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?”