Romantic Comedy, page 4
Hunched over the couch at such an angle that my sitting up had brought our faces within a few inches of each other was Noah Brewster.
“Sorry,” he said again. Even in my disoriented state, I noted that he looked, in his cheesily handsome surfer way, uncomfortable. Though I was accustomed to being awakened by random people in an office in the middle of the night, perhaps he was not accustomed to waking people in this fashion.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Well, Bob O’Leary suggested—should I give you a minute? I can come back.”
“Now is good.” I wiped the back of one hand across my mouth in case I’d drooled in my sleep, which it felt like I had.
“Bob said you’d be the best person to help with the sketch I’ve been working on.” Bob O’Leary was a longtime supervising producer at TNO, one of the many magicians who had been there since the beginning and made the show run, while remaining almost totally unknown to the public. Noah was no longer leaning toward me—he was standing straight up—and I noticed then that he was holding a few papers.
I pointed at them. “Is that the sketch?”
“Seriously, though, if you need a minute—”
“I’ll read it now.” I extended my arm, and when he passed me the script, I swung my feet off the couch. I gestured toward the couch’s other end. “You can sit. This is the idea you mentioned at the pitch meeting?”
He nodded as he sat. “Should I tell you what it is or just let you read it?”
“Let me read it.”
I grabbed a blue ballpoint pen and pulled a two-month-old issue of The Atlantic off the windowsill to use as a surface to write against, and began reading. I was dimly aware of Noah Brewster a few feet away from me, scrolling on his phone. It would have been a lie to claim I didn’t feel some vestigial stress about keeping a huge celebrity waiting. I still often recalled an observation made by a writer named Elise with whom I’d overlapped for my first two years, which was that when we nonfamous people talked to famous people, we wanted the encounter to be finished as soon as possible so that we could go describe it to our nonfamous friends. But my stress was mostly offset by the knowledge that I was keeping Noah Brewster waiting for his benefit. The overriding goals of any episode of TNO were to entertain and to make the host look good; a genuinely funny or endearing host could reap the benefits in terms of public perception for years.
The sketch was seven pages, set in a dance studio, and featured a musician meeting with a choreographer in the presence of two record label executives, an agent, a manager, and a videographer. The choreographer was saying things like “When you do rainbow arms, the people sitting all the way in the back will feel your passion” and “A retrograde will bring closure to the song in your heart.” In reply, the nameless musician was saying things like “But I’m a singer-songwriter. I’m not a member of Cirque du Soleil.” In the ten minutes it took me to read, I marked the script in a few places, though more gently than I would have for a cast member or fellow writer’s work. About two-thirds of the third page achieved nothing and could easily be cut, but instead of drawing a blue line through that section, I made a question mark in the margin next to it. On page four, when the choreographer asked the musician if he’d ever considered incorporating some kind of panther into his show, I laughed out loud.
After I’d finished, Noah Brewster and I made eye contact, and I said, “Is this based on personal experience?”
“It’s been a while, but when I first started playing arenas, the record label had me work with a choreographer who had a lot of ridiculous suggestions. Her ideas made sense from a visual standpoint, in terms of the size of arenas, but they were really influenced by the boy band craze and completely off for me personally. Just all these very melodramatic hand gestures and pauses.”
“Your script is actually in pretty good shape, although I think it can be tightened. Do you want me to give you feedback and you go work on it or we can revise it together now?”
“I’d love to get your help revising. Bob said you’re a genius with structure.”
“Ha,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s a euphemism for being more hardworking than funny. Can you email me the version I just read?” I stood, stepped toward the desks, and pulled over Danny’s chair so it was next to mine.
As I took a seat in my chair, Noah sat in Danny’s. He was tapping his phone, and he said, “What’s your email?”
I gave him my address and asked, “How long have you been working on this?”
He smiled. “I’m tempted to pretend I started it earlier today, but at least a few weeks. Whenever it was that I got the confirmation I’d be hosting.”
“There’s no shame in preparation. Obviously, a lot of stuff here happens on the fly, but sometimes a sketch that ends up being a big hit is something the writer was pitching week in and week out for an entire season.” After I hit the return key on my keyboard to bring the monitor to life, my open email account came into view. At the top of the inbox was an article my stepdad had forwarded with the headline as the subject: Daily Garbanzo Beans, Other Legumes Lower Bad Cholesterol. Just under that was an email from Henrietta, related to a sketch she wanted us to write together and filled with links, that had as its subject line Batshit evangelical mom influencers. Though it felt weirdly intimate to expose my inbox to Noah, the wall behind the computer monitor made me even more self-conscious. I’d taped two photos there, the first of which was of me and Hillary Clinton in December 2015, taken in her TNO dressing room before she’d appeared in a sketch I’d written. The other was of my mother holding me as a baby in early 1982, my mother wearing a buttonless denim vest over a yellow blouse and me wearing a yellow onesie. Between the photos I’d taped a rumpled piece of printer paper with two columns. In the first column, handwritten by me, were the words boner, balls, dick, cock, blow, golden shower, manhood, hand job, suck, prick, beat off. In the other column were the words pussy, tits, titties, eat out, nipples, finger, hairy vagina, vagina, vulva, pink, wet, queef, cervix, fist. Next to pink were parentheses with three exclamation points inside them and next to cervix were parentheses with eight exclamation points. As Noah’s email appeared in my inbox, and I downloaded and opened the file, he remarked on none of this.
I said, “Your attachment isn’t going to give me an STI, is it?”
He laughed. “I hope not.”
“Okay.” On my desk, in the space between the monitor and the keyboard, were my almost-empty coffee cup from the afternoon and about two dozen hair elastics. I lifted an elastic and looped my hair into a bun. “You actually have all the ingredients you need, but they’re not in quite the right order. And it’s kind of subtle in places, but, because of the sketch’s physicality, it can be more slapstick. Does that make sense?”
“It does.”
“Also, I’m sure setting it in a dance studio is realistic, but it’ll confuse the audience. It should be set in the stadium where the musician is performing. So you collapse space and time for the sake of clarity.”
“Got it.”
“Another thing for clarity, and this would kill a few birds with one stone, is we could start with a title card that gives the date and place. Wait, what if the musician is explicitly your younger self? And wardrobe can come up with some awesome early-two-thousands clothes? So the title card says Madison Square Garden, May 2001, or whenever your first album was really exploding—when was that?”
“The album was released in May 2001.”
I’d already typed Madison Square Garden, and I glanced at him. “I’ll email the document back to you afterward, and obviously you can change any wording that you don’t like.”
“Go for it. Please.”
I added May 2001. “The other characters will address you by name, so the audience immediately knows it’s you. But the next issue is there are too many characters. Do you think anyone serves a purpose here besides you and the choreographer?”
“Isn’t it important for the record label execs to be there? To show that these are directives coming from above and the musician—well, me—can’t just shrug them off?”
“True. Maybe we should even play that up.” The current first line was from the choreographer, who said, “I want to give you some ideas to jazz up your dance moves onstage.” Above it, I inserted an executive saying Noah, we’ve summoned you here because we at your record label are getting feedback that your live shows lack excitement, and we think some cutting-edge choreography will really enhance the audience’s experience.
“It’s ridiculously obvious,” I said, “but, unless there’s a payoff for withholding the premise, you might as well give it as fast as possible.”
“What if the guy is like, ‘According to some focus groups…’ ”
“Oh, that’s even better,” I said. “How about ‘According to focus groups held with one hundred twelve-to-fifteen-year-old girls residing in four mid-Atlantic states…’ ”
He laughed, and I retyped the sentence.
We both were quiet, and after a few seconds, I said, “ ‘We’re concerned that the girls sitting up in the nosebleed section aren’t sufficiently receiving your soulful emotions.’ ”
“ ‘And this could affect your long-term sales,’ ” Noah added, and I typed both parts.
“ ‘So the world-famous choreographer’—we need to give her a silly name—‘is here to offer her expertise.’ Hmm. Lulu von Floppy Bosoms?”
Again, he laughed in that light way. “Sure.”
“Just FYI, some stuff that reads on the page as only mildly funny is automatically ten times better when the cast is acting it out. Okay, now we can cut everyone other than the record label guys, you, and Lulu. The celebrity entourage clutters up the sketch because they aren’t really what it’s about. So we give everyone else’s dialogue to the execs, but you pick who plays the parts, and their names go in the script, not the characters’ names. Who do you want to be Lulu and who do you want to be the executives?”
“Shouldn’t I ask people if they’re interested before assigning them a role? I don’t want to be presumptuous.”
I laughed. “You’re the host. Any cast member will be happy to be in your sketch.”
“What do you think? For one of the execs, Josh always cracks me up.”
“Yeah, he’d be good.” I typed Josh’s name before the first record executive’s dialogue. “And maybe Hakeem is the other? And for the choreographer—” Either Henrietta or Viv would do an excellent job and each was likely to appear in multiple other sketches. Naming a chronically underused cast member, I said, “What about Grace?”
“Sure.”
“Then from here on out, really the only change I’d make is to put Lulu’s choreography suggestions in order of ridiculousness from least to most. It’s more satisfying if they escalate, so it starts with waving your hands around a lot and ends with the panther idea.”
“There’s one thing I didn’t put in there because it didn’t come from a choreographer but from kind of like, I guess he was an image consultant. He recommended I perform shirtless and in leather pants.”
“Oh, that’s perfect. But let’s make the pants into shorts. Shorts are even better. Or what if you’re the one who suggests this, and it’s the pivot at the end? So up ’til now, it seems like you’re so resistant to these silly ideas, but you’re just resistant to their silly ideas. And you’re wearing tear-away clothes that you pull off, and you say something like ‘I’m confident that audience engagement will be enhanced by my beautifully sculpted body.’ ”
Noah shook his head good-naturedly, and his blond surfer hair shifted a little. “I’m starting to feel like I just dug my own grave. And I’m still with the same label I signed with in 1999. That’s the irony here, as I vilify them in public.”
“If it reassures you, there’s no guarantee any sketch will get picked for the live show.” When our eyes met, I said, “But I bet this one will.”
“I guess I’m a winner either way,” he said. “Or a loser?”
I scrolled through the document, making the changes we’d discussed. When we got to the third page, I said, “This chunk can go because it doesn’t establish anything new. It’s kind of filler.”
I could tell he was reading the lines onscreen, then he said, “No, you’re right.”
At the end, I inserted the stage directions for him to rip off his clothes then I glanced at him once more. “Want to read it through out loud? You can do the you part, and I’ll be the execs and the choreographer.”
We both laughed a few times as we read. When Noah said, “Because my beautifully sculpted body will enhance audience engagement,” I realized it unintentionally echoed the earlier line about cutting-edge choreography enhancing his live performances. I cut the second enhance and replaced it with increase. In general, word repetition worked only when it seemed intentional.
“We need a title,” I said. “But just as a placeholder, so don’t overthink it. Something like Choreographer.”
“Done,” he said. “Choreographer.” He pointed down at the elastics on my desk. “Is it when you pull your hair back that your magical editing powers kick in?”
I laughed. “I’ve heard of novelists who are very precious about their writing rituals, like they have to light a candle or drink herbal tea first, but TNO beats that out of you.”
“Well, I feel like I just took a master class in comedy writing. I seriously can’t thank you enough.”
“Again, it still has to make it past the table read and rehearsals, but I actually think it’s really fun.”
“The way you keep saying actually,” he said. “It’s like you’re surprised.”
“Sorry. It’s just that very few hosts write sketches, and even if they do, a writer probably drafted it. And honestly, for a musician host, it’s almost unheard of.”
“Do you know I write my own songs?”
“But don’t you think songs and sketches are different animals?”
“Well, structure is really important in both, right? And rhythm? And what you withhold versus what you reveal up front?”
“True.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“What kind do I like?” The question caught me by surprise.
“If you’re making dinner at home or you’re on the subway, what are you listening to?”
“I guess a range. If we’re talking about genres, mostly folk or pop.”
“Which specific artists?”
“I don’t have particularly cool taste if that’s what you’re asking. Have you met the writer Jeremiah? He always knows about bands before they blow up.”
“I’m just curious. I swear this isn’t a trick question.”
“When I was in third grade, I had a cassette of The Supremes’ Greatest Hits that I played so much the tape started unspooling out the bottom. And then, because of how upset I was, my mom took me on an emergency trip to the mall that same day to replace it.”
He smiled. “And since then?”
“Mostly female singer-songwriters. My mom liked Linda Ronstadt, Patti LaBelle, Joan Armatrading, so we listened to them a lot. Dolly Parton, of course. And Sade. And then my taste sort of segued into more countryish like Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris. And then, you know, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Dar Williams, or more recently Brandi Carlile. Oh, and Janelle Monáe.” I glanced over and said, “My favorite singers of all time are the Indigo Girls.”
“Yeah, they’re incredible,” he said.
I looked at him—we still were side by side, perhaps six inches apart—and said, “Are you serious?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“A lot of people—meaning male writers here—would use the Indigo Girls as a punchline. Or have used them as a punchline, to make a joke about something that’s very female or that’s lesbianish or that’s earnestly political. And I fucking hate it. Partly because it’s sexist, but even more because it’s not funny. It’s lazy. The Indigo Girls are super talented and have been doing what they do for a long time, on their terms, regardless of cultural trends, and now that we’re a budding autocracy, it’s a little harder to mock the people who have always stood up for the rights of the disenfranchised. Plus, they just have such beautiful, complementary voices.” I paused. “That’s why you came to my office, right? You were hoping for a rant about the Indigo Girls.”
“I love rants about the Indigo Girls. Have you seen them live?”
“Yes, a bunch of times. Have you?”
“I performed with them at a fundraiser in L.A. years ago. And Amy does backup vocals on my song ‘East Matunuck.’ I’m trying to think if they’ve ever been on TNO.”
Of course he had played with them, of course he was on a first-name basis with them. But how had I not known Amy Ray was on one of his songs? “Funny you should ask,” I said. “They haven’t been the musical guests, but there was once a spoof of them where the cast members playing them were dudes. This was before my time.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“It’s my ninth season. Another fun fact is that TNO and I are actually the same age. I was born the month of the premiere, in October 1981.”
“That seems auspicious, right?” Noah said. “I was born in September ’81, so you and I are the same age. If you’ve been here nine years, I take it you like it?”
I had to admit that, for all his cheesiness, he had impeccable social skills. Most hosts were charismatic and many were polite; some were curious about the history of the show; but almost none would ask a writer multiple questions about herself. It didn’t seem rude to me that hosts registered writers the same way the outside world did, which was far lower in the hierarchy than cast members. A lot of writers aspired to be cast members, and some had auditioned for the cast at the same time they’d auditioned for the writing staff, but I felt liberated by not wanting more. It wasn’t by accident that I had never appeared on camera.
