On Tuesday night, Eden J. Riegel '02 was worried. It wasn't being away from home, an impending Expos assignment or roommate troubles that had the first-year distracted.

It was the mail.

"I need to find an overnight FedEx place!" Riegel said urgently, shaking the envelope in question.

The sentiment is not unusual among upper-class students this season, busy with medical school and job applications, but as Riegel said, her reason for evening exasperation was unique:

"I need to send something to my agent!"

Her agent--as in the person who has helped get the first-year cast in commercials, television shows, movies and Broadway plays.

Riegel and her agent have done well. The easily-excitable brunette entered Harvard this year already an accomplished actor. At age eight, Riegel and her grandmother moved to New York City from Arlington, Virginia, when she was offered a switch from playing the younger version of Cosette in the touring company of Les Miserablesto the Broadway show.

"After about a year on tour, they said, 'Do you want to go to Broadway?' and I said sure," Riegel recalled.

Riegel called going to New York City "not a big deal."

"I was excited: I was going to New York and I loved it," she said. "I didn't know I was going to be gone for so long."

That role led to a swing part in The Will Rogers Follies, also on Broadway, where she ultimately took on a major role as Mary Rogers. It was in that role that Riegel learned to lasso, a skill she now markets, along with several accents.

But most of her acting skills originated in New York, where she attended Professional Children's School (PCS), an institution for child star hopefuls, while working as an actress. There she and current roommate Allison E. Lane '02 rubbed shoulders with the likes of Macauley Culkin and Christina Ricci, a talented actor she says is genuinely nice in person.

"She's very down-to-earth," Riegel said. "She's so excited that she doesn't have to play 10-year-olds anymore."

The typical undergraduate schedule is a switch for Riegel. At PCS, she went to class about two days a week and her limited schoolday was the norm.

"Everybody in school had something other than school as the center of their lives," Riegel said.