Happy Accidents

by Jane Lynch

  Moving also made sense professionally. The Fugitive would open that fall of ’93, and if I was in LA, I could capitalize on it. I said good-bye to Elaine and Don. Before I left, I had a lunch date with Holly where I did the official breaking up. She graciously accepted my need to be the one to call it off, and she wished me well.

  I bought a round-trip plane ticket going out to LA on September 1, 1993, and returning to Chicago on October 1. But I never used the return half of that ticket.

  I got an apartment on Cheremoya Avenue in Beachwood Canyon, down the street from Jill Soloway and a hop and a skip from most of the Brady contingent. It was a little studio apartment in an old Spanish building with lots of windows and good light. Every day, I woke up to sunshine. I could look out at all the bougainvillea and the hummingbirds darting from flower to flower. The hills and valleys of the canyon had a rugged beauty in which I felt nestled and calm. I was starting to feel LA’s charm.

  After my many years of transience, I had figured out what to do to make a “home” for myself. I set up my LA life with all of my essential comforts in place. I loved my apartment, as tiny and spare as it was. I had a little coffeemaker and a kind of Mary Tyler Moore setup, with a pony wall between the kitchen and living room. I picked up a dining room table off the side of the road on Beachwood Drive. I got myself a rescue kitten, whom I named after my first true obsession, Greta. I burned sage and said Indian prayers before bed. I still had that voice recorder next to my bed so I could mumble unintelligibly into it post-dream. And I secured myself a bunch of very powerful women’s-only AA meetings to go to and attended a meeting every day of the week.

  To do AA by the book, you need to have a sponsor. I’m a rule-follower, so I set out to find me one. I feared this process like I feared intimate relationships: it was fraught with the same kind of emotional danger and could easily result in rejection. Even if I escaped snubbing, choosing a new person to be in my life was usually accompanied by a lesson that felt like a sharp stick in the eye.

  Soon after returning to LA, I was at one of my women’s meetings when I felt a cool breeze with the faint scent of disapproval. When I found its source, I immediately thought I’d found my new sponsor. She was hip, maybe a bit older than me, with spiky hair and a stern countenance, so I sort of sidled up to her, and, though not jumping up and down about it, she agreed to have coffee with me.

  Before I had even put cream in my coffee, she said, “I assume you want me to sponsor you.” Not much for chitchat, this one. She very methodically laid out her sponsoring style and how she worked with spons-ees, or her “babies” as she called them. Although her use of the word “babies” in reference to full-grown people gave me pause, I kept going forward as though I had yet to see the red flag waving.

  “Does this mean you are agreeing to sponsor me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how this worked. “That’s your choice, Jane. I am at your service. But before you decide, come to my home group meeting tonight at eight P.M. You can meet all my other babies.”

  Of course I went to the meeting. I walked into the appointed room at the appointed time and saw my would-be sponsor sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth, bawling her eyes out. A bunch of women, some of whom I assume were her “babies,” were kind of holding her in a group embrace and cooing as she moaned and groaned. I didn’t know what to do. I just sat down in an empty chair across the room from them, filled with dread.

  I searched my mind frantically. What did I do? I racked my brain. I was certain that somehow my fifteen minutes of coffee and conversation with this woman earlier in the day had caused her to have the nervous breakdown I was witnessing. I thought I was such a bad person that I could have that kind of huge, instantaneously negative effect on someone. There’s a saying in AA about how in the same moment we can be both self-condemning and grandiose: I’m the biggest piece of shit in the world. I excelled at this.

  The meeting started, and I could barely listen for my self-mortification. I wanted the hour to end so I could ask her what it was I had done. And then, all of a sudden, it hit me—boing! This had NOTHING to do with me. I felt a wave of relief, an internal shift like I had just had a chiropractic adjustment. I realized that I had made something that had nothing to do with me into something that was all about me.

  I saw that I had been doing this all my life. When I was a kid, my mom was easily annoyed, and I always figured it was me bugging her. After growing up like that, I was forever making myself the cause of other people’s pain. It was self-centered and rendered me incapable of compassion for others, because I’m no good to anybody else when it’s all about me. And frankly, most things have nothing to do with me. It was very adolescent, really. I got it, suddenly and profoundly.

  I later found out that my would-be sponsor had been upset that her boyfriend had cheated on her. I got to know her a bit later, and she was nice enough, but also a bit of a drama queen. They say that when you choose a sponsor, you should want what they have. I passed.

  In settling into my LA life, I reunited with my Brady Bunch friends and began doing stage sketch shows with them. We rented out theaters and put on shows that inevitably ended with us singing songs in our underwear. I also got an agent. This was no small feat, as one can go years without getting an agent in Los Angeles. If you don’t have an agent, getting a job is pretty much impossible. My agency in Chicago had a branch office in LA, so I met with an agent there. During our meeting, his first item of business was to hop up on his desk to show me his Mae West impression. Then he sat me down to lay out his personal rules of the road. I was never to call him—he would call me. He didn’t do small talk on the phone, so please don’t ask him how his day was going. It went on and on.

  This agency would probably be classified as mid- to low-level, which means there were lots people behind desks who had “power” issues. These agents will find ways to impress upon you that they hold the keys to the kingdom you want, and if you don’t appreciate them often, they will never call you with a job. Actors want to work. Most of us would sell our souls to the devil to get a crack at a job, and we will hand over our power so fast it would make your head spin. And beggars can’t be choosers, so I signed with these people and I endured.

  The Fugitive would be coming out soon, and since I had a featured role (if not a big one), these new people took some interest in me. My first audition was for a part on a new and soon-to-be-canceled show called Joe’s Life starring Peter Onorati. Not at all aware of the irony, my new agent told me that what made this sitcom unique was that the comedy came out of the situation.

  My first time out and damn if I didn’t book the job. My heart was pounding when I called my mom to tell her the big news. She met my enthusiasm with a sincere, if oddly directed, query: “What will you wear?”

  I played a saleslady trying to help Joe of Joe’s Life find a birthday present for his wife in the women’s wear department. Hilarity would ensue.

  The prop department asked me what to put on my employee name tag, and I told them Eileen, which was my mom’s name. In a tribute to my mom’s enormous concern about my wardrobe, her name would literally be what I was wearing. I told my dad, and it was our big secret. But when the show aired, I asked my mom what she thought when she saw the name tag. She said, completely deadpan, “I didn’t read it.”

  Suffice it to say, there were no machete-wielding madmen in my life in LA this time around, like there had been back in Venice Beach.

  I’d zip up and down Beachwood Canyon in the little red VW Golf that I’d recovered from Andy Richter, relishing being a working actress in sunny Los Angeles. A friend used to say, “You always look like you’re going somewhere.” And I was. With an LA-based television job under my belt, my agents started to send me out more and more. If I didn’t get jobs, I at least got callbacks. My beeper was buzzing like crazy. I was in the game.

  Jill, ever the entrepreneur, created a weekly stage sketch show called The Beachwood Palace Jubilee at what was then the Tamarind Theatre down
the street from where a lot of us were living in Beachwood Canyon. She would offer fifteen or so slots to performers to do their thing. We branched out from our little Chicago circle and started meeting other comedy people in town. Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan did their Roxbury Boys scene for the Jubilee when they were both at The Groundlings, LA’s version of The Second City. Molly Shannon was around, as was Ana Gasteyer, until they both left for Saturday Night Live.

  When Jill went on to do something else, my friend Barry Salzman and I took over the show, and I got my first experience as a producer. Looking dapper in a tuxedo, Barry was our host for the evening of acts as his alter-ego “Adamola Olegabufola,” a kind of Catskills MC knockoff. We performed every Monday evening and closed every show with a group musical number from a Broadway hit we had no business doing. None of us were dancers, or singers really, but we committed ourselves to the moves nonetheless. The audience found our awkward but well-intentioned efforts to be hilarious. The night’s entire ensemble performed a very earnest yet sexually charged version of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. And in perhaps one of my all-time favorite moments on stage ever, three of us performed and ineptly danced a fully committed “At the Ballet” from A Chorus Line.

  After a couple of years, I dumped that first TV and film agent when I received a “Dear Client” form letter informing me that, even though they were not entitled to commissions on residuals, they would now be taking them anyway. I signed with another agent, Chris Sherman at Halpern and Associates. He was my champion. I wanted to work, work, and work some more, so he submitted me for everything he could find. I told him to go for the guy parts, too. He was already on it. He would call casting people and say, “Could you see this character as a woman?” They’d say “Maybe.” I’d come in and do my authority thing, and sometimes I’d get hired and they’d get to feel like geniuses because they’d thought outside the box. I loaded up my résumé with TV guest spots playing doctors, teachers, lawyers, detectives, and other authority figures—many of them written as male.

  I have to say I don’t know why I am so frequently cast in the role of an authority figure, since the core of these characters does not match mine. I don’t have that kind of confidence. I certainly don’t experience the level of delusional cockiness I can portray in a role. But authority is so often projected onto me, in art and life. I first noticed how people listen to me early on in AA, when people seemed to hang on my words. Back then, I felt even less confident, so the difference between how I was seen and my inner reality was ample and unnerving. Sometimes I felt the expectation so intensely that I would start pretending to be overconfident in my day-to-day life. Now that I have earned more than a bit of my own confidence, I still don’t really understand why people see me as so absolutely self-assured. I get that I am tall, and that I walk the man-woman line energetically, and that now I have a history of being seen in roles meant for men, who are just granted more authority, so that adds to it. But how this pattern was established, I have no idea. But more and more, I have learned to accept, and even enjoy it.

  This bossy “know it all” vibe I gave off became my calling card, and I created a little niche for myself. As far as I could see, no one else was competing with me for it. I began to find different colors within it and was happy to use it. I would be cast as the emergency room physician, conveying grave concern, or the crusading attorney authoritatively fighting for the rights of the downtrodden. For comedy, I could do all sorts of over-the-top, self-important characters. I’d be the guru/therapist offering ridiculous advice as if it were the obvious choice, or the controlling and demeaning television director abusing my minions. I did these variations over and over again. I was working all the time, and really I’d do any character for any job. Chris started to say that I’d work for a buck fifty and a steak, and warned that I should be careful and perhaps a bit more discerning. A fan of food metaphors, he said, “I’m not going to let you trot out your cookies for just any old thing.”

  He might have had a point. I didn’t confine my obsessive need to work to paying gigs, or even free steak. I did things I thought were stupid, for free. I would be in anyone’s short film, one-act play, or stage sketch comedy show. I enjoyed doing my thing for its own sake.

  A friend would call and say, “I’m going to do a short and you’re going to play the boss,” and I’d be rolling my eyes, anticipating how disorganized the production was going to be, knowing I’d be bringing my own clothes and doing my own makeup and making up my own lines. . . . But it was always “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  I said yes all the time because I love performing, but also because I didn’t want to tempt the acting gods to punish me for being ungrateful. I also wanted people to like me and be grateful to me. Quid pro quo, baby. Unlike in the old days, when I sold my soul hawking cubic zirconia while auditioning my own replacements on America’s Shopping Place, I started getting back what I was putting in. I began to see how important good relationships are in this business. I’ve always been naturally thorough and well prepared, and by my mid-thirties I had worked out the worst kinks in my personality. I might have even become someone who was nice to have around.

  It wasn’t about being famous, like it had been when I was a kid. Back in Dolton, when I was writing letters to Hollywood agents, my objective was to be adored, fawned over. I wanted people to scream for me, like I remembered screaming for the Monkees when I saw them in a mall. Had I become famous as a younger person, it might have been a disaster for my insecure self. I would have been swayed by the public’s opinion, pro or con, and my sense of self-worth would have been at their mercy. I’d have believed the hype and the trash talk, and probably would have trusted the wrong people. But once I’d reached my thirties, I just wanted to work. I didn’t need to hang around for very long, so short-term gigs were fine. Just as with my relationship dalliances, I was happy to get in and get out fast.

  And that seemed to be how my romantic relationships were going, when they were happening at all. After all the drama of coming out to myself and then to my family, my sex life lay fairly dormant. I was just starting to be good at friendship. I was really taking my time with the intimacy thing.

  I did have a four-month-long relationship with a woman who felt curiously familiar and deeply psychologically attractive. Growing up with a Swedish-leaning mother, I’ve always been attracted to the cool breeze in the room, and this icy woman fit the bill. I even accidentally called her “Mom” several times. She was rather emotionally cut off to say the least, which left me plenty of room to project onto her the image of a deeply compassionate and wise soul who would nurture me. Imagine my disappointment when all my need came crashing down on her and she headed for the hills.

  My mourning over the loss of this four-month relationship was nearing the two-year mark when a friend sent me to her therapist, Nicki.

  Nicki was fabulous: openhearted and sensible and not afraid of my neediness. Yet she was also hilarious and deeply soulful and not in the least bit phony: she had come through the dark into the light via her own battles with addiction and self-worth but still had great reverence for the shadow. Just like Don, my Jungian dream analyzer before her, she saw its great gift. She had a lyrical quality when she spoke about the psyche. Every session was like spending an hour with Auntie Mame, and I couldn’t wait for my next appointment. Working with her, my idealization and preciousness about intimacy got slapped down. There was no room for it. When I would start to romanticize about how relationships should be, she would question and dismantle my defenses. She helped me understand what was really in my heart. I began to believe in my own goodness, and to disregard my self-contempt. She laughed at my jokes and we both laughed at my foibles. At the end of each hour, she would hug me. One day she said, “Caring for you is my job. The love is extra.” She was tailor-made for me. She loved me until I could love myself.

  When I was training for the AIDS Ride (a seven-day bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles to raise money f
or the LA Gay and Lesbian Center), I told Nicki about an extremely frustrating encounter I’d had on the bike path in Santa Monica. Cyclists are supposed to pass to the other cyclists’ left. It’s understood. But one Sunday, I was passed on my right, continually. As I was retelling the story to Nicki, I became more and more enraged. “It’s inconsiderate and it’s dangerous!” I fumed. Nicki started to laugh, and then so did I. “You have to write a monologue in this voice,” she said. Thus was born “The Angry Lady.”

  The following week, I read Nicki a rough version of what would become the first character I ever purposefully created from deep within my own shadow. I made productive work of the less attractive parts of my insides.

  I visualized performing her like this:

  Seething with rage, The Angry Lady could barely speak above a whisper. She wore a redhead wig with tight, angry curls, one of my mom’s old Janet Reno suits in a breezy red polka dot, and a store-bought surgical neck brace. To Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” a single spotlight followed as she slowly and painfully made her way to a microphone at the center of a bare stage.

  I performed it for the first time at a night of solo comedy acts at Highways in Santa Monica. I either knew personally or knew of almost everybody there. Kathy Griffin and Nora Dunn were among those performing that night, and I was humbled and nervous to be among their company. This night was all solo artists who did their own thing, and it was not lost on me that I was entering a whole new rank. The energy was electric, but loose. We walked through the tops and bottoms of our acts for light and sound cues before the show. I had done this hundreds of times in the past, but this time I was going to be alone up there.