I don’t miss the frustration of youth, the anticipation of love and pain, the paralysis of choices still ahead. The pressure of “What are you going to do?” makes everybody feel like they haven’t done anything yet. Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns. Young and old need to relax in the moment and live where they are.
You are all so good and I wish I were better. Now get out of here because I want to be where you are.
When I left SNL, I gave Seth a badge of courage, like Dorothy give to the Cowardly Lion... He kept it in his pocket during “Update” until he didn’t need it anymore. Now it sits in a box on his desk at Late Night.
Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again. Or you will lose your mind and turn into a crazy person. Either way, let’s just hope you avoided tattoos, because most are pretty stupid anyway.
I wrote it ugly and in pieces.
People treat writing like it’s some elegant act but it’s usually lonely and isolating.
Every mother needs a wife. Some mothers’ wives are their mothers. Some mothers’ wives are their husbands. Some mothers’ wives are their friends and neighbors. Every working person needs someone to come home to and someone to come get them out of the home. Someone who asks questions about their day and maybe fixes them something to eat.
I wonder if this love will crack open my chest and split me in half. It’s scary, this love.
And then you just do it. You just dig in and write it.
There should be some kind of pregnancy superhero movie. Calling Hollywood now. What’s that, Hollywood? It’s a weird idea and also you don’t do movies with female superheroes? Copy that.
During a recent trip to Amsterdam, she sent me a picture of her smoking marijuana for the first time just because I asked her to.
Let me offer this apology. Please excuse this self-indulgent preface. I know what I am doing. I am presenting a series of reasons as to why you should lower your expectations, so that you can be blown away by my sneaky insights about life and work. I am a grown woman. I know my own tricks!
A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren’t one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own. Melissa and Wendy and Jane and I joked about the Golden Globes and gave each other fake awards. I gave Melissa “Best Person in Charge.” She gave me “Most Famous and Most Normal.” This meant and means a great deal.
The eighties were a strange time for teenage fashion. We wore silk blouses and shoulder pads, neon earrings and jodhpur pants. Come to think of it, our pants were especially weird. We also wore stirrup pants, parachute pants, and velvet knickers. It was a real experimental pant time.
I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things.
Dancing is the great equalizer. It gets people out of their heads and into their bodies.
Debbie Downer” was one of the few sketches where I broke, and I remember watching Heratio Sanz laugh so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes. I still believe that sketch may be a cure for low-level depression if watched regularly.
You get better at understanding what people mean and how it can be different from what they say.
Anyway, this other nurse and I used to jump around in our underwear and kiss each other for fun. Oh wait, what I meant to say was that I answered phones and filed things.
Feeling invisible means you can float. You can decide to travel without permission.