Tina Fey

            On Thursday I went to bed at 1:30 but barely slept because there was a major bedbug invasion of my bed and body. I got up at 2:45 and I must have killed about fifty, half just from running the lint roller over my mattress. Quite a few were caught on the carpet tape around the edge of my futon, mostly on the wall side but they seem to only get caught after they are bloated with my blood and only some get stuck while crossing the tape before they’ve fed. I went back to bed but still couldn’t sleep because soon I started feeling them again. I still haven’t been able to find any nests to know where they are coming from. I killed some more and tried to sleep again but no dice. At 4:30 I got up to kill some more and lint rolled again. At 4:45 I had fifteen minutes before the alarm so I went back to bed and dreamed I was underground and traversing a tunnel with a dark haired troubled woman. Then we were walking in the street behind a guy who might have been her boyfriend and they were arguing about abuse and a child they had together. Later she and I were back in the tunnel while I was carrying a long yellow staff. She offered to carry the pole and so I let her but she was drunk and lost it. I escorted her out of the building with the intention of returning to look for the staff but she stood on a landing and jumped to the street from a second floor height. It looked like she must have hurt herself but when I looked for her she was gone and I woke up. 

            After yoga I worked out the chords for line 2 of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through singing it in French. Tomorrow I’ll run through my translation and then upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog to prepare it for publication. 

            I weighed 91.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            I weighed 92.65 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back. There were no more cherries and the grapes were too soft so I bought a basket of Canadian peaches, a basket of Canadian plums, a Canadian watermelon, some bananas, a packet of sliced smoked turkey, a packet of sliced Black Forest ham, and a lint roller. 

            I weighed 92.4 kilos at 18:40. 

            I slipped back to being two days behind in my journal and worked on catching up. 

            I grilled a striploin steak and had it with a potato with gravy while watching three interviews: with Tina Fey, Tony Bennett, and Vicki Lawrence on the subject of Carol Burnett. 

            Tina says Mama’s Family is like the precursor to The Office. On 30 Rock, Matt Damon’s character was named Carol Burnett. 

            Tony Bennet says Carol is one of the best singers he ever met. I don’t know why people keep saying that. She could sing well but lots of singers are better. She was a good theatrical singer because her voice was loud and she could carry a tune but she was no Barbara Streisand. When he was a guest on her show he did sketches of her and the rest of the cast and the sets. She asked him to make a painting of Times Square for her and he did one in oil that she adored. In later years he painted every day. Carol was like a next door neighbour to her audience. The only other performer who took questions from the audience was George Burns. On Tony’s birthday no matter where he was in the world, Carol sent him one rose. 

             Lady Gaga is very spontaneous and a great singer. 

             Vicki says it was her mother who encouraged her to write the fan letter that caught Carol’s attention. She hadn’t even seen Carol on television very much. She’d seen the play Once Upon a Mattress because they were going to do it for their high school musical. Vicki wasn’t that interested in musical theatre. She was already singing with The Young Americans. She did the comedy songs and some funny bitts for The Young Americans movie. She remembers seeing Carol on The Entertainers but she watched that because she had a crush on John Davidson. As far as female performers are concerned Vicki was more of a fan of Mary Tyler Moore. She was also in love with Dick Van Dyke. It was only because she cut her hair short before high school that everybody started telling her that she looked like Carol Burnett. Vicki was a big writer of fan letters and so her mother said she should write one to Carol. She had no pictures of Carol on her walls. She had Johnny Crawford, Fabian, and Clint Eastwood. Carol told her later that her fan letter was unique because it was written well and had something to say.

             When Carol invited her to audition for her new show, Vicki went to the director of The Young Americans to tell him. He told her the chances were miniscule of her audition leading to anything and warned her that if she backed out of the summer tour she wouldn’t be allowed back into the group. It was a very traumatic decision for her. 

            She thought she was going to be a dental hygienist, marry a rich dentist and hang it up. 

            Vicki learned from Carol how a show should be run. She was very giving, loving, caring, and nurturing. Carol knew everybody in her crew and cared about them. Vicki barely even spoke to Carol for the first few years because she put her on such a pedestal even while she was learning from her. Vicki doesn’t know if the fairy tale story of her success would ever happen nowadays. The suits would come down today and just say, “Get rid of her and get somebody who knows what she’s doing.” A lot of older people she’d meet on Carol’s show would tell her it’s nothing like the real world of show business. Carol’s show was a special place. 

            Vicki says a good executive producer hires the best people then backs off and lets them do their jobs. That doesn’t happen much anymore. 

            Harvey Korman never gave up on a sketch even after everybody else said it wasn’t working. Vicki says that she thinks he thought that since he was stuck with having her around, it was his duty to train her. He worked with her on dialects and props. He told her, “Make your props your friends!” When they did the old movie take-offs Harvey would have to explain to her who her character was based on because she didn’t know those films. He taught her most everything she came to learn about comedy.

            Vicki started at UCLA the same year she started on Carol’s show. When it came time to declare a major she picked theatre because of what she was learning on Carol’s show. But Theatre students were required to do a quarter of a year in crew work; they were required to audition for parts and take them if accepted, which would have conflicted with The Carol Burnett Show. She went to her favourite Theatre professor who told her to sit in the audience of The Carol Burnett Show with a notepad and watch the best teachers in the world. He told Vicki she was already where every kid in the Theatre department would give their right arm to be. She devastated her parents when she told them she was thinking of dropping out because her father went to UCLA. Vicki decided to appease them and declare a Dance major because Dance schedules were more flexible than Theatre. She was told she had to take Dance 1-A, which was Interpretive and Creative. In the first class she was lying on the floor with the other students and the instructor said, “Today we will be seaweed rolling on the ocean floor”. Vicki was more interested in learning a Travelling Time Step so she got up, grabbed her bag and quit UCLA. Coincidentally she left after two years just like Carol did. 

            Lyle Waggoner was the second greenest member of the cast. She used to go to his little apartment with him and his wife would cook them lunch. Lyle made a side living with a fan club that cost $2 to join and members would get a button that said, “Be Relyleable”. 

            Bob Mackie didn’t want people to sit down in his costumes. At Halloween Vicki would take her kids to where his costumes were stored and borrow them. He knew how to express comedy through his costumes but Vicki thought Mrs. Tudball's costume was a little over the top. Many times you didn’t know your character until Bob Mackie dressed you. The only thing Vickie added to her Mama costume was to push the stockings down so they were wrinkled because that reminded her of her grandma. The first time she put on the costume she looked in the mirror and said, “Good lord! I’m dysfunctional!”

            Vicki doesn’t know why they thought she was worth the trouble of teaching her. Neil Simon’s brother Danny Simon was the director of the comedy sketches and he would get frustrated with Vicki.

            The first sketch she was fully part of was a takeoff ion The Newlywed Game and Kenny Solms played her husband. That’s when she first did her high voiced bimbo character. She didn’t feel like she pulled her weight until halfway through the series. 

            Dick Clark’s favourite blooper was the one in which Vicki’s character Mama calls Tim’s character Mickey Hart a “little asshole”, which causes Tim to collapse laughing on the floor. She got paid every time Dick showed that blooper, which was a lot. That was the first sketch in which Vicki went off script. 

           When she and Tim guest appeared on the sitcom Yes Dear the suits thought it was funny when Tim went off script but still insisted on him doing it the way it was written. 

            Vicki played Miley Cyrus’s grandmother on Hannah Montana. She taught Miley what Harvey taught her, to make her props her friends. 

            Vicki says if when she was growing up on The Carol Burnett Show there had been people with cell phones in the audience recording everything and uploading it to the internet she might not have chosen this profession. 

            The producers of Mama’s Family asked Vicki to do a Q & A with the audience just like Carol before the live taping. She was terrified at first but came around. 

            When Vicki did her talk show it was for the wrong company and a nightmare. She had learned that television was supposed to be fun or you’re doing it wrong but the producer didn’t agree. They were at each other’s throats for two years. 

            Tina Fey studied Drama at The University of Virginia and then went to Chicago where she took the first set of Second City courses. Nothing she’d studied about acting at university clicked for her but at Second City she learned to focus on her partner and it all made sense. After nine months a teacher told her to skip ahead and audition for the Second City Training Centre. She eventually entered the training program. She became a cast member for several years. In 1995 she was invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. After a few years she became the first female head writer. In the 25th season she began doing Weekend Update with Jimmy Fallon. Her character of Liz Lemon on 30 Rock was meant to be the opposite of a Sex and the City character. She co-created the sitcoms Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Mr. Mayor, and The Four Seasons, She co-produced Girls5eva and Mulligan. She co-hosted The Golden Globe Awards four times. She wrote and co-starred in Mean Girls. She wrote and co-produced Mean Girls the musical. She starred in Baby Mama, Admission, Sisters, and Whisky Tango Foxtrot (which she co-produced). She co-starred in Date Night, Megamind, This Is Where I Leave You, Maggie Moore, A Haunting In Venice, Muppets’ Most Wanted, Wine Country, and Soul. She wrote the memoir Bossypants, the audio for which won a Grammy Award. She’s won ten Emmy Awards. 

            She was a virgin when she met her husband at the age of 24 and he’s the only person she’s ever had sex with. 

            She says Paris Hilton is a piece of shit. Paris told the writers they should do a skit about Jessica Simpson “because she’s fat”. 

            Tina doesn’t have a driver’s license but while I was writing this I fell asleep at the computer and dreamed that I went on a car trip with Tina Fey. She drove us out to the middle of nowhere and then stopped. We were getting out of the car when I woke up.