Girl Walks Into a Bar (8 page)

I was seeing a therapist who kept insisting that I take a trip alone. (Even though I am a huge fan of therapy to begin with—remember, I originally wanted to
be
a therapist—I will tell you that if you are going to be on
SNL
, you should get a therapist immediately. It’s either that or a drinking problem, so take your pick.) Taking a trip by myself was her answer to every problem you could imagine, and most of
my
problems revolved
around relationships. If I was afraid I would never meet a guy—“take a trip by yourself.” I was dating a jerk—“take a trip by yourself.” I’m worried because I don’t think I’ll ever have kids—“take a trip by yourself.” She was an older woman who, in her younger days, had met her husband while traveling alone. Is that what she thought would happen for me? Or would it just force me out of my usual routines and serve as some sort of psychological reset button? I didn’t know. It made no sense to me. I really liked to travel, and I had a little gang of ladies to travel with. So why the hell would I want to go somewhere by myself? I was not interested.

Finally, for some reason, she got through to me. I looked at her advice as some sort of “doctor’s orders,” like taking a pill: I don’t know why I’m doing this, I thought, but I’ll give it a shot. Even the night before the trip, I was packing, thinking, “What the hell am I doing? This is ridiculous.” But I was going. Instead of saying no again and giving the reasons why a trip alone was a bad idea, without consciously realizing it, I had “Yes And”-ed my therapist.

I had picked Costa Rica as my destination because there would be stuff to do there and it wouldn’t be me on some beach with a bunch of honeymooning couples. I went to a lodge in the middle of the rain forest. And except for the fact that one night I woke up to find a large beetle halfway up my pajama leg, it was a great trip. I had no idea that I would also get a character out of the deal.

There weren’t many people at this lodge, but for meals we sat at communal tables, which was nice because I didn’t feel strange being there alone, and it forced me to talk to people.
The surroundings were beautiful: mountains, ocean, monkeys howling in the morning, and scarlet macaws flying overhead. One morning at breakfast, we were just making chitchat and someone asked where I was from. I said, “New York City.” And someone else said, “So were you there for 9/11?” The question hung awkwardly in the jungle air and sort of screeched things to a halt. I answered that I was, but sort of tried to get the conversation off the shoulder of the road and back onto the highway. For a week, that moment stayed in my mind just sort of batting around, me thinking nothing of it. When I was back home in New York, I was out listening to a band, something I don’t go do very often, and there it was! That bolt from the blue that you hope for—the muses decided to pay me their once-yearly visit. The name Debbie Downer popped into my head, someone who just has to go to the negative stuff that’s in all of our heads but that we edit out during a fun moment. I wrote it up that week with the writer Paula Pell. At first we tried to set it in an office, but something just wasn’t clicking. Then we realized it needed to be somewhere really happy. And so we set it in Disney World. We started joking around, making that “Waaaah Waaaaaah!” sound while we were writing, and then we thought, “What if we actually put these goofy trombone noises into the scene?” The over-the-top “waaaah waaaaaah”s were making
us
laugh, so we said, “What the hell, let’s include them.” The scene did well at the read-through table and was picked for the show that week. During rehearsal on Saturday, Jimmy and Horatio were cracking up. “Those guys better knock it off!” I thought. I didn’t want them messing with this scene that I felt could actually go pretty well. Of course, on the
live show, it was I who ended up cracking up on air, flubbing that one line at the beginning and simply not getting back on track. It was the ultimate “church laugh,” where you know you should not be laughing but you can’t help yourself. I knew the camera was coming in for a close-up—there was no escaping it by hiding behind another actor or keeping my head down. “GET IT TOGETHER, DRATCH!” I was thinking. “Lorne. Lorne. Lorne. Lorne,” I thought. But it was to no avail.

People ask me if Lorne got mad over my giggle fit, and the answer as far as I know is no. The audience eats it up when the actors break during a scene, but I would always try not to break. It can become a cheap tool to get the audience on your side since they dig it so much. I think Lorne knows it’s going to happen from time to time, and it’s not a big crime on the show. Ironically, although I was being highly unprofessional by laughing so hard through my scene, I think that was my favorite moment of my time on
SNL
. The subsequent Debbie Downer scenes could never hit the heights of that first one with the genuine laughing breakdown. But for me, that first scene was just unbridled joy—we were all having fun and clearly it showed. It also shows just how live the show really is: There are no do-overs, and whatever happens during showtime is out there for all to see. Whether it’s because we started laughing in what would become the biggest break-fest in
SNL
history, or because the character resonated with people in an “I know that person!” type of way, I had a hit scene. And it was all because I said yes.

any more questions?

I said this book
wasn’t about showbiz and so far I’ve only talked about showbiz. But you have to see where I was coming from before you see where I ended up. So that pretty much wraps up the showbiz section. Oh. Wait … no. I see a few hands up in the imaginary crowd of people in my head, wondering about a few things I left out. There are several questions I am asked again and again, so I will close out by answering them. I have to interject that you would be surprised at how often I am asked this stuff by strangers, and that’s the only reason I’m going into it here.
I
know that there are far more important issues going on in the world, and that people in France have no idea who I am. Except the Brulés, the French family I lived with for a semester during college. So here are the answers to the last few questions I’m asked a lot. Um, let’s see. … I see a lot of hands…. Yes, you!? Doorman from a few buildings down from my apartment?

“So why aren’t you doing those little parts on
30 Rock?
Why aren’t you on
30 Rock
anymore?”

Well, Manny, my character spots ended up happening less frequently as that first season went on, until the idea was faded off completely when the show returned for its second season. Much as I thought playing the different characters was a cool idea, I could understand the fade-out. New sitcoms are ever-changing beasts, and as the show evolved and the sketch section of the show disappeared, the “Where’s Waldo?” thing of me popping up as various characters didn’t quite fit in. Also, though Tina made many self-deprecating jokes about low ratings when the show was starting out,
30 Rock
received a great deal of critical acclaim and was developing a reputation as being The Little Cool Show That Could. Big movie stars were starting to do guest spots in the types of parts I would have been playing, movie stars who could bring in more viewers than I to a show that initially was struggling in the ratings. It was kind of a “Well, that’s showbiz!” situation.

Tina did have me back to appear on the show a few times as the years went by, for the 100th episode as well as the live episode they did. I liked going back to the set and being able to hang with my old friends and cast mates, well out of the awkward period of the replacement and all the hoopla.

Ok, next question, … uh … you! My mom’s friend from book club? I wanna say your name is Lois?

“Yes. Lois Karshbaum. Weren’t you and Tina friends from your Chicago days? Was that weird?”

Well, yes, Lois, Tina and I were friends from back in our Chicago days, and we are still friends now. I have a hunch that my friendship with Tina is one of the reasons my replacement on the pilot got so much publicity. Dozens of actors are replaced
on pilots every season, and it’s usually a little footnote in a trade paper. Tina and I have been friends for many years, and when you throw in the casting changeup, it makes people wonder—what was
that
like?

Tina and I met in 1996, back in our Second City days in Chicago. I worked with her closely, since we were in two shows on the mainstage together. We did one of my favorite Second City scenes together, a scene called “Wicked” that featured the two of us with thick Boston accents as a mother and daughter shopping at the mall. (It was the precursor to the Boston teens scene we wrote for me and Jimmy Fallon when I landed at
SNL
.) A classic Tina line from “Wicked”:

ME: Ma, you’re gonna give me a negative body image. You know eight out of ten teenage girls have a negative body image.

TINA: Yeah? Well, six of ’em are right.

We would hang out after the shows, often ending up with her then-boyfriend, now-husband, Jeff, and fellow cast member Scott Adsit at a diner called the Golden Apple. These were the glorious days of one’s youth, when you could down a milk shake and French fries at two
A.M.
without ever gaining weight. Throughout all our time improvising together, up there in front of the Second City audience without a script, Tina and I developed a certain chemistry with each other, a shorthand that has served us over the years. And never did it come in more handy than the time she saved me from exposing myself to an audience of Hollywood bigwigs. I’m not talking about
exposing my soul or inner thoughts, I’m talking vaginas here, people.

It all started with the sound of
RRRIIIP
, the loud sound of tearing fabric. I knew that sound could be only one thing … ’twas my pants splitting, and as luck would have it, this was the one night of my life that I wasn’t wearing underwear. I was standing onstage in front of an audience filled with Hollywood bigwigs, agents, and studio executives at the now- defunct HBO workspace in Los Angeles. Tina Fey and I were performing our two-person sketch show
Dratch and Fey
. We had written and performed the show in Chicago the summer after I moved to LA and she was writing on
SNL
. The following summer, we performed it in New York at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and it was getting a lot of attention, so we were in LA to show it to industry people there. After I heard the deafening
RRRIIIP
(deafening to me, anyway), I glanced down to see that my pants had split up the
front
, starting at the fly and heading downward. A shot of adrenaline went through my body as a prickly feeling took over the back of my neck. At this point in the show, I was sitting on the floor onstage—that’s when my pants had split, when I went to sit on the floor. How bad was it? I looked down again. I saw my own humanity.

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God. This was a two-person show. There were no breaks. I couldn’t run off the stage and somehow fix the problem. Yet how was I going to continue on, with my jive there for the world to see? Prior to the show, in the dressing room with Tina, I had noticed that the pants I was wearing showed panty lines. In New York, doing our show at
the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, I could have flown with the panty lines. But this was LA! I couldn’t have panty lines in LA! So I happened to say to Tina, “I’m just not going to wear underwear.” It was a throwaway line. We thought nothing of it.

There onstage in panic mode, I carefully got up off the floor for the next little transition moment of the show, where Tina and I faced each other and danced in a sort of stylized make-out move. Loud music played along, so under the music, I blurted out to her “Ijustsplitmypants.” “Grabthatjacket,” she said, without missing a beat. There was a sweat jacket on the floor that had been tossed off by one of the characters we had played earlier. I tied it around the front of my pants for the whole rest of the show. No one noticed. Improvisers who perform together for a long time develop a comfort and a trust that if one is floundering, the others will come in and save the moment. Because of our history, I always knew Tina had my back. Now I knew she had my front too.

Point is, Tina and I had both been in the biz long enough to know that some things are beyond our control. When I was replaced on the show, I felt confident that Tina had “fought” for me as much as she saw fit, but that at the same time, the network has certain demands, and the fact exists that I wasn’t right for the part as it turned out to be. Oddly enough, I didn’t initiate a big Feelings Conversation with her; I didn’t want her to think I was expecting her to solve things for me or
fix
anything, especially when she was busy trying to get her show off the ground. She had written me a part in her show (as she did for her old pals Jack McBrayer and Scott Adsit as well), she’s always been loyal to her old Chicago gang, and she shows
that loyalty with actions big (“You’re in my show!”) and small (“C’mon over! Jeff’s making doughnuts!”). As for the prospect of a big Feelings Conversation, I’ve never known Tina to be the kind of gal who’d be into putting some Shawn Colvin on the iPod, pulling out an afghan and two mugs of hot cocoa, patting the couch, and saying, “Hey, girlfriend, c’mon over here and let’s share our feelings. Mmmm. That’s good cocoa.” I imagine we would both sign off on the statement that in dealing with feelings, she and I have different styles: I am a classic Pisces, prone to sensitivity and emotions, and she is German.