Gasping for Airtime by Jay Mohr Read Free Book Online Page B

up earlier and earlier.
    At first I showed up for work at 11:00 A.M . Problem was, I was the only one there, and I didn’t know what I was doing. What should I write? When I’m done writing it, where do I put the finished product? Where’s the dictionary? The earlier I arrived, the more deserted it would be. I would lie on the couch in my office and fume. “Isn’t everyone else paid to be here!” I would shout to no one.
    Each Tuesday I boarded the subway, terrified that I was running late. I just knew that one day I would arrive at noon and everyone else would be waiting for me—along with a pink slip. Before getting SNL I looked at a subway ride as theater of the absurd. But now I would constantly monitor my pulse. How could it register 140 when all I was doing was sitting down on the train? I would take it again and it would be higher. The closer it crept toward 200, the more certain I was that death was imminent.
    Soon I began taking my pulse everywhere. Regardless of where I was—in restaurants, in record stores, or even in bed at night, I noticed my pulse would regularly race past 200 and I would feel an odd hitch in my chest. A feeling like I was in trouble. Big trouble. I would lie in my bed at night and imagine it looked like a big asterisk inside my chest, spinning and hot, always trying to push its way out of my body. I didn’t wake up with the asterisk every day, but soon enough it reappeared, and I would spend the rest of my waking hours feeling like I had to run out of a burning building.
    For months, Tuesdays brought two scenarios of doom: I was either pissed off in my office or panic-stricken that I was still on the train. In an attempt to alleviate the situation, I ignored “You’re paid to be here” and began showing up at the same time as everyone else, which believe it or not, was 8:00 P.M . At this point, I realized that the show wasn’t really being written on Tuesday, it was beginning to be written three hours before Wednesday. This left little time for any extensive creative thought, because the sketches had to be ready for read-through on Wednesdays at 5:00 P.M .
     
     
     
    Read-throughs were held in the writers’ room. All of the writers and production people who had met in Lorne’s office on Monday attended, as well as a dozen or so technical people and other producers, bringing the crowd to around fifty people. Basically, anyone who needed to know what might be on Saturday’s show attended so they could plan accordingly. For instance, if every sketch read aloud at read-through had all the characters wearing prosthetics, the makeup department would take note of what they needed.
    There was something of a hierarchy to everyone’s position in the room. Sitting at the six cafeteria tables pushed together in the center of the room were Lorne, director Dave Wilson, head writer Jim Downey, the cast members, and a few of the tenured writers. The other writers and nonreading participants sat in a circle around the table. Whoever was left over would form a circle around that circle, and so on. Prior to read-through, every sketch had been printed in the same font and format, spell-checked, and distributed to everyone who would be in the meeting.
    Typically, there were about forty sketches. Starting at the top of the distributed stack of sketches, each one would be read aloud with the cast and that week’s host reading their assigned parts. Lorne was the narrator. Due to the sheer volume of the material, read-through lasted around three and a half hours, with a short break in the middle.
    During my first few weeks on the show, whenever I had an actual idea, I would explain it beat by beat in Lorne’s office in front of the entire cast and writers on Monday, but I soon noticed that the ideas I pitched in Lorne’s office weren’t getting any laughs at read-throughs on Wednesdays. I quickly discovered the simple answer: Everyone had already heard it, so even if the sketch was fall-down