By the time Lori Petty was 18, she'd lived in Tennessee, Iowa, and Nebraska and was hungry for the kinds of acting jobs that only the coasts could provide. After 10 years of movie and television work, the emotionally coiled beauty with a glamour-tinged-with-gravel voice has the role of her career-but she had to go to Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana to get it. In Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own, due in theaters this summer, Petty stars as the pitcher on a women's pro baseball team during the 1940s, alongside an all- star squad that includes Geena Davis, Madonna, and Tom Hanks. Though almost five months of location shooting around the Midwest had its rough spots (''All those people I remembered were still there, and I think I was just a little too androgynous for them,'' she notes wryly), Petty was all confidence on camera-and on the mound, even during shooting at Chicago's Wrigley Field. ''I'm lucky,'' she says. ''I grew up playing sports, I had a lot of varsity letters-I even pitched in Little League baseball.'' She got her League role after her intense performance as a surf instructor in the testosterone-packed Point Break. ''Working with 20 actresses after working with 10 men was different,'' she says. ''We all started getting our periods at the same time-that was lovely-and you should have seen the makeup room. Chicks everywhere. By the end of shooting, I learned how to do my eyebrows myself from watching Madonna- she's the eyebrow and lip expert.'' Next for the actress: ''I don't really want to shoot anyone on screen or to be shot. And I'd like to make a movie about the way things really are-multicultural, multiracial, across different class lines. All these yuppie heroes are working my nerves!''
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