Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle

by Rachel Dratch

  There onstage in panic mode, I carefully got up off the floor for the next little transition moment of the show, where Tina and I faced each other and danced in a sort of stylized make-out move. Loud music played along, so under the music, I blurted out to her “Ijustsplitmypants.” “Grabthatjacket,” she said, without missing a beat. There was a sweat jacket on the floor that had been tossed off by one of the characters we had played earlier. I tied it around the front of my pants for the whole rest of the show. No one noticed. Improvisers who perform together for a long time develop a comfort and a trust that if one is floundering, the others will come in and save the moment. Because of our history, I always knew Tina had my back. Now I knew she had my front too.

  Point is, Tina and I had both been in the biz long enough to know that some things are beyond our control. When I was replaced on the show, I felt confident that Tina had “fought” for me as much as she saw fit, but that at the same time, the network has certain demands, and the fact exists that I wasn’t right for the part as it turned out to be. Oddly enough, I didn’t initiate a big Feelings Conversation with her; I didn’t want her to think I was expecting her to solve things for me or fix anything, especially when she was busy trying to get her show off the ground. She had written me a part in her show (as she did for her old pals Jack McBrayer and Scott Adsit as well), she’s always been loyal to her old Chicago gang, and she shows that loyalty with actions big (“You’re in my show!”) and small (“C’mon over! Jeff’s making doughnuts!”). As for the prospect of a big Feelings Conversation, I’ve never known Tina to be the kind of gal who’d be into putting some Shawn Colvin on the iPod, pulling out an afghan and two mugs of hot cocoa, patting the couch, and saying, “Hey, girlfriend, c’mon over here and let’s share our feelings. Mmmm. That’s good cocoa.” I imagine we would both sign off on the statement that in dealing with feelings, she and I have different styles: I am a classic Pisces, prone to sensitivity and emotions, and she is German.

  Well, I see a few more hands up. Yes, lady who I was seated next to at my cousin’s wedding?

  “Yeah, what’s up with 30 Rock!? Why aren’t you on 30 Rock anymore?”

  Didn’t I just answer this? Good Lord. Question time is over.

  OK! That’s the whoooole story of that. Back when it was all going down, I just figured something else would come along and Ol’ Two-Time Dratch could chalk this up to the time I lost that one job but then this other one happened a little while later. That didn’t happen. I’d get some jobs—a day here, a few days there (and at this point I’d like to say I am eternally grateful to Adam Sandler for putting me in his movies)—but no major steady gig as I had pictured happening post-SNL. A year passed, then two, then three. All the while, these gnarly parts were mostly all that was coming across the table. The road not taken, being a therapist in the burbs of Boston, was starting to sound like a liberating prospect—not one I was actually considering but a nice little fantasy escape hatch. If I were a therapist, I wouldn’t be worried about how my chin looks on camera—or off, for that matter. After all the years of performing, after all the rejections to which I had developed immunity, was I, Rachel, usually a wide-eyed optimist, becoming … bitter?

  I had to face the facts—I’d had the good fortune of working almost fifteen years straight with a steady gig, but now, for whatever reason, my career was at a standstill. I was no longer Rachel the successful television actor, Rachel the cast member of SNL, Rachel the nationally beloved comic treasure. (Was I ever that? Let’s just go with it.) No, I was none of those things. I was just me, and how did I feel about being pared down like that? I had to see all the other facets of myself and not hold my identity in acting or comedy. So to fill the day, I began doing all the stuff I’d always wanted to do but never had the time. I took Spanish class. No puedo hablar pero puedo entendere mejor. I dog-sat. I did yoga. And then there was The Biggie: After spending years hanging out with cute, flirtatious, comedy non-boyfriends, I was going to find Love. So for starters, I took on the biggest challenge of my life. I tried dating in New York.

  Horsemeat

  I hadn’t gone on many real dates: You meet an attractive fellow and hit it off, at which point this debonair man takes control of the situation and says, “Maybe we should continue discussing this … over dinner….” In my world, that happens only on my television set.

  I’ve only been in relationships where you meet the guy through whatever it is you’re doing, in my case comedy, and then later in the relationship, you find out they are an addict (alcohol, pot, sex—but not with you) and then continue the relationship for about another year. Actual formal “dates,” the getting-to-know-you, do-you-like-red-or-white-wine, how-many-brothers-and-sisters-do-you-have dates—I don’t know anything about those. At the time I made the decision to go on the Dating Crusade, it had been a long while since I’d had a boyfriend—three years. And I don’t even know if I could legitimately call him a boyfriend. … He was one of the Three Addicts.

  If I was going to earnestly try to find love in New York, I decided I would have to get out of my comfort zones. I figured I had three comfort zones that were preventing me from finding love: comedy non-boyfriends, gal pals, and gays. Quick breakdown: Comedy non-boyfriends are the SNL guys, good friends like Will Forte or Seth Meyers or writer dudes you absolutely love and they love you too and you can laugh all night in a big group, stay out late, and even flirt, but that’s as far as it goes. They serve the purpose of a sparkly and fun boyfriend in your life without the actual relationship or intimacy. I knew them so well that we were like siblings, so anything beyond that would be highly weird, and I’d always opt for the ease and fun of hanging with them rather than going out and trying to meet strangers.

  As for gal pals, I had an array of quality ladies to hang with that were funny, wise, and entertaining. Basically, I could go out with a different lady friend every night of the week … to a movie, to dinner, for drinks. I could have a really fun time and dish the dirt and be out on the town, but rarely did I meet a guy on one of these evenings.

  Gays? See: gal pals. The evening typically had the same outcome.

  Imagine my glee when forcing myself out of the comfort zone gave me results: A cute guy who seemed nice and funny asked me out. I had been invited to a holiday party by a friend named Henry, whom I met at Burning Man a few years back. Yes, I, Rachel, went to Burning Man—odd, since I’m not into doing drugs or walking around without my shirt on, which are the two most popular activities that occur at Burning Man.

  I went one year with one of my best friends, also named Rachel, who has gone to Burning Man every summer for eight years. If you aren’t familiar with Burning Man, it’s a festival out in the middle of a desert in Nevada, where you have to bring in all your own food, supplies, tents, RVs, what have you. Forty thousand people descend on this spot and it becomes an encampment for a week. Like I said, drugs are big there. There are also seminars. The favorite description I saw was for a seminar on oral sex that you were supposed to attend with your partner. It advised, “Bring wipes. The desert can give you that not-so-fresh feeling.”

  The coolest part about Burning Man to me were the huge art installations, some several stories high, which are truly amazing. There are also “art cars”: Someone will take, say, an old school bus and magically transform it into a light-up dinosaur that, when driven through the desert at night, is absolutely beautiful. That said, one Burning Man was enough for me. I’m not an eight-timer like my friend Rachel. I’m no high-maintenance traveler, but being out in the middle of the desert with inconveniently located port-a-potties when you are not high on some drug to make you think you are somewhere else just isn’t really my jam. You had to trudge to the port-a-potties because, environmentally and hygienically speaking, you just can’t have forty thousand people peeing in the middle of the desert, even if there is nothing around for miles for the rest of the year. One night, though, we were out on the Playa, as it’s called, the huge miles-long stretch of des
ert, where everyone’s looking at the light-up art installations and art cars and generally checking out the scene. It’s completely dark except for people’s encampments and the art cars, so you need to carry a flashlight and wear lights on your clothes in order to not get flattened by a moving art vehicle or by a naked person on a bike. I didn’t know where the heck I was or where the nearest port-a-potties were located, and I had to pee. So Rachel told me to bend down right there on the Playa. Even though there are people everywhere, you are in almost complete darkness. One of the dangers of peeing in this situation that never crossed my mind was the possibility of an eighty-foot metal robot just happening to shine it’s megawatt beam of light down upon me at that moment. But let me warn you now, that can happen at Burning Man. It wasn’t the Pee Robot Police. It was just an accidental intersection of art and human need. Flooded in bright white light as if I were in a sci-fi movie, I frantically struggled to pull up my pants, getting pee all over myself in the process. Besides having the social instinct to not be caught with my pants down, for a second I was consumed with the primal fear that this robot was going to fix its metal eye on me, lean in, pick me up, and fling me across the desert.

  A sculpture of a fifty-foot woman in the middle of the desert—just another day at Burning Man.

  A lot of people walk around naked at Burning Man, as I said. There’s no pressure to be naked—there are plenty of clothed people, myself being one of them. But I expected a sort of hippie vibe about the nudity—grit and grime and drum circles and chicks with hairy armpits. I didn’t expect the Sexy Cat Syndrome to be alive and well in the middle of the desert. I can report to you that at Burning Man, Sexy Cat Syndrome is in full effect. By that I mean that there are plenty of women there who would never dress up as a witch or ghost on Halloween. Even though they were San Fran Nature Girls, come Halloween they’d be Sexy Cats as much as any Bridge and Tunnel chick who comes into NYC on the weekends. Or maybe instead they’d say, “I’m a space fairy!” but still find a way to wear just a G-string and some wings. These chicks had supermodel bodies and were traipsing around the desert in nothing but silver Grace Jones boots and body paint. Where were the old ladies with long gray hair and low-hangers? I’d come to the middle of the desert expecting a spiritual experience, only to feel the kind of physical inadequacy usually reserved for seeing a Victoria’s Secret ad. Fantastic. Although I saw plenty of these hot chicks with impossibly high boobs and long legs, the men who seemed inclined to disrobe, much fewer in number, were all Haight-Ashbury throwbacks over the age of seventy with long beards and leathery skin. Where was the equity?

  Through all the desert madness at Burning Man, I did meet this character Henry. Though he is a Stanford businessman in real life, at the time I met him at our “camp” in Black Rock City, Nevada, he was wearing black nail polish and a man-skirt. He lived near me in New York, which brings me back to my search for love and Henry’s Christmas party. The good thing about Henry’s party was that Henry isn’t an actor. Because he’s in business, there would be a whole new crop of people for me to meet. I even turned down my friend Chris when he offered me a free ticket to Billy Elliot on the same night, thinking to myself, “No, Rachel! You cannot go to the Broadway musical with your gay friend. You must ‘get out there.’” It was a whole new me.

  So, on a December evening, I went by myself to Henry’s party, where I barely knew anyone. My friend Daisy agreed to meet me there, but she was late, so I was going to have to—gasp—talk to strangers. I was over by the bar and food table, as I am wont to be, and right away, as if it were predestined, a man appeared. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call him Steve. But his real name was Brent.

  “Hi!” I said. There was an odd-looking appetizer on a plate, and I turned to him and boldly continued, “What do you think those are?” It’s highly uncharacteristic of me to just say hi to someone I don’t know out of the blue, but here I was, chatting up a stranger, a cute, clean-cut, businessman-looking stranger.

  At this point, I must interject and say that, in retrospect, I think I had been subconsciously emboldened by a cheesy reality show I had been watching at the time: The Pickup Artist. If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing this program, the basic premise is this: A guy named Mystery, who is, in actuality, a total tool, teaches über-nerds how to pick up chicks. He wears fur hats and nail polish, and dresses like a wannabe rock star attending a Renaissance Faire. It is reality television at its finest. One of Mystery’s main theses is that it doesn’t really matter WHAT you are talking about, just as long as you say anything at all to your potential pickup. So when I asked this man about the strange appetizers, although I’m embarrassed to admit it, I think I was channeling the master himself, Mystery.

  We had a bit of chitchat going on and then I asked him his name, unfortunately just as he put some food in his mouth. He chewed while giving me the “just a second” finger in the air, swallowed, and returned with “I know what you do and I’d expect you to have better timing than that.” Pretty slick. That was kind of the coolest way anyone has said they recognized me from TV. I ended up talking to him all night long. It was exactly how meeting your boyfriend is supposed to go. I started asking him questions right when he put food in his mouth. Bite. “Whereyoufrom?” Bite. “HowdoyouknowHenry?”

  When he told me he grew up in New York City, I said that I had always pictured people who grew up in the city as hard-living kids, doing cocaine on the subways at age fifteen. I realized in hindsight that I was engaging in yet another one of Mystery’s techniques: “Negging.” Negging is where you throw out a slightly negative comment toward the other person, like “You have bad timing” or “You were probably a coke addict by age fifteen,” and for some reason, rather than causing offense, it draws the other person in.

  “Steve” and I were totally hitting it off. If you are reading this and thinking, “Big deal, this happens to me every weekend,” then I commend you. I must tell you that this kind of thing rarely happened to me. He was supereasy to talk to, and he seemed funny too. And he was a biologist, which in my opinion is a pretty hot profession. To others, maybe a rock star or actor sounds like a hot profession to date, but not to me. Not anymore. Having dated only comedians, I was ready for a nice stable scientist like Steve, who worked for a biotech company. He was successful, funny, well traveled, and fluent in Japanese. At this point, I wasn’t hiding my interest. When he told me he was fluent in Japanese, I pretended to swoon and fan myself.

  We talked all night and laughed a lot. At one point, we were chatting about our favorite restaurants in the city. When I told him mine, he responded with, “I’ve never been. We should go there sometime.” It was all happening so effortlessly! At the end of the night, he got my number. I felt like this was how things happened in the movies, not in real life.

  The next morning, I woke up a little giddy, reliving all the little jokes and laughs and fun flirtiness we had shared. “Hold up, Dratch,” warned my inner voice. “You’ve had these fun flirtations before. And then … nothing!” As a matter of fact, at Henry’s holiday party the previous year, I had met this cool British accountant who, no joke, had just come back from Africa, where he was building wells for orphans or something. We had talked the night away and even gotten a drink afterward. And then … nothing. I never heard from him again. So I was thinking to myself, “Remember the Brit! Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  Then a magical thing happened—Steve texted me at noon that day. He even asked me out right then for the upcoming weekend. A Friday or Saturday night. Those are the nights normal people go on dates, right? I skipped through the week. Knowing that there was even the potential of love changed my whole demeanor. Then on Thursday, I went to Trader Joe’s.

  I was at the checkout at Trader Joe’s and when I reached down to pick up my bag of groceries, SPROING! went my back. The bag wasn’t even that heavy. Why was this my luck? Did God not want me to date?

  It actually wasn’t the first time this back thing had happe
ned. The other time was much worse. It was during a read-through of SNL. I had stumbled while walking back to my seat, and my back went out big-time. You know that feeling of a leg cramp? Imagine that in your back but ten times worse and lasting hours. I lay down on the floor and couldn’t move an inch. My back was totally spazzing out, and I was writhing in pain. At read-throughs, as I described, the entire staff is there—writers, actors, designers, Lorne, and the host (in this case, Johnny Knoxville). They sent for a doctor, who, upon her arrival, asked if anyone had any pain relievers—muscle relaxants, Vicodin, Percocet—anything. Picture if this had been the original cast from the 1970s. An avalanche of pills would have spilled out onto the table—ludes, pot, speedballs, red bennies, and all those other fun nicknames I learned about in seventh-grade health class. I mean, for God’s sake, Johnny Knoxville was the host! I thought surely he would have some heavy pain meds due to his Jackass stunts. Well, actually, he did have them, but they were back in his hotel room. There was nothing anyone could do; I just had to wait for the meds to arrive. The read-through continued as I lay under the conference table with someone else reading my parts. Every so often, Lorne would say, “Is Rachel OK down there?” No, I wasn’t. I couldn’t even respond. I was too busy squeezing the hell out of the doctor’s hand. After about two hours, I was able to get up again. I never had a problem since then. Until now. At Trader Joe’s.

  The only upside was that this time wasn’t nearly as bad as the time at SNL, but it was the same spot in my back. I walked home like an old lady, shuffling one foot in front of the other. I gingerly tried lying on the floor and stretching, willing the injury to go away. I had my big date on Saturday night (I can’t write that sentence without acknowledging it sounds totally like Marcia Brady). This was the first date I was actually excited about in … well, probably forever. The few formal dates I’d actually had were always blind dates set up by one of my mother’s friends, and, well, you can write that story yourself. People would convince me to go on these dates, against my better judgment. They’d say things like “You never knoooooow!… Sometimes these things take tiiiiiime!” I didn’t even need convincing this time and here I was, laid out like some old biddy from my mom’s aqua-aerobics class.