Amy Kathleen Pietz

She was born in Milwaukee on March 6, 1969, and adopted by Arnold, a truck driver, and Nancy, a nurse. She grew up in a three-bedroom, one-bath house in Oak Creek when the suburb still had cows, walking past livestock on the way to school. She trained for ballet until the money ran out. Seventh-grade social studies put her in Oliver!. At Oak Creek High a girl in the next row said she was leaving for the new Milwaukee High School of the Arts; Amy went with her and finished in the school's first graduating class, then earned a BFA from DePaul's Theatre School in 1991.

Four seasons as Annie Spadaro on Caroline in the City (1995–1999) made her a network regular. Later she played a northern Wisconsin wife on Aliens in America, okey-doke accent and all, so she could impersonate both mothers. DePaul later gave her an Award for Excellence in the Arts. She has said that finding her birth family, which includes a singer, helped explain why performing made sense. Milwaukee Magazine compared the household to You Can't Take It With You and carried her first-person account of the rural walk to school and the Arts-school transfer.

"I felt like an outsider in my own hometown, to be frank," she told Milwaukee Magazine. The birth certificate city is Milwaukee; the raise and the transfer are Oak Creek. The hometown, as she tells it, is the cows and the girl who pointed her toward the arts high school.