The night of the date, I met him at the bar area of a large Spanish restaurant. There was no instant attraction on my part, but I was trying like hell to be a “regular person” who could get to know somebody slowly. We chatted about this and that, and about ten minutes in, I asked him about his job. He told me about being a freelance writer. He then said, “And my partner and I have a dog-walking business.” His … business partner, you ask? Nope! His gay husband partner. The guy is wearing a ring. He is married to a man. And I was on a date with him.
Now this story goes off in two branches. One branch is, I was pissed. This guy seemed straight to me, and I think of myself as having pretty finely tuned gaydar. He even fooled Ryan. Also, he had approached me right after that host announced to the audience, “She’s siiiinngle!” and asked me out. I guess this was the drawback of being in the public eye. This guy just wanted to meet someone who was on TV so he could say, “Hey, I’m hanging out with that girl from SNL tonight.” What other explanation was there? And why would I go out with a complete, gay stranger on a friend date? I have friends, not to mention my full posse of quality gay men friends whom I’ve met via legitimate means!
Here comes the other branch of the story, and this is why I said nothing to this guy on the “date” but hung in there for an hour before bolting from the area in defeat. Before I was in the public eye, which wasn’t until my early thirties, I had a great memory for people I met. I was never someone who forgot a name or a face. But an odd thing happens when you are on TV. People are used to seeing you night after night on their television. You are in their home. They’ve had a ton of practice at seeing your face. But the reverse isn’t true. Sometimes it happens that when I’ve met a stranger, they’ll see me again two years later and think I’m going to remember them from a ten-second introduction at a party, maybe because they’ve had years of seeing me on TV. After I saw this guy on the street and he gave me his card again, I was walking to the gym one morning a few days later, and a complete stranger passed me and said hello. In my head I was thinking, “Who the hell is this?” That’s another thing about being in the public eye; sometimes a person saying hi is just a stranger who recognizes you and is superfriendly. Other times, it’s a classmate of yours from high school. Usually, when a stranger says hi as if we are old buddies, my mind goes into superfast Rolodex mode and tries to sort out who the friendly person is. When this guy said hi, I came up blank.
“Hi,” I said, Rolodex spinning madly.
“This is my partner, Walt.”
“Hi,” I say to Walt, an extremely gay man.
“OK. Bye!”
Who was that? “It sort of looked like that guy who had asked me out,” went a fleeting thought in my mind that flitted immediately out again. I should have paid attention to that fleeting thought, because I discovered on the date that the gay man who had said hi a few days before on the street was indeed the same man with whom I was currently drinking sangria. So you see, by the time I went out with this guy, I did “know” my date was gay. I even met his partner! I had no recourse. I couldn’t say, “Why the hell did you ask me out, gay man!?” Because technically, right before this date, I had seen him on the street with his partner. I had some severe face blindness syndrome with this guy who, I still contend, looked like the quintessential New York Jewish dude.
This dating thing was doing nothing to improve my morale. I am no “star” in my own mind, yet allow me to use this word for the sake of argument. The only thing worse than going on a date with a starf****r is going on a date with a gay starf****r. With a gay starf****r, you can pretty much be sure there will be no f***ing.
My Pal, the Universe
Clearly, love was not happening. My career still wasn’t happening either. I did not want to fall into a k-hole about my life. I was determined to remain positive. I had learned my lesson after I ended my four-year stint on the mainstage at Second City in Chicago and moved to LA, where nothing happened in my career for the longest time. I felt really defeated about it. But after a year in LA, I landed the job on SNL. I was going to be wiser now. I wasn’t going to waste my precious time bumming out, because you never know when your break is coming. However, it was getting harder and harder to stay optimistic. So, next, I did what people do in dark times—I turned to religion. Well, I turned to spirituality. Well, I turned to … The Secret.
As in THE SECRET! As in that DVD and book that came out several years ago that temporarily made me feel I was invincible and the only thing holding me back from my own success was my own negative attitude. The Secret says that if you envision the life you want and live as if you already have all the good things you desire, the UNIVERSE will magically send all those good things to you. Have you ever tried The Secret? I know that believing in The Secret comes with some shame, but I am sure some of you ladies reading this have a vision board with pictures of engagement rings and babies, and a picture of Oprah so you can someday meet her, and it’s stuck behind your dresser in case a guy were ever to come over, see it, and run screaming in terror from your bedroom.
I can tell you from my experience with The Secret that there are two phases. The first is Secret Euphoria. You are the master of your own destiny and can bring whatever you want into your life. You place your order with the Universe, and the Universe delivers everything back that you’ve requested in a neat bow and in a timely fashion. You try it a bit and you know what? It kind of works. Well, at least it did for me. I had first encountered The Secret a few years prior, and to try it out, I decided I wanted a part in a movie and I wrote it down. The Secret says to aim as high as you possibly can, so I decided to up the ante—a role in a movie in a cool foreign land. Yes. I actually wrote it down.
No joke, six months later, I was headed off to Spain and Greece to shoot a comedy with Nia Vardalos. The amazing thing about me getting my wish was that it’s very rare for comedies to shoot in amazing foreign locales. Big dramas or war movies, yes, but comedies can usually be shot right at home. So I did think maybe there was something to this Secret thing.
But as anyone who has done The Secret knows, Secret Euphoria is followed by another phase, which I refer to as Secret Crashout. This is the phase when you look at your list and you look at your life and you realize you still don’t have a boyfriend or a million dollars or an organized apartment. It’s the “Let me get this straight, Universe, you’re telling me I DON’T have magical powers?” phase. Hence the term Secret Crashout.
I needed a reboot. I needed to get back on track. I just needed to believe again. Well, the DVD says to start small by asking the Universe for something simple, to prove you’ve got your mojo. It suggests a cup of coffee. In Secretland, that means you envision yourself getting a cup of coffee, a free cup of coffee that just happens into your life merely because you focused on the positive vision in your mind and therefore start vibrating on the frequency that attracts this free cup of coffee. I didn’t want to ask for the cup of coffee. That felt too unoriginal, since it’s the example they use in the DVD. What could I ask for that could give me a sign? How about a flower? That’s simple. I asked for a flower.
Two short days later, I am performing the works of Spalding Gray, Stories Left to Tell, as a guest (they had a guest actor sit in every week). I didn’t have any friends coming until later in the week, but when I arrived in the dressing room, there on my table was not merely one single flower but three bouquets of gorgeous flowers arranged on the dressing table for me. I looked at my bounty of flowers and gave a sly singsongy wink to the heavens. “Universe! You sly devil!” I thought. Mind you, these flowers were from members of the cast I barely even knew. It was way above and beyond the call of thespian courtesy that there would be flowers from mere acquaintances raining down upon me.
I asked for a flower and I got a whole bunch of flowers in return. Yup, everything was going my way. The Universe was back! Back to being my own magical genie.
When I got home, I started to arrange my new flowers. The bottoms of the stem
s were bound with rubber bands. This is standard NYC-deli flower practice. I got some scissors and cut the first rubber band. SNAP! The rubber band flung off the stem quicker than the blink of an eye. I can tell you with great certainty that it happened literally quicker than the blink of an eye because before I could blink my eye, that rubber band had smacked my eyeball like a slingshot. OWW! Aghh! Owwww!
The irony occurred to me instantly. While still smarting and futilely rubbing my eye, I was thinking in my you-merry-prankster tone, “U-niverse! Why are you doing this to me? All I wanted was a flower and you gave me a whole bunch of flowers. Why you gotta go and wreck it, Universe?”
The next morning, I woke up and, to my surprise, my eye still really hurt. Now I had to go to the eye doctor. There goes my whole afternoon. Just because I asked for that damn flower. The eye doctor told me that it was a good thing I came in, because I had a severe irritation on my eye. He actually had to prescribe me some drops.
“You’d be surprised how often we see this injury in New York,” he told me.
The deli-flowers-rubber-band-eye-snap thing. Beware.
I was walking home from the subway, having spent my entire afternoon tending to my odd karmic injury. I’d better start over again, I thought to myself. Clean slate. I wondered what else I could ask for to get back on The Secret train.
I popped into the Starbucks on my corner and ordered a nonfat latte. As I went to the counter to retrieve my order, the Starbucks employee (no, I am not going to use the word barista) handed me my coffee.
“Hey!” he told me. “When I saw you come in, I made you an iced latte ’cause that’s what you usually get. So I already made you an iced latte too. Do you want it? We’re just gonna throw it away.”
Ta-da! The cup of coffee! THE CUP OF COFFEE! From the DVD! After all of my magical thinking, here it was, the thing right from the video that was somehow supposed to represent all of the abundance of life. I walked down the block with my prescription eyedrops in my purse and two coffees in hand and looked skyward. “U-niveeeeerrrse!!”
I Left My Heart
(and Dignity) in Sacramento
Before I started my mini-dating tear, it had been three years since I had been in a relationship. That relationship ended in Sacramento.
My fourth summer of SNL, I was offered a role in an indie movie, to play the “best friend” role. This was my only foray into the best-friend role because this was a low-budget indie movie, not a big studio venture. In this movie, the leading lady was going to be Estella Warren, the really hot chick from the Planet of the Apes remake from 2001.
I was to play her lesbian roommate.
“OK,” I said to my agent, “I think I should do this, but I do have one question.”
“What’s that?”
“In what universe would Estella Warren and I be best friends?”
By this I only meant that I am about fifteen years older than her, and let’s face it, when you put us side by side, you don’t really think, “Ah, two peas in a pod! There’s ham ’n’ cheese! Peanut butter and jelly! And Dratch ’n’ Warren!” But this was my chance to play more than a secretary who pops in for a few laughs and is not seen for the rest of the movie…. This could bump me up to that coveted “wacky friend” status!
I arrived for the shoot, which for my part would take two weeks, in Sacramento.
I’m sure there are lovely parts of Sacramento. I was exposed only to the Hyatt Hotel and its two-block radius. From this viewpoint, Sacramento is the most white-bread town in the country.
Something went wrong on this movie shoot, in either my life or the shoot itself, or both at the same time, pretty much every day.
Let’s start with this: Probably the second day of shooting, I was in my trailer bathroom peeing. I heard a knock on the outside of the trailer door. I feebly tried to shout that I was in the bathroom, but there was no way someone would hear that through two doors. The knock happened again. I ignored it. Next thing I knew, as I was standing up from the toilet, the door swung open to reveal the college kid production assistant who was there to empty a trash can or something. I screamed. This kid had opened the door at the peak moment of full bush exposure. This is the kid who, the day before, had driven me back to the hotel, a drive wherein you make chitchat like “So, where ya from?” and now he had seen me rising from a toilet with my pants at my knees. “Sorry,” he blurted out, and bolted from the scene. (I realize this is the second frontal-exposure tale I have shared thus far. In spite of the Rule of Threes, I promise it is the last.) I was surprisingly annoyed. So know that for the rest of the shoot, I was skulking around, trying to avoid this particular kid. Was I cool about it? No, I was not. When I saw him later, did I have a good chuckle about the fact that he had just seen m’bush? No siree. I chose avoidance. This entailed my peering around, like Harriet the Spy, over at the lunch tables when it was time to eat. I was a refugee on my own set in Sacramento.
The director of this movie was Charlie Matthau, son of the late Walter Matthau. Charlie was very friendly, earnest, a bit of a goofball, and he looked just like a young lanky version of his dad.
When I was shooting this film, I was in a relationship with Addict #3 and it was severely on the rocks. I was in complete denial about this relationship. It had probably been over about three months in, though by now we had been together for around a year. But all his “I need my alone time” and “I’m just a guy who likes space” and “Work is the most important thing to me” were not taken as clues by me that this relationship would in no way be a self-esteem builder. So one night during this shoot, I was on the phone with this gentleman and I was getting the picture that I was barely going to see him for the rest of the summer and this did not seem to affect him very much. He was throwing all sorts of trips, jobs, and travels my way, of which I was no part. As the conversation progressed, I was seeing that this thing weren’t goin’ nowhere. We basically broke up right there on the phone. I was devastated. Really? This was happening on the phone? In Sacramento?
The next morning, I reported to the set in a sea of self-pity and depression. I must say, though, you would not know it to look at me. I didn’t know anyone on this set, and I wasn’t about to pour out the situation to a stranger. So there we were, on the set of this café (I was a coffeeshop owner instead of a secretary!), about to shoot the scene. Suddenly, a wail rose up from I don’t know where. A mournful, keening, horrid cry. I looked around. It was Estella Warren. Out of nowhere, she had broken down into a heap of tears. Granted, this is how I was feeling on the inside, and here it was, all my emotions pouring out of the very full-lipped, Maxim mouth of Estella Warren. You see, when I was in the makeup chair that morning, she had casually mentioned that she had failed to connect on the phone with her boyfriend, who lived in LA, at the appointed time the night before. She was talking about it pretty lightheartedly in the makeup chair, like it wasn’t a huge deal. I don’t know what happened between then and now, an hour later. Maybe the ramifications of the lovers’ spat were hitting her hard. Who knows—maybe there was more going on than just the phone call. I’m really not trying to bust on her, the peanut butter to my jelly, but I was thinking about my situation and that I REALLY had something to cry about. I had just been straight-up dumped on the phone the night before.
Charlie was all too happy to come to this beautiful girl’s rescue. He sat next to her on the bench while she sobbed and wailed, a young Walter Matthau next to the Planet of the Apes girl, arm around her and speaking to her in hushed, comforting tones. The crew scattered. “Everyone off the set!” What the hell? I was the one who should have been laid out on the floor! I had real problems! OK. I went off to my trailer. There I sat, listening to “Nothing Compares 2 U” on steady rotation. I’m not proud to share this fact. If I could have talked to my dumped self with my current wisdom, I would have said, “Turn off that damn song! U R 2 good for this, and he is not the guy 4 U!” but back then I just pressed PLAY for the thirtieth time. I assumed shooting had resu
med and I’d be called back in when they needed me. Four hours later, a knock came on the trailer door. “They’re ready for you.” I went back to the set to learn that nothing had been shot since the morning meltdown. This was a low-budget movie, where every second counts and there’s no time or money to spare. But that’s the difference between being the beautiful starlet and the best-friend lesbian coffeeshop owner. The starlet shuts down production for four hours, and the best friend listens to Sinéad O’Connor ad nauseum. Maybe we should have joined forces. For all I know, she may have spent her four hours listening to Sinéad O’Connor too. Dratch ’n’ Warren!
This shoot continued with me living in a backdrop of misery. My heart? Broken. My genitals? Viewed. Yes, I was still trying to skillfully avoid College Boy. Well, there was still the work to get me through this, right? The COMEDY?
I failed to mention yet that the plot of the movie involved hottie Estella Warren being a virgin and choosing to which man she would give up her virginity…. Yup.
We were filming my last scene. I’ve been a very stereotypical man-hating lesbian throughout this whole film. My character had been married to a man in her past. In the last scene, I have a talk with my best friend and roommate Estella Warren. I had talked to my ex-husband, whom I haven’t spoken to for two years.
“Joe called,” I say.
“What’d he say?”
“He apologized for driving his truck into the lake. He said he’s lonely. “
“Aw, he misses you.”
“No, he misses his truck.”
We have a little laugh. It was sort of the only grounded moment my character had, with a little joke thrown in for good measure. I was glad to be justifying all my crazy man-hating lines. Right before we were about to shoot, Charlie Matthau came up to me with an excited grin on his face. “Hey! The name Joe isn’t funny. So how ’bout if you change it to Abdul!?” He was tickled pink by this idea. “What?” I said. This guy can’t be serious. This is the first time you are hearing the name of my ex-husband. It’s one of my last scenes. It’s a semi-serious moment. Oh, and it’s a year after 9/11, when, I hate to say, the only times you were hearing names like Abdul were in connection with terrorism stories on the news. “Why?” “’Cause it’s funny!” Now, at that point I should have just said, “No. I’m not doing that.” That would have been a page out of the Amy Poehler handbook. She is excellent at shutting people down when she knows better. Not so with myself, back then. “I really don’t want to say Abdul.” Back and forth we went. “How ’bout Mohammed!?” I can’t stress enough how positively deeelighted he was about throwing an unusual, or “funny,” name into this scene. Back and forth we went again. I was NOT getting this joke. “How about Ali?” I said, offering up a name to appease this sudden Arab jones he had. For some reason, the name Ali didn’t sound as punchline-y-we-are-trying-to-insert-a-wacky-name-here to me. We did one take in which I said Ali. Charlie appeared with a new grin and a brand-new idea. “I got it!” he said. “Say Shaquille.” I was dumbfounded. I was frantically searching the set for the writer. “So the audience thinks I was married to Shaquille O’Neal?” “Say it!! Ha-HAAA! Say Shaquille.” “I’m not saying Shaquille.” I looked to cameramen, to Estella. No one was batting an eye. Where was that damn writer? Then came the most ridiculous suggestion of all. Mind you, I was still fine with JOE. “I got it! I got it! … Say … O.J.!” So my scene would go “Well. I talked to O.J…. He said he misses me.” “So…,” I said to Charlie while wanting to be ejector-seated off this set and out of Sacramento. “So … the audience thinks I was married to O. J. Simpson.” “There could be other O.J.’s!” he said through a new round of boyish giggles. “No one is going to think of the ‘other’ O.J.’s!” Again, why didn’t I just take control Poehler-style and say, “We’re saying Joe. That’s it. Roll cameras.” I have no idea! I was trying to bring some integrity to this character, I suppose, and do a good job at playing the best-friend role, but I was at my wit’s end. I said, sarcastically and somewhat under my breath, “Why don’t we just say Adolf?” “What?” he says. “I said, why don’t we just say Adolf?” trying to make him see how crazy his suggestions were. Slight pause. “THAT’S PERFECT! YES! SAY ADOLF!” At this point, I think I simply left my body. At this point, my attempt at biting wit was going to be worked right into the script. At this point, also, I had lost the fight in me. I had gone through Abdul, Mohammed, Shaquille, and O.J., and I happened to check out of the entire process on the name Adolf. So as far as I know (for I have never seen the finished product), in the final cut of the movie, I say, “Well, Adolf called!”
Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle Page 9