Gasping for Airtime

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Authors: Jay Mohr
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met some friends for “lunch” that Sunday evening at a restaurant called Coffee Shop. The entire time I sat in the restaurant, I fought the urge to run. From or to what, I didn’t know. When our meals arrived, I went into the bathroom and puked. This certainly would be a normal reaction for someone who spent six hours drinking beer and scotch, but I wasn’t feeling hungover.
    Shortly before throwing up, I became morose over the fact that that day, for the first time in my life, I had not seen daylight. This bothered me greatly. Every day starts with the sun coming up, and I had deprived myself of even that. It didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. You’re not supposed to wake up at night. I came out of the restroom and told my friends that I thought I had the flu and needed to go home.
    I didn’t tell them that I was going to run the entire way.

Five
     

Swimming with Sharks
     
    K ELSEY G RAMMER has two half brothers who were eaten by sharks. I know this because it was in Kelsey’s bio when he hosted the show.
    Every Monday when you walked into your office, the biographies of that week’s host and musical guest would be on your desk. These were courtesy of the phenomenal research department that works on Saturday Night Live . You could walk up to any one of them and say, “I need video of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon,” and they would have the tape for you in about three minutes. No matter how obscure your request was, they would find it for you. The research department always made sure that you had every conceivable piece of information on that week’s host.
    When I first started at SNL , I read these bios voraciously. I was looking for an edge. I devoured the host’s information looking for ideas. After a while, however, I grew complacent about finding an edge and stopped reading the bios. Well, for some reason I read Kelsey’s. Dave Attell read through it as well, and we sat and wondered aloud if that was how they became his half brothers. Our mood turned sardonic, and we pondered the odds of two of your family members getting eaten by sharks.
    The pitch meeting with the host took place on Monday night, somewhere around eight. The writers and cast would all gather in Lorne’s office, along with director Dave Wilson, several producers, and assorted technical personnel to say hello and pitch ideas to that week’s host. If that sounds like a lot of people to be huddled in one office, it is.
    Lorne’s office was by no means elaborate. It was one room with a beautiful wood desk and two old leather chairs. To the left-hand side of the desk was a small bathroom with a shower and hotel-style bathrobes hanging on the wall. Toward the rear of the office was a couch that comfortably seated four people. There were a few pieces of art on the walls alongside some great black-and-white photos of the show. It was a very nice, classy, mellow office. It certainly was an odd choice for him to have thirty-five people stand around and sit on the floor for two hours.
    The host would sit in one of the comfy leather chairs; Jim Downey occupied the other one. The rest of us would form a semicircle around Lorne’s desk. People would lean against the wall immediately to the left of the desk next to the bathroom door and then fan out around the walls toward the couch and wrap around to the other side of the desk. If you didn’t get there early, you didn’t have a shot at the couch. If you weren’t on the couch, you either had to lean against the wall, afraid to touch anything, or sit on the floor and stare at the host’s crotch for the entire pitch meeting. One by one, the cast and writers would greet the host and pitch their ideas.
    After the semicircle of ideas was complete, Lorne turned to Downey for ideas. “Downer” always took his time and really had fun with it. He looked like a guy who derived great pleasure from sitting in an expensive leather chair searching for funny sketches. After Downey was finished,

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