Fresh from rehearsing her new role as Magenta in the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show, Daphne Rubin-Vega strides into a Times Square Starbucks in an R-rated Catholic-schoolgirl outfit: virginal white top, plaid miniskirt, tight red leather jacket. Sipping a "tall reg with milk," the woman who catapulted to overnight stardom— and a Tony nomination—as the drug-snorting, tight-pants-wearing Mimi in the musical Rent admits that she once wanted to be a nun.

"I liked the habit," she quips, recalling her Washington, D.C., school days after emigrating from Panama at age 2 with her two brothers and divorced I mother. She eventually grew up in New York City with her stepfather, whom she describes as a "straight-up American Jew." She recalls that when kids in school would ask her if she was black or white, she would respond, "Gold"--that is, until a nun rapped her for it. (Bye-bye, habit.) As Magenta, Rocky Horror's incestuously fashionable transsexual Transylvanian, Rubin-Vega hears echoes of her carefree past. As a stage-struck Greenwich Village preteen, she used to sneak into The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the movie based on the play. But this is one woman who doesn't look back, only forward. In fact, she's writing songs for a new album (the first one fell through the corporate cracks), and her fiance', Tom Costanza, a New York real estate broker, helps keep her focused on her post-Rent career. Laughing, she notes, "Whenever he wants to let me know something is passe, he'll tell me, 'Daphne, that's so Mimi.'"

--Patrick Pacheco