The wedding was on Saturday. Alone, I put on my tuxedo and did my hair. Then Eric Henning, my old friend and best man, and Rodney, Lana’s brother, picked me up to drive to the estate. I remember that day being hot, so we gave out white parasols so people wouldn’t bake in the sun.
The chuppah and chairs were set up in the backyard. Lana had designed the chuppah decorations of hanging bouquets and glass globes. Underneath it stood the rabbi and the priest. We are not very religious, but we wanted to have both of our religions represented, and we found these two men who work as a team.
While I watched the procession of flower girls and the wedding party and waited for Lana to come out in the dress I hadn’t yet seen, but knew she’d spent three days in New York shopping for, I wasn’t nervous at all. I felt only excitement and happiness. I could not wait to be married to her.
Finally, Lana appeared on the lawn in a dramatic white dress by Giambattista Valli. She looked like she was floating on a feathery cloud with a forty-foot-long train. I choked up as soon as I saw her, and was on the verge of crying for most of the ceremony.
We wrote our own vows. Mine were:
Being in Napa, I think it’s fitting that a bottle of wine is much better when it’s shared. I feel my life is so much better now that I get to share it with you. Lana, today in the presence of God and our closest family and friends, I want to tell you that I will forever be your one and only. I promise to be your clown when you need laughter. I promise to be your map when you need guidance. I promise never to make fun of Oprah. I will be your muse when you are searching for inspiration. I promise to be more accepting of people. And I promise to leave the thermostat at seventy-two degrees. Lana, I find something about you every day that makes me fall more madly in love with you. You have shown me what love feels like and for that I’m forever grateful. My heart will be your shelter and my arms will be your home. I love you, little one, and I can’t wait to share the rest of my life with you.
I read them as best as I could while trying not to sob.
Lana went next. She kept a straight face when she delivered hers. She’s much more in control of her emotions than I am. I happen to think it’s because she’s been through the worst of life with her father’s sudden death when she was seventeen. Happy moments don’t make her cry. She smiled reading hers. She made some of the same jokes about the thermostat and our different taste in TV shows, and “to remain calm when you wander off in the grocery store.” But in the end, all that matters to me was her final line: “I’m so lucky to be on this journey with you while loving, learning, and walking together forever. I love you today and always.”
The reception was jaw-dropping and started with a moment of drama and grace before anyone even had a chance to catch their breath after the ceremony. We’d hired ballerinas from a nearby ballet school to stand with big white balloons on strings among the cypress trees during the ceremony, and then they looped around to the reception area and took each balloon—with numbers on them—to the corresponding table to help people find their seats.
The band was outstanding. When they did a Beyoncé song, it sounded so perfect, I thought Bey herself was doing a guest spot. During our first dance—“Try Me” by James Brown—Lana paused, unhooked something, and stepped out of the long, fluffy part of the dress, revealing the top turned into a minidress that was underneath for dancing. I had no idea that puffy part came off. The creative surprises at this wedding just didn’t quit.
My parents and in-laws made toasts during dinner. Again, my father fell flat. He said, “Let the good time rolls.” That was his toast. He’s Mr. Personality at his salon, but once he gets in front of a large group, forget it.
The food was incredible, not that I remember eating a single bite of it. The reception went by in a blur. There was so much going on, with the dancing and eating and drinking, talking to people and hosting. I remember this day, of the entire weekend, the least. I know I was overjoyed to be married, to share this experience with our guests, and that Lana’s parents were paying for it. My parents did contribute, too. When the ballerinas appeared, Dad joked, “Did I pay for the dancers?”
The final event of the weekend was the Sunday brunch. My wife wanted to incorporate art into each event, so we set up a graffiti wall where people added their own painting and drawing on the overall wedding theme: “The Art of Love.”
Our wedding was the greatest weekend of my life so far, by far. I’d never been a part of a huge production like that, the focus of so many people’s brilliance and creativity. I was literally blown away. Our marriage has turned out to be a lot like our wedding: full of surprises and dramatic moments, popping with brilliance and beauty, and laughter all the way through.
7
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SOUS CHEF
I’ve always taken pride in my style and thought of myself as a sharp dresser. BTW, Lana hates the word “sharp.” She never used it growing up. I never found it strange until she told me it was, and then I asked around and others agree. I don’t know if it’s an Italian thing, generational, or Midwest speak, but whatever it is, I use it sparingly around her so I don’t frost her bananas.
So the word “sharp” is out. Soon after Lana and I moved in together, I lost my confidence in my sharp dressing, too. I came home one day to find her and her friend Nazy in my closet, organizing and making a giveaway pile of some of my best clothes. Two of the most fashionable women I knew were trashing my wardrobe. My collection of Adidas tracksuits in every bright color? Gone. My Western plaid button-downs with an eagle embroidered on the front pocket? Trashed. They even put my Joop! cologne in the pile. I’d been looking for it for six months.
“Where’d you find this?” I asked, holding up the purple bottle.
Lana confessed, “I hid it a while ago.”
“You don’t like Joop!?” It had been my signature scent for years.
“Don’t take it personally,” she said, “but it gives me a headache. And a stomachache. And hives.”
I gave it one last sniff and retired it into the cologne graveyard.
I appreciated the brutal honesty, but the giveaway pile amounted to thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, not to mention the memories. Lana operated on a much higher taste level than I did. As an artist, her job was to have a sophisticated aesthetic. If she hated this stuff, I probably should get rid of it all.
My trust in my own fashion sense was completely rocked, and I turned over control of my look—head to toe, hair to shoes—to her. In fact, Lana was put in charge of all style-related purchases for us, including all of our clothes and home décor. I was relegated to handling the logistics, finances, electronics, travel, etc. This arrangement has worked well for us, and my style has improved exponentially. You can actually watch my four comedy specials to chart how my style has evolved—and improved—over the last ten years.
SEBASTIAN LIVE WAS filmed at the Pageant theater in St. Louis in 2007, but it got under way a couple of years before that. While I was on the Wild West Comedy tour, we stopped in St. Louis for a gig. After the show, the other guys and I were hanging out at a bar, and a man came up to me and said, “What are you doing here?”
It took a second, but I placed him as a longtime customer of mine at the Four Seasons in L.A. I remembered him because he was a great tipper. He’d just seen the show and was pleasantly surprised to find me in it. We got to talking, and he told me he worked for Budweiser, which happened to be one of the tour’s sponsors. He was actually involved in the sponsorship program at the company, and he’d been sent to St. Louis to check out the tour. It was all such a small-world coincidence, we were both just shaking our heads.
“You know, Budweiser is thinking about launching a cable channel called Bud.TV. They want to get into the entertainment content business,” he said. “Would you be interested in filming a special for us?”
“Absolutely,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever been asked or approached about doing a comedy special on TV. I was flattere
d and excited by the prospect.
I got my agent and a lawyer involved, and the negotiations began. Initially, they wanted to shoot me at a comedy club, but they decided to do it in St. Louis (Budweiser’s home base) at a big theater where the company could guarantee a packed house of their employees. They were going to give away free beer to draw a crowd, which was a good idea. There was no way I could bring in a thousand people on the strength of my name alone. At that point, I doubted I could draw eighty.
Ironically, Bud.TV hired the Levity Entertainment Group (LEG), which is now my management/production company, to shoot the special. It would be my introduction to the team and people I’d work with closely several years down the road, but for now, they were just the producers of this one show—hired guns.
In 2005, I was thirty-one years old, but still wet behind the ears as far as TV style was concerned. I wore a suit because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. In a suit, you were taken seriously. Problem was, I never had the right suit for the right occasion. This suit had a real traveling salesman look. It was black, and I paired it with a cerulean blue button-down shirt and cuff links. My foot was shoved into a dress shoe that was half the width of my extra-wide Fred Flintstone hooves. The jacket looked like what they would lend you at a hostess stand if you forgot yours. No tailoring. I got it on sale straight off the rack. I call it “sale to set,” and it’s not the effect you want for your first time on TV.
Bud.TV intended to chop up the hour-long special into four-minute clips, to use as connective tissue between their other programming. After one year, ownership of the material would revert back to me, and I could license the special to other networks and keep all the income I generated that way. It seemed like a great deal, and it kind of was.
I don’t remember which came first, ownership of the special reverting to me, or Bud.TV shutting down. It only lasted a year, and then Budweiser got out of the entertainment business entirely. Now that I had the rights to the material, and by then a decent manager, we sold it to Comedy Central, a better home for it. In 2008, they aired it several times over the course of a year. Getting my name and face on a popular channel definitely increased my ticket sales, and my gigs got bigger and better.
There was no way Comedy Central would have produced the special for me, but since we had it ready to go, they were only too happy to put it on the air. If I hadn’t met that Budweiser exec at the Four Seasons, and then run into him on the road, it never would have happened. The thing about comedy and success: You never know. When I served him his Budweisers in a frosted glass, I had no idea who he was, or what he would one day do for me. He liked me because I treated him well, and I remembered him because he was kind and generous. Random people you meet just might circle back into your life, and if you were an asshole the first time around, they won’t be too happy to see you. And they definitely won’t offer you a TV special.
FLASH FORWARD THREE years. By 2011, I’d officially signed up with LEG, and Judi Marmel was producing and managing the rollout of my second special, called What’s Wrong with People? It was filmed in Santa Ana, California, in an old bank that was converted into a theater space with 450 seats.
Lana and I were a couple by then, and she had great ideas for the set design, the lighting, and the backdrop. We’d worked diligently and really thought through the set and the look of the show. We sent detailed notes to the design team. But when we got there, it turned out that they’d ignored most of our directions. We walked in, saw the set, looked at each other, and said, “Oh my God. Whose special is that going to be?”
The stage manger said, “Uh, yours.”
Lana definitely doesn’t seek out confrontation. But that day, she got so ruffled because this just wasn’t our vision. They explained to us that they had had to add something to the front of the set for depth or it would have looked bad. Okay, then why didn’t they run that by us? Also the lighting was all these crazy colors, a hodgepodge that made no sense to us and had to be fixed ASAP. That day was the first time Lana met my management team. I’d say, diplomatically, that the LEG people and Lana took careful measure of each other.
I preferred the set that Lana and I had chosen, but it wasn’t as big a deal to me as it was to her. “It’s about the standup,” I said. “The audience doesn’t give a fuck if the column lighting is gold or purple.” However, as I would learn over ten years of doing these things, the audience might not realize they care about the aesthetics of the set, but the set represents me, and adds a vibe or a tone that affects their experience. The look does matter. It can make or break a performance. Lana has since become my creative director, handling everything from set design to wardrobe and promotional material. So if you like how the stage and the style of artwork on my tours look, you can thank her for it.
I was a bit overweight during that shoot. Despite the warm lighting, I came off as white and clammy, like the room was muggy and stifling. My outfit of tight black jeans, black shoes, brown belt, brown vest, and black shirt was dark, heavy, and unflattering.
“What were we thinking?” I asked Lana (and made a mental note to use that phrase as a possible title for a future special). We had picked out the outfit together, but I’d put on ten pounds since I bought it and the seams were hanging on for dear life. After seeing the playback, we both cringed.
It was a slipup. What you learn doing TV is that some clothes that look good on the hanger, or at a dinner table, aren’t a good match for a standup comedy special. The worst part of the outfit was the jeans. People make fun of me to this day about how tight they were. I get comments like “nice camel toe.” Even friends from home were like, “What the fuck, man?” This special was entitled What’s Wrong with People? but they call it What’s Wrong with Your Pants?
In terms of the comedy, I think it’s one of my best specials. But when I look at it now, I’m distracted, just like the viewers probably were, by the style. I just don’t look or feel my best. It didn’t occur to me to hit the gym and get in shape as part of the preparation for shooting a TV special. I was more worried about getting the comedy right, rather than pumping up my abs.
I never want to fall into the trap of putting that kind of pressure on myself, and I don’t beat myself up about things I can’t change in the past. But, yeah, the style could have been better. A grade C outfit was not the end of the world. I’d do better next time. Because of the A+ comedy, there would be a next time.
I WAS IN great shape when we filmed the Aren’t You Embarrassed? special in 2014. It was right around the time I got married, and Lana and I had been on a strict diet. We both had blood testing, and I learned I was allergic or highly sensitive to some of my favorite foods, like bread, pasta, and Scotch, and some random foods, like asparagus. For about six months, I cut all of them out of my diet, and I dropped twenty-two pounds.
I didn’t change my diet to look good at the wedding. I’d been feeling low energy, sluggish. My wife hadn’t been feeling so good either. She was so drained of energy she could hardly stay awake and focus. Turned out, she had a thyroid condition, an actual medical problem. My problem was that I was eating too much bread. The testing did inspire me to go on a health kick, watch what I ate, and work with a trainer again.
We shot in my hometown of Chicago, which should have guaranteed a good night. But I didn’t particularly like that experience. I made the mistake of using a teleprompter for the first time. Sometimes, during a show, I’ll forget to do a joke. When you film a special, you don’t want to forget anything, because the jokes circle around and come together at the end. The teleprompter helped me remember the order and to hit every bit, but it also took me out of the moment and interrupted the flow. In just that second of looking down and then glancing up, you can lose the connection with the audience. I’m never as off-the-cuff shooting specials as I am at regular gigs.
We filmed two shows, back to back, with fresh audiences each time. The show that would air would be the better of the two, with maybe one or two bits
spliced in from the other one. So I had to wear the same exact outfit for both performances.
For this show, I went with black jeans and a warm but thin magenta cotton pullover sweater. We were down to the wire choosing the look, and went with the magenta just moments before I walked out on stage. The sweater had one of these elastic bottoms, and every time I moved—and I move a lot in my act—the shirt would creep up and expose the skin of my belly and back. I was continually pulling the sweater back down over my belt. It was a constant but subtle tug-of-war throughout the filming.
My dad was at the taping, and he came back between shows and said, “Your shirt doesn’t fit. I could tell from in the audience that you kept pulling it down.” Nothing gets by this guy.
Wardrobe malfunctions are the worst, but I couldn’t change now. We’d shot one of the two versions with the sweater, so I had to put on the clean identical one and wear it. It had to match, just in case we did some editing. I was pissed. “This stupid shirt keeps riding up and it’s going to ruin the special,” I said to every-one backstage. I liked the look of it, but it was taking me out of the moment. In the back of my head the whole time, I was worried that the shirt would be up to my tits while I was doing a joke. I did like how my hair looked in that one, though.
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