Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

by Mindy Kaling

  The show was short enough that we could do two shows a night. That in itself was challenging, because in the play, the twenty-one-year-old Ben tries to impress Matt by chugging an entire twelve-ounce bottle of apple juice in one gulp. So I actually gulped two bottles a night, though the apple juice was diluted. As I’ve written about in great detail in this book, I’m no dainty girl, but I’m a not a camel, either, and doing that twice in one evening was pretty nauseating.

  Word of mouth from the Fringe helped sales. Nicole Kidman and Steve Martin coincidentally came to see the show on the same night, and before long the show was selling out so much that we had to add a third performance a night. This meant three bottles of diluted apple juice. By the third curtain call of the night I had to consciously tell myself not to barf when we took our bows. I have never been so excited to hold back vomit.

  BLOODSHED

  On the night that Bruce Weber of the New York Times was reviewing the show, I accidentally punched Brenda in the face and broke her nose.

  How does one accidentally fracture the face of one’s best friend? Well, in my defense, there is a fight sequence in the play. It happens toward the very end. Matt has been so antagonized by Ben’s immaturity that he tells him he has no talent. Ben, in the heat of the moment, punches Matt. It was a choreographed punch that we had worked on for weeks. But, I don’t know, maybe I was drunk on apple juice, because my fist connected with her nose. It made a funny little cracking noise, which, I should probably note that Brenda did not immediately recognize as funny. That’s because Brenda was too busy bleeding. Her shirt was instantly soaked with blood. Noses, for the record, bleed like crazy. It looked like I had stabbed her in the face. The audience collectively gasped; there was a long beat of confused silence during which Bren looked at the blood on her hand and then up at me. Then the house manager turned on the lights, and Brenda ran offstage.

  Brenda held paper towels to her bleeding face, and I stood by her dumbly, completely in shock at what I had done. Our director David Warren appeared backstage moments later. He walked over to us briskly, with the imperturbable cool of a soldier who dismantles explosives for a living: “You have to finish. The show must go on. Go.” There was no pussyfooting or assessing our comfort levels. We just had to do it. I had never heard anyone say the phrase “the show must go on” in the literal sense.

  Brenda wrapped a makeshift bandage around her nose and valiantly went back onstage. We finished the last ten minutes of the play, took a bow to a standing ovation from an impressed, if horrified crowd, then jumped in a cab and headed to the emergency room of St. Vincent’s. Bren’s nose was officially broken. Years later, she acquiesced, it took her a weekend to not be mad at me anymore, but I think it was actually a full week before she forgave me. I don’t blame her, though, Bren had a perfect nose. It’s still pretty perfect, but now it has a tiny bump in it, which she good-naturedly pretends she likes. I guess the lesson is that if you’re going to punch someone in the face, your best bet is to punch your best friend. Counterintuitive, I know.

  Bruce Weber gave us a great review in the Times and also a separate little write-up about the nose incident. The publicity drove sales even more. People were curious about this weird, sixty-minute East Village play starring cross-dressers, during which at any moment physical violence might erupt. Great press from Rolling Stone and Time gave the producers confidence that the show could move to Los Angeles. So while there was a production going on at P.S. 122, we started another one in L.A.

  EMOTIONAL BLOODSHED

  Matt & Ben was invited to the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, in Aspen, which was a big deal, because HBO sponsored the festival and the place was full of powerful Hollywood execs. Only later I would realize that someone wasn’t powerful simply because they had the title of “exec” and a company had paid for him to travel. Actually, the fact that he could be shipped away from Los Angeles for a week meant he was less powerful.

  Aspen looked the way I had always imagined Switzerland to be, down to the beautiful blonde women walking around in shearling coats with fur pom-poms. Aspen is one of those places that looks rustic but where everything is actually sickeningly expensive. This was on a whole other level from New York, which was just plain old grossly expensive. Aspen was so expensive I was surprised it wasn’t entirely populated with the children of Middle Eastern oil moguls. We were put up at a Days Inn–style motel on the edge of town, but made the smart decision, upon waking up in the morning, of moving our hang-out time to the lobbies of the fanciest hotels. One day, we snuck into the gym at the St. Regis and did the elliptical machines for twenty exhilarating, frightening minutes.

  How do I say that audiences in Aspen completely hated our show without you thinking I’m exaggerating? They hated the show. This was a festival designed for stand-up comedy and sketches, and we were the only play, which made us the longest show by a good thirty minutes. Even worse, we were in an auditorium so huge it could’ve doubled as a venue to announce the NFL draft. What worked so well in the intimacy of an Off-Broadway black box theater lost its charm in this cavernous space. It was like staging a flea circus at the Rose Bowl. Though, come to think of it, “flea circus” probably better describes the attention span of our audiences. People kept getting up to leave in the middle of the play. We’d hear the door open, light would stream in, and then we’d hear the conversation the leavers would have with the people waiting in line for the act scheduled to follow us. When is this going to be over? How much longer? There’s supposed to be a sketch show in this venue about guys playing with their testicles after this!

  FAILING UPWARD

  I’ll chalk it up to good agenting that Marc Provissiero, our agent, was able to parlay Matt & Ben into a pilot deal. Marc was passionate, young, and did charming things like disappear to Costa Rica and send us bottles of hot sauce in the mail. He could also switch from making small talk to becoming fiercely intense about our careers, making unwavering eye contact with his blue eyes. He’s the kind of guy you could see successfully carrying off an Aaron Sorkin monologue in real life. If he ever quits show business he could be a leader of a successful cult. It goes without saying he was a killer agent.

  Our pilot, based on our lives in Brooklyn, was set up at a network that no longer exists, which I will call SHT. It was called Mindy & Brenda. It was supposed to be Laverne & Shirley but sexier, I guess. Or like Mork & Mindy, replacing the alien character with Brenda as a sensible earthling.

  We had a group of producers for the project, a few of whom I still think of with great affection. One was the legendary Tom Werner, who produced The Cosby Show and Roseanne. Tom would mention offhandedly that he’d caught a great baseball game the night before, and we’d later realize he was talking about sitting in his box at Fenway Park watching the Boston Red Sox, the Major League Baseball team he owned. I liked Tom a lot because he never got flustered or anxious, ever. We could burst into his office with Nancy Grace–level anger over a network note, and Tom would sit back in his chair and distract us with a great anecdote about Bill Cosby. He was our wise, tan, and detached uncle.

  When we wrote the show, we assumed that we would be playing the parts of Mindy and Brenda. This turned out to be a misguided assumption, because SHT had no intention of ever allowing that. We were told we would have to audition for the parts of Mindy and Brenda. Mindy and Brenda. I don’t know why we were surprised. SHT at this time was a network known largely for casting models to act in television programs and hoping audiences would enjoy good-looking people saying lines they had learned phonetically. If I sound bitter, it’s because I am still a little bitter. Who wouldn’t be?

  If you were ever considering sitting in a room with a group of actresses who bear a passing resemblance to you but are much, much thinner and more conventionally attractive, don’t do it. You might think it has value as an anthropological exercise but it doesn’t. I was sitting in an audition room with a bunch of girls who were the “after” picture to my “before.” My audition for
Bombay Dreams was Christmas morning compared to this. This was how I found out that I could convincingly play Ben Affleck but not Mindy Kaling.

  The network cast two stunningly pretty and perfectly sweet actresses. By the time we shot the pilot, though, the script made little sense. It had suffered from the daily changes made by SHT execs who put too much stock in “what is cool now?” Being “zeitgeisty” was the biggest criterion for the show. Being funny as maybe fifth important, after wardrobe choices, hair styling, cross-promotional opportunities with advertisers, and edgy sound effects. By the time we shot the script, Mindy & Brenda bore no resemblance to us, figuratively or literally. I believe in the shooting draft they were both fashion bloggers who worked at a cupcake bakery and were constantly referring to their iPods. (This was 2004, when iPods were the white-hot reference.) I’m not proud of that script.

  The pilot didn’t get picked up, my agents were disappointed, and I was very, very happy. I’d had so little Hollywood experience that I wasn’t smart enough to know that this was a big career setback. I was just relieved that that show wouldn’t go forward with my name on it. The only other thing I had keeping me in Los Angeles was that I’d been hired as a staff writer for six episodes of a mid-season NBC show that was the remake of a British show called The Office.*

  *Notice how I laid in all that dramatic irony here? Like in Titanic, when Kate Winslet’s character loved those weird paintings by a little-known artist named Picasso? And in the audience of the theater you were laughing to yourself because you knew Picasso turned out to be kind of a big deal? I’m trying to tell you that I’m Picasso.

  Hollywood: My Good Friend Who Is Also a Little Embarrassing

  Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real

  WHEN I WAS a kid, Christmas vacation meant renting VHS copies of romantic comedies from Blockbuster and watching them with my parents at home. Sleepless in Seattle was big, and so was When Harry Met Sally. I laughed along with everyone else at the scene where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm at the restaurant without even knowing what an orgasm was. In my mind, she was just being kind of loud and silly at a diner, and that was hilarious enough for me.

  I love romantic comedies. I feel almost sheepish writing that, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years or so that admitting you like these movies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from watching them.

  I enjoy watching people fall in love on-screen so much that I can suspend my disbelief for the contrived situations that only happen in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the normal lead guy, say, slips and falls right on top of the hideously expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron is on her. I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. Then I just lap it up. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character. They’re all participating in the same level of made-up awesomeness, and I enjoy every second of it.

  So it makes sense that in this world there are many specimens of women who I do not think exist in real life, like Vulcans or UFO people or whatever. They are:

  THE KLUTZ

  When a beautiful actress is in a movie, executives wrack their brains to find some kind of flaw in her that still allows her to be palatable. She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would want to see that? A not 100-percent-perfect-looking-in-every-way female? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours.

  So they make her a Klutz.

  The 100-percent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way, except that she constantly falls down. She bonks her head on things. She trips and falls and spills soup on her affable date. (Josh Lucas. Is that his name? I know it’s two first names. Josh George? Brad Mike? Fred Tom? Yes, it’s Fred Tom.) Our Klutz clangs into Stop signs while riding a bike, and knocks over giant displays of expensive fine china. Despite being five foot nine and weighing 110 pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway.

  THE ETHEREAL WEIRDO

  The smart and funny writer Nathan Rabin coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl to describe a version of this archetype after seeing Kirsten Dunst in the movie Elizabethtown. This girl can’t be pinned down and may or may not show up when you make concrete plans. She wears gauzy blouses and braids. She decides to dance in the rain and weeps uncontrollably if she sees a sign for a missing dog or cat. She spins a globe, places her finger on a random spot, and decides to move there. This ethereal weirdo abounds in movies, but nowhere else. If she were from real life, people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her, but she is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring, he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and pull him out of himself by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.

  THE WOMAN WHO IS OBSESSED WITH HER CAREER AND IS NO FUN AT ALL

  I, Mindy Kaling, basically have two full-time jobs. I regularly work sixteen hours a day. But like most of the other people I know who are similarly busy, I think I’m a pleasant, pretty normal person. I am slightly offended by the way busy working women my age are presented in film. I’m not, like, always barking orders into my hands-free phone device and telling people constantly, “I have no time for this!” I didn’t completely forget how to be nice or feminine because I have a career. Also, since when does having a job necessitate women having their hair pulled back in a severe, tight bun? Often this uptight woman has to “re-learn” how to seduce a man because her estrogen leaked out of her from leading so many board meetings, and she has to do all sorts of crazy, unnecessary crap, like eat a hot dog in a libidinous way or something. Having a challenging job in movies means the compassionate, warm, or sexy side of your brain has fallen out.

  THE FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD MALE LEAD

  I am so accustomed to the young mom phenomenon, that when I saw the poster for The Proposal I wondered for a second if the proposal in the movie was Ryan Reynolds suggesting he send his mother, Sandra Bullock, to an old-age home.

  However, given the popularity of teen moms right now, this could actually be the wave of the future.

  THE SASSY BEST FRIEND

  You know that really horny and hilarious best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? Okay, that’s this person.

  THE SKINNY WOMAN WHO IS BEAUTIFUL AND TONED BUT ALSO GLUTTONOUS AND DISGUSTING

  Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief during a romantic comedy for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like in It’s Complicated is worth five Diane Keatons being caught half-clad in a topiary or whatever situation her character has found herself in.

  But sometimes even my suspended disbelief isn’t enough. I am speaking of the gorgeous and skinny heroine who is also a disgusting pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie—her parents, her friends, her boss—are all complicit in this huge lie. They are constantly telling her to stop eating and being such a glutton. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who so clearly lost weight to play the likable lead, has to say things like “Shut up you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!” If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.

  You wonder, as you sit and watch this movie, what the characters would do if they were confronted by an actual average American woman. They would all kill themselves, which would actually be kind of an interesting movie.

  THE WOMAN WHO
WORKS IN AN ART GALLERY

  How many freakin’ art galleries are out there? Are people constantly buying visual art or something? This posh-smart-classy job is a favorite in movies. It’s in the same realm as kindergarten teacher in terms of accessibility: guys don’t really get it, but the trappings of it are likable and nonthreatening.

  ART GALLERY WOMAN: Dust off the Rothko. We have an important buyer coming into town and this is a really big deal for my career. I have no time for this!

  This is one of the rare clichés that actually has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing. “He’s really successful—he’s an…

  (say it with me)

  …architect!”

  There are like nine people in the entire world who are architects, and one of them is my dad. None of them looks like Patrick Dempsey.

  All About The Office