Yes Please by Amy Poehler Read Free Book Online Page A

in the audience that night and for a while I thought seeing Amy and Tina perform in Chicago right before they left and got famous would be the most interesting thing that ever happened to me. In my mind it was like seeing the Beatles in Hamburg. And much, I’m sure, like someone who saw the Beatles in Hamburg, I talked about it so much that my friends eventually said, “ Genug .”
    At this point, my relationship to Amy was the same as everyone else’s. I was a fan.
    I auditioned for SNL in 2001. My manager called me to tell me I had been hired. He then listed the other new cast members, one of whom was Amy. My first thought after hanging up the phone wasn’t “Oh my god, I’m going to be on SNL ,” it was “Oh my god, I might get to be friends with Amy Poehler.”
    I am happy to say we were friends right away.
    I won’t bore you with the details of our many years of friendship and collaboration on the show for no other reason than it is likely Amy has dedicated dozens of pages to that topic in this very book. I wouldn’t be surprised if a photo of me graces the cover of this book. To take up any more time talking about it would be redundant.
    Instead I will pick up the action years later on the Saturday before the Saturday Amy became a mother. Josh Brolin was hosting the show that week, but this fact would soon be rendered a footnote when Sarah Palin agreed to do a cameo.
    In 2008, under intense pressure from the comedians’ lobby, Senator John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. This brought much good fortune to SNL in the form of Tina Fey’s mimicry. However, the fact that Governor Palin would actually be appearing on the show was not immediately greeted with cheers.
    It wasn’t that we weren’t excited to have her on; we just didn’t know what to do with her once she got there. When you perform a sketch about a person when they’re not in the room you have a great deal more freedom than when they are in the room. It was understood that we’d have to write a sketch with Tina and the governor, and we did. It was a soup of moving parts; Alec Baldwin, Lorne, and Mark Wahlberg made cameos, there were some jokes, and it went well.
    Sensing that the audience might want more, on Friday night Lorne suggested using Governor Palin a second time, on “Weekend Update.” We sat in our weekly joke read kicking around ideas that failed to inspire any enthusiasm. For a laugh, someone said the governor could do a rap, perhaps starting with the line “I’m Sarah Palin and I’m here to say . . .” Someone else suggested that the governor could get cold feet and Amy could do the rap instead. I don’t remember if either of these ideas was meant to be real but I do remember that Amy’s eyes went wide with glee and she left the room with a notebook in hand. The next time I saw her she was on the phone with the wardrobe department barking orders like mission control trying to get a shuttle back. “I need Eskimo suits for Fred and Andy, a snowmobile suit for Jason, and a moose suit for Bobby.”
    Take a second here. Go back and watch the Palin Rap one more time. Maybe you forgot how convincing and believable Sarah Palin was when she said she wasn’t going to do the piece; maybe you forgot exactly how pregnant Amy was when she stood up from behind the desk; you probably remember that Amy was good but you likely forgot exactly how good. It is a performance without artifice. She’s not play-rapping. She’s rapping. I still get goose bumps when I think of Amy screaming, “I’m an animal and I’m bigger than you!” And the whole time she was doing it, for every single second of it, there was a little person sloshing (that’s the correct medical term, yes? Sloshing?) around in her belly.
    That person, Archie, is getting older every day, and soon he will be aware enough to watch and appreciate what his mother was doing on national television the week before he was born. When I want to smile,