like me out here.”