He made a self-mockingly anxious expression. “Maybe not one hundred percent calm?”
“I think you’re going to be great and have a great show,” I said. “Truly.” It was common for hosts to be palpably nervous as the live show approached—and some were so nervous all along that they were vomiting and shaking for the entire week—but I personally had never offered reassurance to any of them. I had, however, once randomly found myself in a hall hugging the panicking male backup dancer of a female rapper, a bald, extraordinarily muscular man wearing a tight tank top and short denim shorts. To Noah, I added, “This week’s show is actually in much better shape than a lot of them are at this point.”
“Yeah?” Noah said. Then, simultaneously, we both said, “Actually?” and smiled. It felt in this moment like we knew each other much better than we did, and I thought that Noah clearly was a good guy, in addition to being radiantly handsome, and also that it would be an enormous relief when the live show was finished and we were no longer having dozens of ostensibly casual encounters. If TNO was like summer camp, at least his session would last only a week. I gestured with my thumb and said, “I should go tell Danny my bitchy little sketch about his love life is cut.”
“Before you go—” Noah leaned into the room and set his palm on the shoulder of the blond woman, who wore a maroon dress with brown flowers on it and was eating a hundred-calorie bag of cashews. There was a bowl of such bags on a table, along with bananas, apples, grass-fed beef jerky, a crudité platter, tiny brownies, and water bottles. The woman turned toward him, and Noah said, “Sally, this is my sister, Vicky, and Vicky, this is Sally, who’s a writer here.”
Warmly, Vicky said, “You’re one of the people making Noah’s dreams come true.”
“Well, not personally,” I said, which immediately seemed weird on my part. “Nice to meet you,” I added as we shook hands.
“Likewise.”
“Do you live here in—” I began, but before I could finish, Autumn was upon us in her Autumn-ish way, saying, “Sally, I’m going to steal both Noah and Vicky and show them where Vicky will stand when she introduces Noah’s first song.”
“Oh, fun.” I took a step backwards and waved vaguely. “Break a leg!” I said, then I scurried away.
SATURDAY, 11:08 P.M.
Working at TNO was often hectic, but the most hectic time was between the end of the dress rehearsal and the start of the live show. The three-hundred-plus audience members needed to be escorted out, and another three hundred–plus needed to be brought in. All the writers and all the producers and all the cast crammed into Nigel’s office—this time, his office overlooking the studio—so he could reveal which two or three sketches he was cutting for time, and how he thought the sequence of the remaining ones needed to be rearranged, and which last-minute adjustments he wanted made to the scripts, sets, and costumes. If at times his attention to detail seemed ludicrous—he’d decree that a potted plant in a sketch should be moved from the right side of a desk to the left—the counterargument was that he was Nigel Petersen, and the rest of us were not.
Dress had gone well, with the audience laughing a lot, but it hadn’t gone so well that it made me fear for the live show; sometimes you went into live knowing you couldn’t top dress, and this wasn’t one of those nights. There’d been a true dud—Sister & Father, the one that featured Viv as the nun—where the audience was quiet from start to finish, but it had been right before Noah’s first musical performance, which to some extent served as a palate cleanser and prevented the dud from ruining the rest of the show. It was understood that, although all of us always preferred to kill, the fact that sketches could bomb, that the audience wouldn’t reward us just for showing up, gave killing its value and meaning.
In keeping with Nigel’s frequent inscrutability, he wasn’t cutting Sister & Father; instead, he wanted it rewritten so that rather than Noah as the Pope coming in two-thirds of the way through, the sketch started with Noah, and Noah’s headgear changed from a miter to a skullcap. Both Blabbermouth and the Cheesemonger survived dress, though Nigel wanted twenty seconds cut from Blabbermouth, which raised the question for me of whether to eliminate the recent addition when Henrietta flew airplane-style on Noah’s feet or to thin out the chatter between the male judges. I went with the latter, while wondering if doing so would undermine the entire sketch. And Catchphrase’s Unicycle sketch had been moved to the last slot. Later sketches tended to be wild cards—clearly, including them wasn’t Nigel’s priority, because they might need to be cut for time during the show—but they sometimes became unexpected classics.
After the meeting, I raced to the cue cards room and ran into the writer Benji, who said, “That’s a bummer Nigel cut The Danny Horst Rule. I thought it was solid.”
Even if I’d wanted to, there wasn’t time to clarify; we both needed to check new cue cards. I simply said, “I know.” There were ten minutes left to air, and I could hear the house band playing on Home Base, and the chatter of the audience members eagerly waiting for the show. Usually, Danny took the stage for a couple minutes before air to warm up the audience, but I heard Bailey, who also had gotten their start as a stand-up, doing it instead. Then Bailey left the stage and the cast member Jay bounded out, with Bianca, Lynette, and Grace taking their places behind him. Though I couldn’t see Home Base, I knew because this was how it always happened that Jay was wearing a three-piece, seventies-style pale blue suit, and the women were wearing matching short silver halter top dresses with tall white boots. They all belted out “We Are Family,” and the audience went nuts.
As I walked toward the spot under the balcony where I usually watched the live show, a no-man’s-land quite separate from Nigel’s cave, and without rosé, I passed Viv, who was about to play Comey’s book editor in the cold open. In the seconds before a cast member went on, when they were surrounded by a makeup artist, a hair stylist, and someone from wardrobe all making last adjustments, the clusters always reminded me of when the mice and birds in the original Cinderella movie dressed her for the ball. I didn’t want to get in the way, or to call out Dr. Theo’s name, so when Viv’s eyes met mine, I merely held up my right hand, first with the thumb up, then with the thumb down, and raised my eyebrows. She nodded and held up her own thumb. I wasn’t sure whether I’d been asking if Dr. Theo was there or if they’d spoken, but, either way, the confirmation seemed promising. “Awesome,” I said, and kept walking to take my place next to two other writers, Patrick and Jenna. Unless things went awry during the show—if another sketch went way over and I was told by a producer I needed to make more cuts—this was where I’d stay. Even on nights when none of my sketches were in the lineup, it was thrilling to be in the studio seeing the cast members perform and knowing the sketches were appearing on television screens all over the country. Like Noah and millions of other people, I too had once been a kid who lived far from New York and watched TNO and was electrified.