Guess Who I saw at Ground Zero?!?

New York Post/October 20, 2002
By Sarah Gilbert

Apparently, the demand for reading material about Sept. 11 is so drastically high that you can have spent three weeks feeding volunteers at Ground Zero and score a book deal.

"21 Days at Ground Zero: A Young Volunteer's Story" is a new memoir by Juliet McIntyre, a 20-year-old Scientologist/aspiring actress who did, in fact, spend three weeks at Ground Zero feeding volunteers.

"A lot of people - neighbors and friends - had questions," says McIntyre, who lives on the Lower East Side. "I thought if I could write the book, it would help people understand."

Yet McIntyre is the central character and Ground Zero the mere backdrop, with cameos by visitors Vince Vaughn, Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon and fellow Scientologist John Travolta.

Tales of hardship include less-than-ideal sleeping arrangements: After trying to sleep on a plank of wood, then moving on to a row of rubber bins, she and her fellow volunteer Erica finally got some fireman - WHAT? - cots. But McIntyre says that the cots were hardly much better than the plank.

"What person has that shape is beyond me!" she says of the mattresses. "It was very unpleasant. But sleep was sleep, so we just suffered."

McIntyre's memoir isn't all a buzzkill, though:

"The day I was born," she writes, "Mom started to take a picture of me. To her surprise, I looked right at her and smiled. They say most newborns can't even focus their eyes but we still have the photo and there I am, already mugging for the camera."

Also in the book: pictures of McIntyre as a "child model," posing with Ben Stiller at Ground Zero, and one in which she stands in front of the wreckage with her Erica. The caption: "I took off my asbestos mask briefly to pose for this photo."

Heroism indeed.