To her credit, Jane made things much easier early on when we were in the makeup room. She stated outright, “This is really awkward,” and I agreed and that was that. I was relieved that we addressed our strange circumstance. I should point out that we had this conversation while she was wearing a showgirl costume—a showgirl costume exactly like the one I had worn for the pilot, the costume that may well have been a factor in my losing the part, for I’m sure I looked quite comical in it, and Jane looked like a hot showgirl.
Oh, Lord. At least my first week on the job led me to a deep and soul-affirming conclusion, a lesson I could carry with me as I traveled the peaks and valleys of life’s journey: Showbiz be crazy.
Luckily, after that first week, my anxiety dream ended, and I started to feel more comfortable on the set. I was having fun playing my various characters—one week I’d be Liz Taylor, another a little blue man who was Tracy’s hallucination, another a Polish hooker. And Jane immediately made the part of Jenna her own, defining her as the wacky diva she would be known for as the show developed. Off the set, though, people kept asking about what had happened: strangers on the street when I was going to get coffee, relatives at a holiday when I was just trying to relax with my fourth glass of wine, casual red-carpet interviewers I thought were going to ask me an inane thing like “What are you going to be for Halloween?!” who would instead suddenly decide to go all 60 Minutes on me—“SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH 30 ROCK?!” As the questions kept coming, I found myself starting to waver between the two theories of why I had been recast. More often I had the more sane and pro-Rachel opinion that it was just a case of type, that they wanted an ingénue and not a sketch performer. When I was younger and in acting class in high school or college, we didn’t really understand type. In class, I could be playing Lady Macbeth or Blanche DuBois—terribly, mind you—but we were taught that acting is all about becoming the character and drawing on your own personal experiences to embody the character’s situation. You can do anything! At Second City or even SNL, it worked the same way, only in a comic context—I could play a supermodel in a sketch at Second City, or the president, or … well, whatever I wanted! In a sketch show, your own personal type doesn’t really matter; your talent lies in the fact that you can play all sorts of character types. When you get to sitcomland, or movieland, though, your own type is a factor. I’m not going to play a hottie on TV when real hotties exist … superhotties that moved to LA from their small towns in Iowa because they were born superhotties.
In terms of my type, I knew I was no leading lady or diva. I always thought I would end up in that typical “best friend” role in movies or TV, but it would turn out that, by Hollywood standards, I was too odd to play even that. Especially nowadays—the best friend is someone slightly less beautiful than the leading lady, except with brown hair. Or glasses! “Hey! She’s wearing glasses! My brain now sees her as slightly less attractive than the lead! Everything makes sense in the world!” That’s the reality I was beginning to comprehend. That’s Hollywood, kids (I say as I take a drag of my More lady cigarette). It ain’t all glitz and glamour and shrimp cocktail and cocaine parties.
In my less self-assured moments, the more negative speculation about the replacement started to seep into my head. Maybe all those meanies on the Internet were right; maybe a bunch of focus groups watched the pilot and checked off a box marked “No!” Maybe the way it works for a new show is a bunch of TV execs sit around a room with some wires and EKGs attached to their wangs, and when I was on screen, the needle dipped dangerously into the Code Red Anti-Boner Zone. I was starting to feel like the ten years of training and performing and sweating it out pre-SNL, plus the seven years at SNL, all went out the window because I didn’t have a symmetrical face. This would have been OK if at some point along the way I had gotten the memo: “Oh, and if you want to be a successful female comedian, you better have a symmetrical face.” Maybe I was naïve, but this was the first I was hearing of it. I grew up watching perfectly lovely female performers whom I don’t think you would call “hotties”: Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett. Those were my comedy idols. I would think of the genius Jean Stapleton of All in the Family and how today some ding-dong in the network would insist she be played by Megan Fox to get the male 18–49 demographic. “People,” he’d say at the meeting, “Megan can be very funny.” I had always been pretty sure that comedy was about producing a laugh and not a boner. Now I had to produce laughs and boners? When did the rules change? This is not the kind of stuff you consider when you are young and dreaming about becoming an actor and thinking, “I have fun doing the school plays!”
SHOW!!!!!!
A moment of early showmanship with my aunt Susan. Not pictured in this photo: my jazz hands.
The setting: A suburban living room, Lexington, Massachusetts
The year: 1975
The Event: A Choreographed Dance to Rosemary Clooney’s “The Kitty Kat’s Party” That Will Rock Your Freaking World
As we look back in history, this is the first known official Rachel Dratch Production that we find in our extensive research. Not only did I serve as choreographer, I was also performer, casting director, publicist, and costume designer. (Those ears and tails weren’t going to make themselves.) I suppose as I listened to the strains of Rosemary Clooney over and over again on my 78 rpm record (I just lost everyone under the age of forty with that reference), a creative vision began forming in my nine-year-old head, a vision that could not be denied. Yes, the Kitty Kat’s Party must be enacted through the art of The Dahnce. My younger brother and a few neighborhood kids were enlisted to enact said Kitty Kats, to fulfill my Artistic Vision. I believe the lyrics went “At the kitty kat’s party, all the kittens will be there, they’ll be dressed up in their Sunday best with flowers in their hair.” If memory serves, the dance consisted of some minor hand gestures and cat motions, nothing too strenuous … no lifts. And lip-synching. To wrassle up an audience, check out how cute/pathetic this is: I went to the little farm-stand store across the street from my house and put up a homemade sign that simply said “SHOW!!!!!!” with my home address and the date and time. The cost of admission, I believe, was twenty-five cents, really a lot of entertainment on the dollar when you think about it. And at the bottom, the sign said “All proceeds go to Muscular Dystrophy” because at the time, everyone was having those McDonald’s “carnivals” in their backyards for muscular dystrophy. (Of course, to a kid, finding out that the carnival consisted of a huge vat of orangeade and a beanbag toss was heartbreaking when you were picturing a Ferris wheel magically set up in your neighbor’s backyard.) Needless to say, no proceeds were raised for muscular dystrophy through my production. The audience consisted solely of our parents, but I didn’t mind. Any sucka who wasn’t in the audience that day missed out on quite a SHOW!!!!!!
Soon after this, I met with my first big success in a wider arena. No, I was not cast as one of the orphans in the national tour of Annie, though that was surely my fantasy. My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Nancy Tokarz, was a big proponent of creative writing. She had us do a ton of it that year. This is notable because pretty much all my English classes after that were just about reading a great work of literature and commenting on it. She was one of the only teachers I recall in my entire education who focused on creating a story rather than commenting on one. We were assigned to write a story, and one of the stories would be picked to be produced as a play—live on stage! My story was picked and thus, my first work, “Autobiography of a Leaf,” was brought to the masses (and by masses I mean some parents in a gymnasium in Lexington, MA). It was about a leaf who lives through the winter, told, as the title suggests, from the point of view of the talking leaf. Pretty heady stuff. There I was, the narrator, with a green leaf/sandwich board as my costume. When I said, “And then autumn came,” I turned the leaf so the back was now the front, and I went from green to orange. The audience responded. My first big laugh.
By this time, I had already started watching
Saturday Night Live, during its very first season. Though my parents were young and hip, I didn’t find SNL through them. I discovered SNL the way I discovered all things adult and semi-forbidden: through my friend Jill. It was Jill who told me how babies were made that same year, for though my parents were, as I said, young and hip, Jill’s parents were young, hip, and far more open. Jill was seeing R-rated movies like Jaws, whereas my first R-rated movie was still years away. Although I was jealous of her adult status, when she got home from seeing the movie with her parents, she did throw up. I guess being on the fast track has its drawbacks.
Along with introducing me to the world of sex and shark attacks, Jill was also my liaison to Saturday Night Live. The first time I saw the show, I was sleeping over at her house, and her older brother, Mark, was watching it. Older siblings were scary to me. I was the oldest kid in my family and when faced with a friend’s older sibling, I would skulk around and be very deferential. There was Mark in their living room watching SNL, and we plopped down on the floor and started watching it too. I remember being immediately fascinated. What was this secret world I had just stumbled upon? It had a feeling like nothing I’d ever seen on TV. I remember thinking it was really funny, but I also knew full well that half of the jokes were going over my nine-year-old head.
I started watching the show of my own accord every week. If I had a friend sleep over, we would watch The Love Boat, then Fantasy Island, and then SNL. My friends were never all that interested in SNL. I’d feel responsible if one of the sketches was incomprehensible to us. I’d try hard to telepathically send out the vibes to my hapless friends: “Just stick with it!” They would invariably fall asleep partway through, but I would watch the whole thing—I was always a night owl, even back then. My favorites were Lisa Loopner, the Coneheads, Roseanne Roseanna Danna, the Wild and Crazy Guys, Mr. Bill—all the stuff even a kid could understand. I thought “Samurai Delicatessen” was really funny, but I wasn’t quite sure what was happening. The Bees—well, I didn’t get that at all, but I still don’t now, so I’m going to give myself a pass on that one. I remember one week, a musician named David Bowie performed wearing a dress. I didn’t have an explanation for my sleepover friends for this one, either. I had no idea that years later I would be in that very studio, getting my head shot taken for my opening credit, and that David Bowie would be the musical guest for my very first show. While my picture was being taken for my dream job, David Bowie was right there rehearsing with his band, singing “Rebel Rebel.” This time he wasn’t in a dress, though.
I didn’t grow up thinking, “I want to be an ACTRESS!” I thought it seemed like it would be really fun, but it seemed too crazy a dream to have. I did have comedy all around me as a child. My parents loved Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks, SNL, Woody Allen, and the Three Stooges* (*Dad only). My father was and still is an exceptionally funny guy. He was particularly good at doing imitations. The baby of the family, he was a typical youngest kid—attention-seeking and the life of the party. My mom has a creative wit of her own, often put to use in writing funny poems for people’s birthdays, and she served as a good straight man to my dad—“Oh, Paaauuul!” she’d say when he’d start to get what she deemed too unruly. My younger brother, Dan, was in on the action as well, making up goofy songs in the backseat of the car on road trips. He ended up going into comedy too, as a TV writer. The funny thing is, my brother and I weren’t marching around the house saying, “We’re gonna be in COMEDY!” It just kind of happened because of the sense of humor that was floating around, I suppose. I was at a girl’s house during high school, and her father happened to be a high school classmate of my father. He told me, “Your dad was always imitating the teachers as soon as they left the room!” I had no idea he did that as a kid, but I was busy doing the same thing.
Halloween, 1976—My Brother and I show an early affinity for the comedy world: Dan is the Unknown Comic from The Gong Show, and I am a Conehead. (Can you tell I made my own costume?)
Throw into this mix my group of funny girlfriends, many of whom I’d known since elementary school, who only added to my burgeoning class clown status. I would pipe up with one-liners from my seat in junior high. As I grew older, I still didn’t seriously think of trying to become a professional actor, yet I kept doing plays. I went to summer theater camp four years in a row, which I think officially qualifies me as a drama geek. Though I hung out on weekends with jocks and the group who would go drink in the woods (not so unlike Sully and Denise, the sketch I would do on SNL), during the school week, I’d be puttin’ on the ol’ “character shoes” to rehearse for the high school musical. (Fellow drama geeks will back me up—those Capezio character shoes signified you meant business and probably knew the lyrics to “Out Here on My Own” from Fame by heart.) Even so, acting was just a hobby to me, and besides, I was off to a prestigious college where I’d probably end up becoming a professional of some sort, perhaps a psychologist, I was thinking. I had no idea my choice of college would send me running into the world of comedy.
WASP World
The year was 1984, and I, an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl from suburban Boston, was arriving at my new campus, Dartmouth College, where I was about to encounter a species of human I had never met in my life. I speak of the WASP. Not just one WASP, a swarm of WASPS: blond and beautiful women wearing pearls, and the daughters of oil barons from Texas. Gorgeous adolescent males from Deerfield and Exeter who looked as if they’d walked off the pages of a J.Crew catalog. The Dartmouth Review, a super-right-wing college newspaper, had a big voice on campus. Laura Ingraham, the ultraconservative commentator, was a vocal student there and she was heading up the Review, along with future speechwriters for George Bush, such as Dinesh D’Souza. The following year, members of the Review would destroy the antiapartheid shanties that had been constructed on the green. Wait a minute! What was I doing here in this hotbed of right-wing delights? Like many seventeen-year-olds looking at schools, my main criterion had been “This is a pretty campus!” Plus, every student I met seemed to love the place with a devotion usually reserved for a cult. Walking around the campus as a prospective student, I was sucked in, seeing all the dreamy, perfect-looking boys who looked like they were straight out of a teen movie. When I got there, I eventually realized that the guys who look like that in movies are usually the antagonists to the goofy underdogs whom everyone’s rooting for—the campus had its fair share of James Spaders from Pretty in Pink, Neidermeyers from Animal House, and faux Neidermeyers from Revenge of the Nerds. I think I would have been happier in college with the Duckies, the Blutos, and the Nerds, and in spite of its academic reputation, back in the eighties, there weren’t many Nerds at Dartmouth.
I got my first glimpse of what a culture shock college would be on my very first Dartmouth experience—the freshman trip. These are hiking and camping trips you take before school starts, to get into the groove and supposedly have fun. I signed up for the easiest, level-1 trip because I’m a terrible athlete. Upon meeting my fellow freshman-trippers, I discovered that the most beautiful girl I had ever seen was in my group. This chick was total Dartmouth material. She was named Abigail and was a natural-blond species the likes of which did not exist in my high school. Although she was perfectly friendly and nice to me, I took one look at her and was like, “Oh, nooo! I think I picked the wrong school!” When I was eighteen, I didn’t have the faith in myself to listen to my gut feeling. I don’t mean to say that I saw one beautiful girl and freaked out—it was the type of beautiful girl: the confidence, the breeziness, the probable lineage connecting her to the Mayflower. Oh, and as a side note, she was doing our level-1 trip on crutches because she had sprained her ankle being a champion tennis player. Otherwise, she would have been on a real hiking trip. You should have seen the guys fighting to carry her over the streams.
I had come from my hometown public high school with my funny friends and Irish and Italian characters, and here I was with people who had last names for first names, like Farns-worth a
nd Chadwell. Where were the Sullys? The Smittys? (They were at UMass or Plymouth State.) Now, I know it’s not like I was coming from the ghet-to. My town, back then, was about a third Irish, a third Italian, and a third Jewish, and our parents were largely second generation who had managed to move out to the burbs. Overall, I felt quite comfortable in high school. All had been rosy in my world, or, as some people from my high school might say, everything was wicked pissah.
For this next section, if you happen to have a cassette tape of REM’s “Murmur” lying around, throw it into your boom box, which you also surely have on hand, and press PLAY, because that was the sound track I had on constant loop for much of my time at Dartmouth, where I was feeling none of the comfort level I had in high school. I was rejected from the two plays I auditioned for during the fall and winter trimesters. I thought I really might have had a shot in the winter—they were doing William Inge’s Picnic and I was auditioning to play Millie, the more plain younger sister of the beautiful Madge. (Madge, no joke, was played by Freshman Trip Abigail.) As I was walking onto the stage to audition, the director said of the girl who had just auditioned before me, “Well, I think we found our Millie!”
Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle Page 2
