Or maybe a sly smile of approval at some bon mot I’ve tossed out at Orso, where we used to eat on Tuesday nights with the host. I also still dream (a couple of times a year) of Lorne Michael’s approval, embarrassing in its mildness, in the clear implication that crumbs were all I ever expected, the dream features him… just nodding yes. I am reminded back into the present by my thumping heart, my skin against my husband’s thigh. A snort of apnea sometimes thrusts me into reality. I will startle myself awake out of those SNL dreams. The kind of dreams I imagine Wilfred Owen would’ve had, had he’d only lived. Did they change the script? Are the lines on the queue cards? Is that mustard gas I smell? Should I write a quick note to my loved ones and pin it to the muddy, wet (you could say tear-stained if they weren’t already blood-stained) walls of the trench? The rush of heels clacking in the hallway outside my dressing room. In my dreams, a wall-mounted tinny speaker in the hallway of Studio 8H blurts out that we’re going live in 5. Imagine the worst, most exhilarating, most excruciating, most indelible time. A blink of an eye, yet I still occasionally dream of it, like one probably would after they’d been in a war, any war, let’s say The Great War, in the trenches. Pat was outed in the most profound sense of that word.Īnyway, I was on SNL, a brief four and a half years, let’s say five to round it out. The Taschen SNL book did not mention Pat. Soon after, SNL stripped out most of the Pat sketches from its collection on the show’s website. But to Pat, Pat was, well… whatever Pat was. The joke as I conceived it was that Pat was just not clearly male or female to other people. I thought of Pat as heterosexual, maybe even homophobic. The fact was that I had never thought of Pat as non-binary. The then Jill Soloway (now Joey) declared in the New York Times and then the Chicago Tribune that Pat was an affront. Then, Icarus-like, I fell backwards out of the sky, as the non-binary world gathered its skirts and grew in influence and decided that Pat was not a good icon at all! I was probably up to no good! Fortunately, I was already has-beened, so only the smallest ripple, deep beneath the ocean of my world, percolated up to my awareness. I touched the bright orb of Popular Culture with an androgynous recurring character called Pat. You probably know me, if you know me, from my years at Saturday Night Live. One thing I knew I could do well was to tell a story on stage. So, in my case, my skills were scattered. The word haphazard, or herky-jerky might come to mind. I aimed my talent-arrows at many targets. No, forget talent, it’s skill that we aim for. Talent is cheap and ubiquitous, litters the sidewalks of Hollywood, everywhere you look plastic bags (ten-cents-each!) of talent blow this way and that. Anyhow, what I really care about is skill, not talent. Not going there now, so tired of both the Patriarchy and the Patriarchy-blamers. Actor is serious: Laurence Olivier, Jeremy Irons. Are we supposed to identify as an actor, not specifying the gender? Actress sounds finicky, privileged and probably deluded.
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