M: They’re all old already! Don’t they need a meal?
N: Or they might get old and need affordable health care. It’s quite baffling.
M: Anyway, it’s all going to change. We’re hitting critical mass, and we’re going to reach a certain point of no return, where all this positive change we’re seeing is really going to take root in the mass consciousness. I can’t comprehend the amount of energy it would take to stay at the level of denial required to have the belief systems that a lot of people have. It’s so gargantuan. I don’t understand how people make it from one day to the next.
N: That’s a great point, but I think because it’s fear-based it’s much easier to remain in denial than to have to be open-minded. It’s human nature. Let’s say you’re prone to laziness and you think, “There’s a beautiful forest outside my house, and I could go for a walk. But I’m just going to stay in.” It takes a lot more effort to go out the door and do it. Once you walk in the woods, you’re so glad you’ve done it. It’s so much more beautiful and smells incredible. There’s no way to compare it to sitting on the couch. You simply have to get out the door.
We both had an awareness as children of this opulent church, the nicest building in town, where all of our parents put money into a basket that was passed around each week, and all of these funds went toward paying for this opulence. We both noticed that there was no actual apparent devotion. There was no life in the celebration.
M: Well, there was no celebration.
N: And then we both came to find that celebration and that life in the actual live theater. So I’ve always said—I always get a laugh when I say it, but I mean it sincerely—that theater is also born of religion. And to me that is very religious. We both talk about how we feel like we have a calling. When people ask me what my favorite thing to do is—theater, film, TV, or whatever—I say theater because of the immediacy. You can feel the medicine you’re giving your audience through laughter or tears or what have you. And the medicine they give back is the closest thing I’ve felt to some kind of holy transaction.
M: That’s how I feel about music.
N: That’s how I feel when I’m singing in the theater.
M: Oh my god. The end.
N: When I see the beatific faces, with tears streaming down . . . begging me to stop singing. But I think that’s our religion. People of other faiths pray on a regular basis, or they follow rules of kosher eating, or what have you. We devote ourselves to creating the sermons of our performances. Delivering our own Good News, if you will, to the people.
M: Good sermon. I had the best interview the other day. I was doing an interview with a music writer at the Village Voice. She was interviewing me about Nancy And Beth, and she said that the thing that struck her after talking to Stephanie and me was that what spurred both of us on was this very childlike joy and pure excitement about what we’re doing. And I said, “Oh my god! That’s completely it.” It’s such an ephemeral thing. Nancy And Beth is like two little girls playing. There’s a childlike excitement about what we’re doing, where you don’t realize that time is passing because you’re doing something that you really love to do. That can happen with a lot of things. It can even happen when we’re here working on this book. There’s something mysterious and real about that. I hope everyone feels free to experiment with that part of themselves.
N: I think that’s a great point. Because you two, in a way, do become possessed. You’re channeling something. When a person can find what their calling is, what it is they love to do, there’s something holy about that.
M: It’s all of it: When we’re picking songs, or when we’re brainstorming what we want the record to look like or what we want the show to be like. What we want to wear. When we’re trying out choreography in front of the mirror. It’s full-on two little girls set loose.
N: It’s a very Wendell Berry–ian notion, that you’ve found what makes you feel that way, and you thrive from it. I’ve sat in a great many of your audiences, and there are massive hordes of people that you’ve thrilled.
M: Well, that’s very nice. And if religion is more amorphous for us than it would be if we were part of some organized religion . . . if there’s some mysticism involved . . . there’s something that happened in 2002. It was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Even though we weren’t huge W fans, we decided to go, because we wanted to see what it was all about. It was in a giant ballroom with about two thousand people. It was really just a lot of people glad-handing and networking, up and out of their chairs, all over the room, doing business. The only time they were quiet was when Bush got up to speak. They kind of had to be. But after he spoke, everyone immediately went back to working the room. And it was a bummer because there were journalists on the podium talking about colleagues who had been killed in the war. There was one journalist in particular who talked about a fellow correspondent and close friend who had recently been killed in the line of duty in some conflict overseas after 9/11. And no one was listening!
And then they said, “The evening’s entertainment: Ray Charles!” And everybody suddenly got really excited. And everyone was actually quiet for most of the first song, which was one of his up-tempo hits that everybody knew. Then his second song was “A Song for You” by Leon Russell. It’s a beautiful song, and his rendition of it was the most incredible piece of singing I have ever heard. The single most unbelievable piece of live singing by a vocalist that I’ve ever heard in my life. And nobody was listening. Nobody except me and Nick. And I started sobbing. I put my head down on my lap, and I was sobbing into my lap at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because it occurred to me that it doesn’t matter if anybody’s listening. Even if nobody’s listening, you have to speak your truth. And here was Ray Charles, near the end of his life, singing into this deafening crowd noise, putting his entire being into singing this one song for nobody. Or so he must have thought. And that was so moving to me. That was like a religious awakening.
N: It’s like a truth teller, with people screaming at them, continuing to stay on message. One of the Wendell Berry messages that I love is that he is into religion and the Bible, but he doesn’t like churches. He doesn’t like what people do with it. He finds his evidence of God much more out by the river and in his pastures than he does at church. And that made me think of the feeling of how I was organically driven through the use of tools—I used tools for so many years before I realized I could make furniture—I’m thinking of these trestle tables that I made at my shop. I made them because I could. And when I made this joinery and fit it together, and had this magnificent table of mahogany sitting in my shop that I had made out of a stack of boards, I felt a similar feeling of euphoria. Like “I have done what is right. I was called to do this, and people can eat off of it.” Megan’s talked about it ever since we met, finding creativity in every part of life that you can. That has done me a lot of good.
M: You can find the creativity in everything, and you can find the humor in everything.
N: I don’t think that’s very funny. But it’s true, and it’s less tangible in some things. It may seem a little obvious that Megan would feel that in her music or I would feel it in woodworking, but there are so many domestic places, so many little ways that you can make your existence holy in how you choose to treat your loved ones and your community.
M: The thing with Stephanie is that it’s such a true duo, it’s so completely mutual. Stephanie and I spur each other on. It’s a great partnership that makes it so much more compelling and interesting than if I were just singing in a band on my own. This is more like, this girl and I have a weird proclivity for the same things, so we’re going to perform them for you if you’d like to come see it. To me, there’s some force at work there that transcends my understanding. Even though it’s not a moneymaking proposition. It’s just something I have to do. And Nick and I are also lucky to have the luxury to have things that could be consider
ed side projects. Nick has woodworking and I have the band. We’re lucky we can afford to do that. And of course Nick and I are a duo. Heart emoji, rainbow emoji, two-girls-in-cat-costumes emoji. Good old Mom and Dad. As we’re going through life and we find that yet again we’re on the same wavelength, I love that you always say, “Hey, we should stay together.”
N: I feel like we should. Which brings us to . . . our wedding!
M: Whee! It was a simple affair. Just two thousand guests at Mar-a-Lago.
N: Yeah . . .
M: What a beautiful, beautiful night.
N: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
M: Twenty-one gun salute.
N: The setup is that this was the early 2000s. I am pleased to say that I don’t know if celebrity weddings are still major fare for tabloids . . .
M: I don’t know either because we don’t read them.
N: But at the time, there was a huge market for Brad and Jen—lots of helicopter beach-wedding paparazzi photos. One of the first things we did together, romantically, was attend Debra Messing’s wedding on the cliffs of Santa Barbara. And a helicopter buzzed it to take pictures.
M: Wait, did a helicopter really buzz it? Remember? Weren’t they just really afraid a helicopter was going to buzz it so they moved the wedding to a more secluded location last minute? So I don’t think a helicopter did buzz it after all. I sang at it. And it was pretty quiet.
N: That’s right. It’s the only wedding I’ve been to where they had the Jewish tradition of carrying the bride around on a chair . . .
M: We have to do that with Debra anyway. That’s not just at the wedding.
N: It’s like a monthly ritual?
M: It’s an everyday thing. We carry her around.
N: And then you wrap a glass in cloth and she stomps on it?
M: We don’t do that part.
N: Anyway, that created this traumatic potential that some paparazzi would somehow spoil our wedding.
M: Oh, you know what happened? We lived in this duplex in West Hollywood for the first five years. I’d lived there for over sixteen years, but Nick and I lived there for the last five—right?
N: Three. You must be thinking of Kevin.
M: I had another husband who lived there for five years. He was so great . . . (Laughs) . . . Old Kevin. Why did we ever part?
Anyway, we had just moved to our first house, up in the hills. We were going to a movie—god, remember that? Having time to go to a movie—those were the days.
N: Like a cinema film?
M: Just having time in the daylight hours. “Let’s just go to a movie! Nothing doing. What do you want to do? I’m so bored.”
N: Yeah.
M: No work to do.
N: No whip being cracked by any fancy New York book editors.
M: That’s right.
The design of the house was such that you’d open the front door and see all the way through the front hallway, through to the living room. The far living room wall was all glass, and there was a view of the city. We’re just at the front door, opening it to go the movie, and we said, “What is that sound?” We turned around, and there was a black helicopter, like from a ’90s Tom Cruise movie, hovering right over our backyard. Right at eye level. And we thought, “What is happening?” It just hovered there for a second and it moved on. A couple of weeks later in US magazine there was a bird’s-eye-view photograph of the ridge we lived on, because a bunch of famous people lived on the same block, basically. They didn’t even point out our house. We didn’t make the cut.
N: Thankfully.
M: Anyway, so we thought, “Uh-oh—helicopters.” So we started thinking . . . Oh, the best idea that Nick had, which was a foolproof way to have a wedding that for sure nobody would suspect or photo-bomb, was to do it during the actual Emmys. When I was nominated. We wouldn’t go to the Emmys—we’d just get married instead. I don’t know why we thought that everybody was so frothing at the mouth to get pictures of our stupid wedding, but we really thought that. So that was the completely foolproof plan.
N: Yeah.
M: But then we thought that wouldn’t go over too big—
N: Professionally.
M: —if I just didn’t show up at the Emmys.
N: But we landed not too far from it. We used the Emmys as our bait. We had just moved into the house. So we invited my family, and Megan’s mom and Nat, her step dad, to come to the Emmys, which was exciting—it was your fourth time, or something.
M: Yeah, it was our fourth time.
N: We invited our families to come to the Emmys. And the night before the Emmys, we’d have a little get-together so everyone can check out the house. We had about twenty guests.
M: I sort of said it like, “We may have you guys over the night before to see the new house, but we may not, because that whole Emmy weekend is a big spazz, so we don’t know . . . We’ll play it by ear.”
N: We played them. Like a French horn. Even our assistant didn’t know . . .
M: We didn’t tell one other person it was our wedding. Except for the man who performed the ceremony.
N: So everyone came to this dinner thing. We had a couple of friends each . . .
M: We had to get a cake. I ordered one and I said, “It’s for my mom’s birthday, and she likes vanilla. So a white cake . . .” The whole thing was just a big lie. We just lied a lot.
N: So everybody was over, and we said, “OK, now if you would like to step into the backyard, this is our wedding.” People were crying. Shozo Sato, my college Kabuki theater professor and lifelong sensei, appeared from the back bedroom and married us with a tea ceremony. My dad was very funny—to this day, he makes a very sour face when he is reminded of drinking what he calls “that seaweed juice.”
M: He has that oyster stew to explain to me.
N: He eats the most disgusting . . .
M: . . . the grossest oyster stew. From a can. It’s a mysterious family tradition, although most of the family has jumped ship at this point.
N: It was really amazing, our processional, as it were. Megan picked this song, Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” and it was beautiful. For the recessional, I picked “Picture in a Frame,” by Tom Waits. And then we had a big party. We had a mariachi band, which was fun.
M: We had invited a couple of friends apiece. Sean Hayes was there. And we were all sitting at dinner—we had put a long table in our backyard—and at one point I looked around and I realized I didn’t know where Sean was. The mariachi band had two dancers—a guy and a girl—in flashy costumes. All of a sudden Sean bursts out in this red satin dress. He came out and did a flamenco dance. Well, not flamenco.
N: He did a Latin style . . .
M: A dance-of-the-seven-veils style . . .
N: And apparently the ceremony worked. I guess it took.
M: It took. It stuck. It really was a great way to have a wedding, because everyone was so excited when we said, “It’s our wedding.” There was a lot of screaming and merriment. Most people were just in jeans and T-shirts. It was great. Really fun, and so easy. We had a caterer. I actually confiscated everybody’s phones. This was early cell phone days—it wasn’t smartphones yet, it was clamshell flip phones—but I took everybody’s phones because I didn’t want anyone taking pictures. Again, apparently we really thought our wedding was a high-dollar ticket.
N: And everything remained perfectly private until we got to the Emmys the next day. I will start you off by simply saying the name Shelley Morrison. (Laughs)
M: Aww, good old Shelley.
The day after the wedding, the day after our wedding night (Evil laugh), we were on the red carpet. It was when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was first on. Nick is very good at something called Spray, Delay, and Walk Away. Remember you used to do Spray, Delay, and Walk Away?
N: Yeah.
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M: You haven’t done that in a while.
N: You no longer like me wearing a scent.
M: I don’t really, that’s true. Just Axe body spray.
N: Maybe an illustration of Spray, Delay, and Walk Away would be appropriate for the book?
M: I think so. So we were there, and we saw a couple of the guys from that show. We were sort of friendly with them. We told a couple of people, friends, that we had gotten married the night before. And one of the guys from Queer Eye told Shelley Morrison, thinking that she must already know. We weren’t really telling the press—just telling friends, “Keep it under your hat, but we got married last night.” And Shelley raced over to the nearest person with a microphone, yanked it out of their hands, and said, “Big news! Megan Mullally and Nick just got married!” And told everyone. But that was all right.
N: Yeah. Welcome to showbiz.
M: We probably would have just wanted to break the news ourselves. But you know, could be worse. At least she’s cute.
Megan: All right. We will now hold forth on the subjects of fashion, music, and art.
Let’s start with art, shall we?
Nick: I have a bachelor of fine arts degree, so I guess I should do most of the talking on the art chapter. And you can just chime in.
M: Did you plan that line out when I told you that the chapter was art?
N: Me? Are you accusing me of packing a lunch? Is this about art in the widest definition?
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Page 11