“Hi. I’m Mandy, and I was a teenage quitter. An eternal Virgo, I’m a type-A, planning, list-making, proactive doer. Or maybe not so much of a doer as a starter.” Mandy Kaplan is sitting at her dining-room table in Studio City, reading from notes. In front of her is a Casio keyboard. Mandy is about to play some songs for us. They are songs she wrote in junior high. And they’re terrible. She used to gather her family ’round the piano and force them to hear her compositions, despite the fact that they’re all unfinished. “I had heard that Debbie Gibson wrote a hundred songs by age 16,” Mandy says. “And I wanted to do the same thing. I started three, and, well, didn’t really finish any of them.” In a few weeks, Mandy will perform her 2.25... More >>>