One of my favourite moments in the sketch is a scene with Libby and Lenny at home. Libby is working on “I’m Taking My Own Head, Screwing It on Right, and No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me That It Ain’t.” Lenny is angry with her for spending so much time on her upcoming show. They are in the middle of an argument when Libby suddenly says to Lenny, “Go like this,” gesturing to him to let her smell his breath. He breathes out. “Did you have hot dogs for dinner?” she asks. “Yes,” says Lenny. “Do you have any more?” Libby asks. He tells her there are some in the freezer. They then continue their argument.
We did numerous sketches together, but the Libby scenes with Rick will always be among my favourites.
The late great Harold Ramis, way before he wrote Caddyshack and wrote and starred in Ghostbusters, was SCTV’s head writer for a brief time as we were launching the show. When I think of him, I picture him doing crossword puzzles. It was his way to relax. In between takes, he’d pull out a puzzle and fill in the blanks with the speed of someone playing tic-tac-toe. I was always slightly intimidated by Harold’s intelligence. I looked up to him. When he moved on to write and perform in movies, it was a great loss for SCTV. He brought profound humanity to every piece he wrote and acted in, and I loved him. We all did.
He wrote for me two of my favourite SCTV sketches: a commercial for Connie Francis, who was a big star in the ’50s. I was a fan of her film Where the Boys Are, and thanks to her Italian heritage, I could look like her convincingly enough to impersonate her. I had noticed that her songs always sounded sad, so Harold wrote a K-tel record ad for Connie, whom we called Connie Franklin. Connie stands alone on a stage with a bright spotlight on her as she sings despondently:
I’m losing my hearing,
I’ve lost sight in one eye.
I’m sorry I can’t hear you,
Did you really say goodbye?
ANNOUNCER: Yes, Connie Franklin, the most depressing singer of her generation, will really bring you down with twenty of her most depressing hits.
We then hear Connie continuing, “Stop slapping my face now.”
Harold also co-wrote “Sex Talk with Dr. Cheryl Kinsey” with me. Dr. Kinsey was an incredibly uptight woman who had a nervous tic whenever anything sexual was mentioned.
DR. KINSEY: Welcome ladies to today’s seminar, Sex, Sex, and More Sex … Today I want to talk to you about one of the most common sexual dysfunctions in women today. The inability to fake orgasms. Recent studies show that nearly 60 percent of all women are capable of at least one fake orgasm, and nearly 20 percent of these women report multiple fake orgasms. That leaves 40 percent, four out of ten women, who are unable to convincingly fake an orgasm. If you are one of these women, may I suggest the following exercise. Please repeat after me, these helpful passionate phrases: (With no affect, yet involuntary physical twitching.) “Don’t stop, lover, please … don’t stop.” “Oh, you’re good, you’re so good.” And “Stuff me like a mushroom, big boy.”
Fortunately, in a recent study, it was shown that nine out of ten males will believe anything, especially if it confirms their virility, so don’t be afraid to pretend you’re aroused by your partner.
I was so thrilled that Harold cast me in his film Club Paradise, and the shower scene he wrote for me remains one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever had the great pleasure to do.
Johnny LaRue, John Candy, Johnny Toronto, Johnny Chicago. Anywhere John Candy went, he was worshipped and adored. The police, the queen of England, the janitor. It didn’t matter who you were or the status you had, John treated everyone the same. He was exactly as you would like to think he was. He was actually that guy. I’d see him with fans who had come up to him on the street and started acting out their favourite scenes with him, and he’d go along with anything.
John was the first person I knew who had an entourage. There were always people in his dressing room, from all walks of life. It’s been twenty years since John died, but I’m still stopped by people, especially working-class guys, who ask me about SCTV and say how sad it is that John is no longer with us. Even those hulking guys let their guard down as tears fill their eyes, their grief over the death of John Candy, a man they never knew, overwhelming them.
Everything John did was big. Bob told me about the time he was writing a sketch with John. It was ten pages long. Bob said, “John, we’ve got to cut it down.” “You’re right, Bob,” said John, “I’ll take it home and work on it this weekend.”
“He came back Monday,” Bob told me, “and said he rewrote it—and it was now twenty pages long.”
Bob once went out to write with John on his farm, but they got no work done because John had so many things going on. He was having a radar dish installed, and gardeners building a river. He showed Bob a barn that housed every car he’d ever owned. He wasn’t able to give anything away.
What John did share was his deep vulnerability and authenticity. There wasn’t a cynical bone in his body. I would have loved to see where his career would have taken him. He was not only capable of making you laugh, he could also make you cry, which you’d know if you saw Trains, Planes and Automobiles. He was a singular actor and a heartbreaking clown, and the world still mourns his loss.
My favourite scene with John Candy: In August 1981, the accomplished actress Lynn Redgrave sued Universal Television, claiming she had been fired from House Calls, a sitcom in which she played a nurse. She had been told she could not breastfeed her baby during breaks in shooting. I had just given birth to my first son, Jack, in July of that year. We took the incident and turned it into a promo sketch called “Wet Nurse.” It begins in a hospital waiting room with me dressed as a nurse and my back to the camera. Joe Flaherty, as the doctor, is talking to me with overly dramatic urgency:
“Nurse, there’s a total power failure in the cafeteria. Every patient in this hospital is starving. You are the only one that can help us. We are counting on you.”
I turn to face camera, and viewers can see for the first time my ginormous boobs, a foot in diameter. “Yes, doctor,” I say as I run toward camera, my boobs filling the screen.
We then hear the announcer, voiced by Rick Moranis:
“Coming to SCTV this fall, Wet Nurse, starring Lynn Redgrave, a woman dedicated to the sustenance and nurturing of all mankind.”
The scene cuts to me with a little baby, who in real life was my two-month-old son, Jack. He is perilously balanced on my shoulder. My gigantic boobs keep him suspended as I walk around the room. I put him on my lap and begin to unbutton my shirt to breastfeed him. There’s a time lapse and the baby is now John Candy. He is on my lap, in the same position, dressed identically to my real baby, and I’m burping him. The camera pans down to my boobs, which are now flat and deflated as I rock all three hundred pounds of Baby John. He coos and smiles gleefully as he is bounced up and down.
I am not sure you could show that sketch today on prime time anywhere because women with big breasts would feel discriminated against. Breastfeeding advocates would think we were admonishing them, not to mention the child abuse charges brought against me for recklessly balancing my son on my shoulder.
John, my son Jack, and me
We had so much social and creative freedom on SCTV. The world wasn’t picky about being politically correct, and we never thought a lot about it because we were isolated from the press, and the media, and we were having so much damn fun. Lynn Redgrave, like so many actors I had impersonated, became a friend, and she was delighted to have been portrayed so comically. When I was acting in the film Stepping Out with Liza Minnelli, I was terrified that she had seen my impersonation of her, whom we called Lorna Minnelli. Over the three months we worked together, she never mentioned seeing it—until our last day, when she took me aside and said, “I’ve seen you do me. You’re terrific.”
Brenda Vaccaro, Linda Lavin, Bernadette Peters, Anne Murray, Andrea McArdle, Barbra Streisand. Not one of these women, all of whom I have impersonated and was later introduced to, ever confided in me
that they were upset or insulted by my impersonations of them.
I’m sorry I never met Mother Teresa because I know she would have had the utmost forgiveness of my portrayal of her in Lola Heatherton’s show. We realized while doing SCTV that people love being impersonated—it is the highest form of flattery. At least no one told us differently. We made it a point never to be mean-spirited. Our comedy was not cynical. Overall, we had a reverence for what we were making fun of. One of my favourite sketches was “Farm Film Celebrity Blow-Up,” starring John Candy and Joe Flaherty. It was a perfect vehicle in which to impersonate famous actors—or let’s be honest, people we could look like.
The Juul Haalmeyer, Bev Schectman, and Judi Cooper-Sealy Hall of Fame
Bernadette Peters
Joni Mitchell
Cher
Sophia Loren
Ethel Merman
Betty Friedan
In this sketch, celebrities were blown up because of something irritating they did or were known for, and it never failed to make me laugh. It sounds cruel now, the act of blowing someone up, but when you watch the sketch, you see innocence and glee and mischievousness in John’s and Joe’s eyes, not cruelty, and because of the fun they are having, the audience is having fun too.
Eugene Levy did a spot-on impression of Neil Sedaka. He sounded and looked exactly like him. As he sits behind the piano, Joe and John question him about his high voice.
Eugene, as Neil, lets us know that he knows he’s going to be blown up. And he’s excited about it, just as long as John and Joe stop making fun of his high voice. He continues to sing, and when he is asked to sing even higher and does so willingly, he is blown up in a puff of smoke.
It is hysterical, in the same tradition as the “Nairobi Trio,” the unforgettable Ernie Kovacs sketch from the ’50s. Four people dressed in gorilla suits perform the same musical piece week after week. Despite the predictability of the routine, the impeccable timing of the actors and their physical comedy always made me laugh. Our scenes worked because we exaggerated an element of truth about the celebrities we were impersonating.
Most actors will tell you that the best part of a job is getting it—and then it’s downhill from there. In the theatre, the best part for me is the rehearsal process. Because you’re exploring, figuring things out, discovering things, changing things, not being judged. SCTV, for its seven years, was a rehearsal. Every day was a discovery. We were writing new scenes all the time. We didn’t have a formula. We created a fictional TV station, SCTV, and we had freedom to program it any way we wanted. We wrote film parodies, news broadcasts, commercials, morning shows, late-night shows, game shows, talk shows, and entire shows built around musical acts who were guest stars. Everyone brought his or her personal experiences and unique talents to the writing rooms, and everyone had his or her own particular writing style. We didn’t worry whether people would like what we wrote or performed. In fact, we never thought much about the audience. We never even thought anyone was watching. We were isolated in studios in Toronto and in Edmonton without any live audience. There wasn’t the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, iPhones with cameras, paparazzi, and so on. No distractions and no feedback. We were in a creative bubble. We were never thinking, What can this show lead to? What will it get us? When you have that toxic expectation, it’s impossible to do your best work.
In 2008, SCTV was honoured at the Comedy Festival in Aspen, Colorado. My castmates and I sat on a panel on stage, in front of a big screen on which scenes from SCTV were projected. Conan O’Brien moderated and conducted interviews with us.
A huge audience had gathered. We couldn’t believe the laughter from the audience. It’s not that all the scenes were amazingly funny. It’s just that we had been on our own, on stages in Toronto and Edmonton, for seven years, and we’d never heard live laughs. We had only heard laughs from one another.
When I started writing this chapter, I felt a huge responsibility. I didn’t know how to tell this story. It was not up to me to represent my friends, and thirty years later, we are still friends. It was up to them to tell their story. But how do you extricate yourself from your family? We grew up together. We were just starting out in our lives and careers when we met. We began in the ’70s, when comedy was as hip as rock ‘n’ roll, when comedians were on the front page of Rolling Stone. By the ’80s, we were going our separate ways. Some of us were married or were about to be married. Our family grew. We had children and then more children, and our careers went in different directions. We remain very close today. We are at each other’s theatre and film openings, birthday parties, kids’ weddings, holidays, summer cottages, and, tragically in a few instances, as Dave Thomas poignantly pointed out, each other’s funerals.
People ask us all the time if there will be a reunion. None of us has any interest in trying to recreate those years, or to show up looking older and decrepit and then have that become the focus—how we aged, rather than how we made people laugh. Today, you can buy the seven seasons of SCTV collected on DVD. That’s enough of a reunion for us. We see our kids laughing at the same things that made us laugh thirty years ago, and it’s both heartwarming and validating that our comedy may just be timeless.
Cast of SCTV, 1981
Everything Must Go
EDITH PRICKLEY: Well, there you go, folks. Ms. Martin ended that SCTV chapter on a whimsical note, which seems to be her gushingly sentimental style, but not mine! When I reminisce, there’s nothing sentimental about it. I know how to be concise.
Let me tell you about the time I met Mr. Prickley. I saw him in the touring company of Hair. He was playing the role of Woof. He did that famous nude scene at the end of the first act, I took one look at him, and that’s what I said, “Woof.” He proposed to me that night. What he proposed, I’m not prepared to tell you, but it involved three girls from the show, a trapeze, and a Shetland pony. That was my introduction to show business. Unfortunately, that’s not what the vice squad called it. Pahaaaaaa!!!!!
And that’s enough about the past, mine and Andrea’s. It’s time to move forward. I’m on the yes train, baby. Pure and simple. As my old lover, the Dalai Lama, once said to me on a cold morning in a hut in Tibet when he broke his vows and wouldn’t get his hands out of my pants, “Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.” I don’t know what the hell he was talking about, but as soon as I said yes, I felt better. Luckily he got back on track and now he’s saving the world. My life is less complicated. Every morning, with Mr. Prickley by my side, I give thanks. I get down on my knees, Mr. Prickley’s gorgeous manly parts in full view, and woof, do I give thanks. Pahaaaaaa!!!!! I just keep going, moving forward, and so must you. Stay on that yes train, folks, until the big man upstairs says “Knock it off.” Yes, eventually everything must go, including this godforsaken book. So put your hands together and let’s bring this baby home!
Rapper L’il Edith P.
What am I supposed to do? Shrivel up and cry now?
Menopause and then applause and “Thank you, can I die now?”
What, I’m pushin’ sixty? So, suddenly I’m sickly?
Hey, suck this Dixie cup, I am Edith Prickley!
All my life, I have barrelled through every stoplight
So sorry, baby starlets, I don’t wanna leave the spotlight
Give me the love, give me the stage, give me the laughter
Give me the thirty-two-ounce margarita after
I can garden, I can bake
I can shimmy, I can shake
You can stay on golden pond,
I’m skinny dipping in this lake
I’m Prickley and I’m proud
Prickly and I’m loud
I’m wearing leopard print
So you can pick me in a crowd
Give me the energy to live and never settle
Put the pedal to the metal from the ghetto to the shtetl
Fuck Gepetto, I’m pulling my own string
‘Cause I got my own song to sing
I told yo
u everything must … WHAT?
Everything must … WHAT?
Everything must GO!
Epilogue
A couple of years ago, I was spending the afternoon at the Whitney Museum in New York, taking in all the wondrous art of Edward Hopper. I saw out of the corner of my eye a woman staring at me and then avert her gaze. Oh boy, I thought. Can’t a celebrity get some downtime without being bothered by her fans? Is there always paparazzi lurking about? Don’t I deserve a little privacy? Am I going to have to pull an Alec Baldwin and punch her out? At that moment, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the woman. She spoke quietly and hesitantly. “Excuse me,” she said, “I don’t mean to bother you. But … are you Cher’s mother?”
Acknowledgements
Books are hard to write, but easier if you have the following people in your corner:
Seth Rudetsky, James Wesley, Matt Roberts, David Feldman, Nathan Lane, Sam Wasson, Linda Wallem, Bruce Villanch, Walter Bobbie, Dani Klein Modisett, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Sean Hayes, and Mel Brooks. THANK YOU.
Thank you to Andrew Alexander and Second City, Ivan Reitman, Barry Weissler, Stephan Schwartz, and Lin-Manuel Miranda for allowing me to reproduce material.
To Paul Trusciani, for your generosity and loving reminiscences of my father. To my sister, Marcie, my brother, Peter, my cousin Stephanie Stearns, my sons, Jack and Joe Dolman, for your unconditional love. To my extended Armenian family, who gave me my roots, and to my hairdresser, Pascal, who restored them to their natural colour.
To Mel Morgan, for your patience and computer savvy.
To Deb Monk, my dear friend and life coach.
Lady Parts Page 21
