On Fridays I might treat myself to a greasy slice of pizza and onion rings at Giggio's down the street. I'd try not to think about the fact that my seven-dollar meal was basically an hour's wages. On my way back and forth I might encounter Gregory. Gregory was a fixture around Evanston, well-known for stopping anyone on the street and telling them his story, which went like this: "Hello, my name is Gregory. I used to be an accountant. I had a lovely wife and family. I had a big house. One day I had to go to the store, but my wife had the car. I took my bike, but I didn't wear a helmet. I got hit by a truck. I suffered a head injury. I still have difficulty walking. I lost everything. My wife left me. I lost my job. So when you ride your bike, think of me and always wear a helmet." His injury had also destroyed his short-term memory, so he would tell you his story every time he met you.
When Gregory wasn't walking around town telling this story, he was coming to the Y for his daily swim. I met him every day for several months.
The people who worked upstairs in the offices would breeze by the front desk to pick up their messages. Returning from their hourlong lunches in restaurants, going to the bathroom whenever they wanted, the office people had it made. A guy in boxer shorts never screamed at them that the resident lounge TV was broken. They never got reprimanded for peeling an orange while working. Our only power over them was that we had to "buzz them in" to the front desk area, and sometimes Donna and I would buzz it too short so they'd push on the door and it was already locked again. The small joys.
The guy in charge of the residence was a big doughy bald guy whose last name had more consonants in it than I have in this book. I always thought he had the hardest job. He had to deal with all of these gentlemen and whatever their complicated, depressing backstories were. He seemed to have a lot of compassion, but he also had to be tough and kick people out sometimes.
Unlike the women who ran the fitness program or the child care program, he experienced zero point zero fun in his day-to-day work. Even at Christmas, when other departments were doing crafts with kids or having Secret Santa with their coworkers, Mr. Mczrkskczk had to organize a holiday dinner in the basement for all the men who had nowhere to go.
When I took the job at the front desk in early November, I had stipulated that I had to have off a few days around Christmas because I had already booked a flight home to see my family. This being my first Christmas after college, I was used to having a month off over the holidays, and cutting that down to a three-day weekend already had me weepy and depressed. I'm sure that I in some way screwed Donna over by doing this, and she probably ranted and raved to her husband, "Gotta work Christmas.Stop."
The twenty-third came. I punched my time card and headed out, excited to see my family and enjoy some middle-class comforts. On my way out of the building, I passed the Men's Residence Christmas Dinner. If you've ever witnessed a school bus accident or a dog trying to nudge its dead owner back to life, then the sight of this dinner probably wouldn't affect you. But for me, it was easily the third-saddest thing I've ever seen in my life.
The residents were at a long table in the basement, and Mr. Mkvcrkvckz was wearing a Santa hat with his dingy suit. There had been some kind of turkey dinner, because the place smelled like gravy, and they were just opening their presents. A tall goony kid named Timmy held up a pair of tube socks.There were tube socks for Mr. Engler. Opening tube socks over here, boss! They all got tube socks. It wasn't the tube socks that got me. It wasn't knowing that these guys would get nothing else for Christmas. It was the thought of Mr. Mvzkrskchs at the dollar store buying forty pairs of tube socks that set me weeping all the way home. This was compounded by the fact that Whitney Houston's cover of "I Will Always Love You" was constantly on my FM Walkman radio around that time. I think that made me cry because I associated it with absolutely no one.
After a visit to civilization with my family, I found the front desk harder to take.
There was a rich old guy named John Donnelly who must have donated a bunch of money. He had forgotten his member card one day, and when I tried to explain that it was a four-dollar fee to enter without a card, he went batshit. "Don't you know who I am, goddammit?" I had never seen him before."Do you know who I am?" I wanted to say. "Then how could I know who you are? We don't know each other." My boss pulled me aside and told me to just give him whatever he wanted no matter how much of a prick he was. I found he usually wanted a free guest pass for whoever was with him instead of paying the six bucks. This chiseling behavior helped me realize that most gym fees are a scam and only suckers pay them. I found myself pocketing the occasional guest-pass money and treating myself to some Giggio's. What was happening to my moral compass?
One day sweet goony Timmy came down to the lobby with a dark look in his eyes. He was pacing the lobby, ignoring us. "Heeth off his medth!" Joe Daffy-Ducked from the mail room when he saw him. "Heeth off his medth!" Joe's Daffy Duckism spread into his body as he flitted around in a panic. By the time I figured out that Joe was saying "He's off his meds," as in "off his medication," it was too late.Sweet Timmy had rushed up to a young mom in Lycra workout pants and blurted, "I wanna squirt it in your mouth." Poor Tim, he was in big trouble. Mr. Mrkkkzzz had to be called in early. The young mother was beside herself. That's the kind of trouble you get when diverse groups of people actually cross paths with one another. That's why many of the worst things in the world happen in and around Starbucks bathrooms.
I started to see a pattern at the Young Men's Christian Association. It was a power pyramid. At the bottom were all these disenfranchised residents who had to be taken care of like children, above them were a middle class of women who did all the work and kept the place running, and above them were two or three of the least-useful men you ever met. There was our comptroller, Lonny, who never once entered a room without saying, "Are we having fun yet?" He never went anywhere without food on his face. And his exit line was always "There's a million stories in the naked city." There was the program director, who talked exclusively in nonsense business language: "We are attempting to pro-activate the community by utilizing a series of directives intended to maximate communicative agreeance." At the very top of the pyramid was Executive Director Rick Chang, who had no idea who anyone was or what anyone did. He's the one who reprimanded me for peeling an orange at the front desk.
I heard from Donna that an office job was opening up in the office. "Vicky's assistant's going back to school. Stop. Think I'm gonna go for it. Stop." I was happy for Donna. Getting a job in the office would literally change her life.
I continued to be strung along by Eli No Shoulders-which is what he'd be called if this were a Native American folktale. He now claimed to have broken up with his girlfriend. I sat through a lot of Hal Hartley movies. He described his plans for a one-man show about Charlie Chaplin. Nothing came of any of it.
By the end of January, I had started taking improv classes at night. I was making new friends, actual friends who were not from planet Grim. But the classes cost money, and my 4:40 A.M. wake-up was getting harder and harder. One February morning was so cold that they closed school. There wasn't any snow; they just closed school because they didn't want kids dropping dead at the bus stop. I waited for the train at 5:10 A.M. wrapped in multiple hats and scarves so that only my eyes were exposed. By the time I got to Evanston, all the blood vessels around my eyes had burst from the temperature. I ran into Gregory. He told me his story and I assured him that I always wore a bike helmet. When I finally punched in, one of my coworkers at the front desk was giggling about something. He told me that Daffy Duck Joe was telling people that he and I were "doing it." That's what I got for engaging in simple pleasantries? A sixty-year-old hobo jerking it to me upstairs? Before I could get too worked up, Gregory was now at the front desk. As I swiped his membership card, he introduced himself to me, told me his story, and suggested I wear a bike helmet. Rising to an Irish boil behind Gregory was John Donnelly, who could not be kept waiting. "Take my card. Do you know who I am goddammit?"
Enough was enough. I was going to have to steal that office job from Donna. And that's where my college education finally gave me the unfair advantage I'd been waiting for. I wore jeans to my interview with Vicky. It was easy. Did I have basic computer skills? Sure, I was twenty-two. Did I have a good temperament on the phone? Sure. What were my career goals? "Do this job to pay for improv classes." Good enough. I went back downstairs to relieve Donna on the phones. "You're up," I told her.As I watched her nervously trundle up the steps to her interview, I knew it was no contest. Poor Donna had been at the front desk too long. You could smell other people's grimness on her, like my roommate's BO wafting out of the blue suit.
Donna would have thrown herself into that office job with deep commitment for the rest of her life. I stayed less than a year and bailed when I got a job with The Second City Touring Company.
That makes me sound like a jerk, I know. But remember the beginning of the story where I was the underdog? No? Me neither.
The Windy City, Full of Meat
The most fun job I ever had was working at a theater in Chicago called The Second City. If you've never heard of The Second City, it is an improvisation and sketch comedy theater in Chicago, founded in 1959 by some University of Chicago brainiacs. There's a Second City theater in Chicago and one in Toronto, and between the two they have turned out some mind-blowing alumni, including John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Chris Farley, John Candy, Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Steve Carell, Amy Sedaris, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert. I could go on, but my editor told me that was a cheap way to flesh out the book.
I moved to Chicago in 1992 to study improv and it was everything I wanted it to be. It was like a cult. People ate, slept, and definitely drank improv. They worked at crappy day jobs just to hand over their money for improv classes. Eager young people in khakis and polo shirts were willing to do whatever teachers like Del Close and Martin de Maat told them to. In retrospect, it may actually have been a cult.
I had studied legit acting methods in college-Stanislavsky, Meisner, Cicely Berry's The Actor and His Text-but any TV critic will tell you that I never mastered any of them. Improvisation as a way of working made sense to me. I love the idea of two actors on stage with nothing-no costumes, no sets, no dialogue-who make up something together that is then completely real to everyone in the room.The rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview.Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it's where I met my husband. What has your cult done for you lately?
When I first started working at The Second City, there were two resident companies and three touring companies. The resident companies would write and perform original sketch comedy shows for packed houses in Chicago. The touring companies would take the best pieces from these shows and perform them in church basements and community centers around the country. We traveled by van to all kinds of destinations, from upstate New York to St. Paul, Minnesota, to Waco, Texas.
In the touring company we were paid seventy-five dollars per show and a twenty-five-dollar per diem. Of course, sometimes you'd have a show in Kansas followed by a show in Texas followed by another show in Kansas, so you'd have to ride in the van for two days to get to your seventy-five-dollar gig. It wasn't lucrative, but it was show business!
There were three touring companies: Red Company, Green Company, and Blue Company. I was in the Blue Company, or BlueCo as we called it to be unbelievably cool. I still feel affection for the members of BlueCo like we served in the military together. Specifically the French military, because we were lazy and a little bit sneaky. For example, they once sent us on a tour of Texas and the Midwest, and the moment the van pulled away from the theater, we all agreed to throw out the "best of" sketches we had been directed to perform and replace them with our own original material. Amy Poehler in particular was tired of being handed dated old blond-girl roles where all her lines were things like"Here's your coffee, honey," or "Mr. Johnson will see you now," or "Whattaya mean a blind date?!"Each night we'd pull out an old sketch and replace it with something of our own. My friend Ali Farahnakian, who is a genius in many ways, wrote a very funny monologue about the McDonald's Big Mac. During the course of the monologue he would eat an entire Big Mac Extra Value Meal onstage.Because the meal was technically a prop, he made the stage manager buy it for him every night and he kept his twenty-five dollars. These were the kinds of skills you learned touring for The Second City. By the time we returned to Chicago ten days later, the "best of" show was completely gone and we were in big trouble, except we didn't really care.The Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce BellyFat*
The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you're improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we're improvising and I say, "Freeze, I have a gun," and you say, "That's not a gun. It's your finger. You're pointing your finger at me," our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, "Freeze, I have a gun!" and you say,"The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!" then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.
Now, obviously in real life you're not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to "respect what your partner has created" and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.
As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. "No, we can't do that." "No, that's not in the budget." "No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar."What kind of way is that to live?
The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with "I can't believe it's so hot in here," and you just say, "Yeah..." we're kind of at a standstill. But if I say, "I can't believe it's so hot in here," and you say,"What did you expect? We're in hell." Or if I say, "I can't believe it's so hot in here," and you say, "Yes, this can't be good for the wax figures." Or if I say, "I can't believe it's so hot in here," and you say, "I told you we shouldn't have crawled into this dog's mouth," now we're getting somewhere.
To me YES, AND means don't be afraid to contribute. It's your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you're adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.
The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying "Don't ask questions all the time." If we're in a scene and I say, "Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What's in that box?" I'm putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers.
In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don't just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We've all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It's usually the same person around the office who says things like "There's no calories in it if you eat it standing up!" and "I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice."
MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, "I'm going to be your surgeon? I'm here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?" Make statements, with your actions and your voice.
Instead of saying "Where are we?" make a statement like "Here we are in Spain, Dracula." Okay,"Here we are in Spain, Dracula" may seem like a terrible start to a scene, but this leads us to the best rule:
THERE ARE NO MISTAKES, only opportunities. If I start a scene as what I think is very clearly a cop riding a bicycle, but you think I am a hamster in a hamster wheel, guess what? Now I'm a hamster in a hamster wheel. I'm not going to stop everything to explain that it was really supposed to be a bike.Who knows? Maybe I'll end up being a police hamster who's been put on "hamster wheel" duty because I'm "too much of a loose cannon" in the field. In improv there are no mistakes, only beautiful happy accidents. And many of the world's greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.Bossypants Lesson #183: You Can't Boss People Around If They Don'tReally Care
The producers tried to punish BlueCo by giving us the worst gigs. Prom shows were held at one A.M. after a high school prom, and attendance was mandatory. It was basically a way to keep kids from drinking or having sex on prom night, and the performers hated doing these shows almost as much as the kids hated watching them. Imagine how mad you would be if you were missing out on a toothy knob job to watch some cult members make up a song about the 1996 election.
There were other terrible shows. Brightly lit hotel ballrooms with broken microphones. College shows where the kids were all drunk. Charity buyouts where the audience was very, very sober.Corporate gigs at eight A.M. for employees who were there to be told about reductions in their health care benefits. Basically, any time you were performing for an audience that was not there voluntarily, it was a rough show.
After seven or eight months of touring, we started to wonder which of us actors would get promoted to one of the main companies. The Mainstage cast and the "Second City e.t.c." cast got to stay in Chicago and earn a unionized living wage. They would develop their own sketches by improvising in front of an audience, then keeping the ideas that had worked until they had a full two-hour show. It was the dream job. However, of all the places I've worked that were supposedly boys' clubs, The Second City was the only one where I experienced institutionalized gender nonsense. For example, a director of one of the main companies once justified cutting a scene by saying, "The audience doesn't want to see a scene between two women." Whaaa? More on that later.
In 1995, each cast at The Second City was made up of four men and two women. When it was suggested that they switch one of the companies to three men and three women, the producers and directors had the same panicked reaction. "You can't do that. There won't be enough parts to go around. There won't be enough for the girls." This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury. We weren't doing Death of a Salesman. We were making up the show ourselves. How could there not be enough parts? Where was the "Yes, and"? If everyone had something to contribute, there would be enough. The insulting implication, of course, was that the women wouldn't have any ideas.
I'm happy to say the producers did jump into the twentieth century and switch to a cast of"three and three," and I got to be that third woman in the first gender-equal cast. However, I must say, as a point of pride, that I didn't get the job because I was a woman. I got the job because Amy Poehler had moved to New York with the Upright Citizens Brigade and I was the next best thing.
But this was the first time I experienced what I like to call "The Myth of Not Enough."
When I worked at Saturday Night Live, I had a five A.M. argument with one of our most intelligent actresses. It was rumored that Lorne was adding another woman to the cast, and she was irate. (In fairness, she was also exhausted. It was five A.M. after writing all night.) She felt there wouldn't be enough for the girls and that this girl was too similar to her. There wouldn't be enough screen time to go around.
I revived my old argument: How could this be true if we made up the show? A bunch of us suggested that they collaborate instead of compete. And, of course, that's what they did, with great success, once they were actually in a room together. But where does that initial panic come from?
This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. "You're up for a promotion. If they go with a woman, it'll be between you and Barbara." Don't be fooled. You're not in competition with other women. You're in competition with everyone.
Also, I encourage them to always wear a bra. Even if you don't think you need it, just... you know what? You're never going to regret it.
My dream for the future is that sketch comedy shows become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest. You might see four women and two men. You might see five men and a YouTube video of a kitten sneezing. Once we know we're really open to all the options, we can proceed with Whatever's the Funniest... which will probably involve farts.
My Honeymoon, or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Either*