Official Book Club Selection (12 page)

He said, “Um, I just have one that I use for a bathmat and a towel.”

“What?” I said. “That thing on the floor? I’m supposed to pick it up and dry my body with it?”

“What’s the problem?”

Oh, Pig Pen.

Even though the general population didn’t know who Jack Black was at the time—this was when he and Kyle Gass’s folk/metal parody act Tenacious D was just starting out, when Bob Roberts was his biggest role—he did get mad at me because I talked about him onstage. When our brief fling ended, I got up at Un-Cabaret and did a bit about how Jack dumped me for Andy Dick, because they had started hanging out and became their own mutual admiration society about each other’s comedy. Well, even though there probably wasn’t a single guy I knew who I hadn’t gone up onstage and talked about, Jack and Andy were staring daggers at me after that set. I remember thinking, I don’t care. You broke up with me, Jack. And Andy, you’re probably high.

They got over it very quickly, and that was about the biggest dustup I ever had in those days pertaining to anything I said onstage. That’s because the crowds were small, the same two hundred people usually who were fans of the scene, and this was in the pre-blogging days, when what you said in your act didn’t necessarily go anywhere, and someone like me could really get away with murder. What I said just died on the vine. I could go up and talk about what Winona Ryder ate when Janeane took me to her house to watch John Cassavetes movies—she was really more of a food picker, I never saw her have a whole meal, that’s how she stays waif-y—and you certainly weren’t going to read about it the next day on Perezhilton. But Jack and Andy’s mini-snit probably foreshadowed how this kind of material might upset a famous person not accustomed to having their bullshit exposed. Not that I’m complaining here, but there’s something about the safety of a theater. See me live these days, and you will get a much more eyebrow-raising act than anything you’d hear me say on a talk show or The D-List. In other words, if your name is Clay Aiken, you probably don’t want to come to one of my stand-up shows. It may not go your way.

Nowadays when I see Jack, it’s on the red carpet, and it’s like high school all over again: as in he won’t say hi to me. Maybe not out of any choice on his part. I don’t think he’s trying to be rude. I get it; the guy’s a little busy these days. Huge movie star, wife and kids, the whole thing. Let’s face it, he’s an A-lister. I remember being at the Grammys and looking at him up on the podium as he presented an award and thinking, That’s so great. He’s a giant movie star now. It’s the transient nature of show business friendships and relationships. It’s a bittersweet thing.

There was a period when we all saw each other all the time. None of us had money to travel, but we could all hang out at someone’s house. Inevitably, though, I started to lose friends to fame. I learned a lot about what happens when someone goes from not being famous to being famous very quickly. Janeane got so hot, she wasn’t just well known: Girls wanted to be her and duplicate that Doc Martens-and-black-tights look of hers. I remember visiting Garofalo at one of the Chateau Marmont bungalows, and there were flowers everywhere from studio and network people. I was so happy for her, but also a little jealous. I wasn’t getting flowers, not even from donut fryers. I mean donut chefs.

I went from seeing Molly Shannon all the time at Dave Rath’s house, doing shows with her, to not seeing her for years after she got Saturday Night Live. I ran into Molly after her first year on the show. I was so happy to hear that she was having a great time. I distinctly remember her saying, “A year ago I was a hostess at Hugo’s restaurant. I can’t believe I get to do this now!”

That drift occurred with Cho, too. She had been doing Un-Cabaret and Hot Cup O’ Talk constantly, and then all of the sudden she got her own ABC show, All American Girl, and none of us saw her anymore. I remember one of our mutual girlfriends saying, “Well, she’s caught up in the machine now.”

“What machine?” I said.

“You’re on a television show,” she said, “so you’ve got to lose the weight, get a trainer, take fen-phen, and you can’t stay up till four in the morning because you’ve got to be at work at eight a.m. the next day.”

It happened to Lisa Kudrow, as well. We were never best friends, but we spent a lot of time together because of the Groundlings and often auditioned for the same parts in sitcoms. My favorite story about Lisa is that when I was hanging with her, she had long black hair and real boobs. She got a few guest spot gigs, like on Cheers, but she felt like she wasn’t getting any traction. So one day she said, “I’m gonna dye my hair blond, I’m gonna get a nose job, and I’m gonna get fake boobs.” (I remember after she got the boob job, she was playfully knocking on them one day, and this girl walked by and said, “You might as well enjoy ’em, you bought ’em.”)

Well, it helped change her career overnight. She got Mad About You right after that, and then Friends. Then her career just took off into the sky. I remember in the week or so after Friends premiered, we ran into each other at a mall. At Cinnabon, to be exact, a place Lisa referred to as “life-changing.” During our chat she said to me, “You know, I think this show is gonna actually end up being pretty good.” Well, if it had been a month later—after Friends hit the stratosphere—I doubt she’d have been able to be at that mall without a bodyguard. I remember thinking, I’m not going to see Lisa for five years now.

But then I started to get my own foothold in TV shows, from an HBO special to a few choice guest spots in well-known sitcoms, and I was finally on my way. I was only a few years away from becoming an overnight success.

George Clooney clearly has his hand on my ass, and Quentin Tarantino told him to put it there.

So my luck with television shows started to improve after I became a stand-up, and it was about time. Obviously, my dazzling network debut four years earlier—on an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air during its first season—hadn’t turned into the avalanche of offers I thought it would.

But Fresh Prince had been a pretty memorable experience. After doing student movies and training films—or “industrials”—for corporate entities, snagging a part on something that even my aunt Florence in Berwyn, Illinois, could watch was pretty exciting.

It was the fourth episode ever of Fresh Prince, and when I went to the table read of the script, the show hadn’t even begun airing yet. This was the fall of 1990. As you might imagine, my heart was racing at having a small guest role on what was promising to be a hit show. Will Smith wasn’t a big film star at that point, but he was still a giant figure in rap. Music legend Quincy Jones, who was there that day, was the executive producer, and then for some reason civil rights activist Andrew Young was also there. Holy shit, I thought. This is fucking big-time. This is not a normal gig. I’d better not trample on anyone’s civil rights today.

For those of you not in the biz, a table read is when the cast reads the script out loud for the first time, usually with all the writers and producers there as well. I had only a few lines, and I was trying to be casual by turning the page at the same time as everyone else, but all I wanted to do was flip to my page and read my part over and over. “Be in the moment, Kathy, you’re playing a character,” I had to tell myself.

And it was a real stretch, my character. I was the honky.

I remember looking at the writing staff, though, and seeing only one black guy. The two show runners were this white married couple, Andy and Susan Borowitz. What two New York, uptown Jews were doing writing a rap-themed show, I do not know. But I remember a couple of times during the read-through, Andy would say to Will, “Is that how you would say it?” Then Will would add some “flava.” The consultation and correcting of lines was much more hilarious than the script itself.

When it came to my first line, I got a laugh. What was weird was, it wasn’t a joke. And then when I read the joke line, I got a monster laugh. Believe me, not only was I not that funny, the line certainly wasn’t. But that’s when I first learned that table reads are notoriously uncomfortable situations because people laugh way too loud and way too often, especially writers responding to their own jokes.

Afterward, somebody asked the lead actors about their impressions of the script. This is the part I’ll never forget, it was so clichéd and genius about actors. Janet Hubert, who played the aunt to Will Smith’s character, said, “I think what’s lacking is a scene where Will and I sit down one on one and we talk about what Aunt Viv went through when she went to college.” Then the guy who played her husband said, “It seems to me there should be a scene where Will and his uncle go golfing to discuss things.” The girl who played their daughter said, “Shouldn’t there be a scene where Will and I go shopping?”

I’m listening to this thinking, So what each of you is saying is, the script would be better if only you were in it a lot more. They were all so unaware of how they sounded, too. I should have raised my hand and said, “I think the honky should talk more!”

Overall, though, my week on the set was a blast. I made friends with the woman who played the grandmother—a veteran actress by the name of Virginia Capers—with whom I shared a tiny dressing room. She would cook soul food and bring it every day, and I’d listen to her tell stories from her life in movies and television. Flavor Flav from Public Enemy showed up for no reason on the night we taped and got on the mike and the crowd went wild. There was a DJ, too, playing dance music as if it were a nightclub. As for Will, he didn’t have time for me all week, which was understandable, but he was a different person on show night, bonding with the actors right before performing with them. It was very smart. Before my scene with him, we were dancing together and chatting, and he was extremely charming. Even though he was new to television, he clearly had a sense of knowing when to turn it on and with whom.

I was a nobody when I did The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but by the time I filmed a guest spot on Ellen DeGeneres’s sitcom, Ellen, in the mid-’90s, I was a little more known—somewhat from stand-up, but mostly from that Kenwood commercial on which I droningly recited “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” which had become hugely popular.

The table read for Ellen was tense. She ran that room with an iron fist, and you could tell people were nervous around her. If she laughed, they laughed, and if she didn’t, nobody dared to. I remember I walked in, and Ellen seemed very friendly. She said, “Oh, you’re the girl from that commercial!”

I was really excited that she recognized me, and I sort of felt a little bit famous, so I had fun with it. “Why yes, that’s me!” I said.

Then in front of this whole room of actors, writers, producers, she commanded, “Do it.”

I remember thinking at that moment, Wow, the star just said “Jump,” and now it’s my “How high?” moment. I’m the chick who’s only going to be there four days, and it’s an intimidating room of writers, and now I’m the dancing monkey. It’s a power move, something only a celebrity or a corporate CEO would do. “You’re the girl from that commercial. DO IT.” It wasn’t mean, but I certainly learned how much the tone of a show is set by the star, and it was clear that she set up a pretty tough energy. By the way, I did it. I reenacted that commercial. And then, as the week went on, I of course started fucking one of the production assistants. I showed her.

When I did the NBC sitcom Mad About You, I remember Paul Reiser being very fun and friendly, and Helen Hunt being … not. Then again, she really seemed like she had one foot out the door. And when you look at that show, she really did do the heavy lifting. She’d win Emmys for that series because Paul Reiser had all the funny lines while she rocked the acting when they’d do “a very special episode” about how her character couldn’t get pregnant. So I got the impression that it had all gotten old for her, and that the show wasn’t her thing anymore. She wanted movies, and sure enough, she won an Oscar not too long after for As Good As It Gets.

Another abrasive star I encountered was Thomas Haden Church, whom I worked with when I did an episode of Ned & Stacey, the short-lived sitcom he starred in with Debra Messing. Tom was coming off the long-running TV sitcom Wings, on which he made a name for himself as the dim-bulb mechanic, and to this day, he is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and certainly one of the most talented sitcom actors I’ve ever watched work. I’ve never seen a sitcom actor improvise as much as he did, and his improvised lines were all funny. It didn’t surprise me at all that he went on to get an Oscar nomination years later for the film Sideways.

But Tom was extremely tough. He was hard on poor Debra Messing, because comedy didn’t come naturally to her. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very good at comedy, but she’s not a comedian. And he ran those writers ragged. I remember, at the end of the run-through, he had all the writers stand in a circle and he screamed at them. It was one of the first times I’d watched a star act in a temperamental way, but at the same time, I thought, You know, he’s right. I could see why people on that staff bitched about him, but he was funnier than his writers. I’ve never seen anybody since improvise on a sitcom like him. I’m sure his behavior is the reason he doesn’t have his own show now, but it got me thinking about how there’s got to be a way to voice those same concerns but not completely piss people off.

Tom was sexy and good-looking in an offbeat way, and what was cool about him was that he treated me like a peer, not a girl. I completely interpreted it as that situation where guys are nicer to the girl when she isn’t the hot chick. He just saw me as a human being—like a sister—and so it was “good ol’ Kath” and a punch in the arm. Guys like that are not flirting with me, but at least they’re not rude to me the way they might be to a girl who really turns them off. I’m in a solid middle category, where I’m safe enough to hang out with and joke with. I can keep up with these kinds of guys, and it’s nice.

George Clooney was like that, too, when I did a guest stint on ER. I was playing a scout leader with a troop of sick kids. I was nervous to be in a scene with him and Anthony Edwards. But the handsome Clooney immediately put me at ease, joking and being an all-around charmer.