Working Girl

''Betsy's Wedding,'' he begins reading. ''The Breakfast Club. Face the Music — I have no idea what that was. For Keeps — I saw that. Wasn't bad. Fresh Horses — I don't think I saw that. Malicious — she was okay. I didn't like the movie.'' He pauses. ''If you look at anybody with that long a list, there's going to be [some] crummy movies.''

Townies is intended to be a Roseanne for blue-collar Gen-Xers. If it is hard to imagine Ringwald as a working girl slinging chowder, you're not alone. ''There never is and never will be anything schlumpy about her,'' admits Myman. Says Ringwald, ''They were sort of worried, because of the way I dress and speak. And I kept saying 'Well, I'm an actor, and an actor acts!''' Also, Ringwald, never known for a comedic flair, refused to do a test reading (''I'm bad at auditions''). Says Myman, ''We basically rolled the dice.''

Arriving at the Townies set, Myman watches over one last run-through before tonight's filming. Between scenes, Ringwald sips from a Starbucks cup and casts an impatient eye around the set, as if she's waiting for a late bus; at times, she seems like a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club's aloof Claire Standish. ''She's a trouper — a real professional,'' says Myman admiringly. He's right; during two days of rehearsals, Ringwald never flubs a line. Yet watching her adjust to sitcom timing is disconcerting, like watching John McEnroe return from retirement to play Ping-Pong.

Back at her house, Ringwald grabs a cigarette and a bottle of spring water. Like everyone around her, she is anxious to see whether the public embraces a downsized version of her old persona or greets her as rudely as Shannen Doherty did. A phrase she uses several times is ''leap of faith'': how her producers took one by hiring her, how she took one to do a sitcom, how she took another to sign with a manager, even though ''I can't say that anyone has my best interest at heart except me and my family.''

She says she looks back on her Brat Pack era ''very fondly — although for a while I felt it was all I was known for.'' She sees her fellow Packers ''rarely'' and mainly on screen, as when Emilio Estevez had a part in Mission: Impossible. ''I'm always sort of happy when one of my own'' — she pauses and laughs — ''no, when one of them breaks out and does something good.'' Asked if she tried drugs — which ensnared some of her Hollywood peers — she will say only, ''Like anyone else, yeah.''

''I'll never get immersed in this business like I was at one point,'' she says. ''You have to have something else.'' She glances around at her new rental, which she preferred to moving back into her old house. ''I didn't want to feel like I hadn't gone anywhere. Even though it's not decorated and it's a mess, it feels like I'm someplace else.''