At the age of 20, Melissa McCarthy, was a bored, sometime college student living in Boulder, Colorado. She called her mother and said, “Mom, I got a one-way ticket to New York.” McCarthy was living with the big dream of going to New York to pursue a fashion career. Her mother replied, “Oh.”

McCarthy, young, single and broke, reflected, “I knew I wanted something, but I didn’t know exactly what. Way longer than I should have been, I was looking to my parents for help when I couldn’t quite make it.”

For Sandy, McCarthy’s mother, that would take the form of a phone call. She said, “There was the ring, ring, ring: ‘It’s time to pay the rent, and I’ll have the money if this and that works out,’ and so I’d write the check.”

Even now as a successful actress, Melissa gets tears in her eyes from the gratitude she feels: “I don’t know how you did it, Mom,” she says. “I would have said, ‘This is silly. You’re not going to become an actor. The odds of this are ridiculous, and you should move home and knock it off.’ But you’d just send me 70 bucks, 200 bucks. The fact that you didn’t give me guilt changed the course of my life. Because if I’d been guilted out, I definitely would have quit.”

David Hochman; “Melissa McCarthy Will Make You Laugh,” AARP (4-2-18) page 31