Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [63]
I went looking for Marci Klein to find out where I would be spending my next twenty Saturdays. I found her in the conference room outside of Lorne’s ninth-floor office. When I asked her where my new dressing room was, she told me it wasn’t ready yet. When I asked her when it would be ready, she told me she didn’t know.
Since you’re not supposed to be in wardrobe until Saturday, I didn’t really need a dressing room that night at all. On Thursdays and Fridays, it was more a place to hang out and wait around. You could excuse yourself from rewrites early and go down to your dressing room and read a book for an hour until your sketch came up. I didn’t have a book or a dressing room, so I wandered around the halls.
I noticed that there were new photos up from the previous year. Unlike in the past, the photos were memories, not devices for intimidation. I saw photos of Nicole Kidman with Mike Myers, Emilio Estevez with Rob Schneider, and Charlton Heston standing on stage during Good-nights. I remembered Sandler doing an impression behind closed doors of the way Charlton Heston shuffled his feet when he walked. We had to keep in mind Mr. Heston’s age when we submitted sketches that week. He was pretty old. There weren’t going to be any pratfalls on the air that show.
On the Heston show, a “Planet of the Apes” sketch was scheduled to run during the opening monologue. The show had hired fifty extras to play apes, and the wardrobe department had secured the actual uniforms from the Planet of the Apes movies. The basic premise of the sketch was that the show, to Charlton Heston’s horror, had been overrun by apes. The makeup department put several cast members and all the extras in perfect ape makeup. The process of being made up to look like an ape took five hours. I told anyone and everyone that there was no way I could be an ape, so I played a slave of the apes. (What if I had a panic attack under all that ape makeup?) Dave Attell had to be an ape. Attell was a chain smoker, but he couldn’t reach his lips with a cigarette through the ape mask. It was easy to know which ape was Dave because he was the only ape with a five-inch cigarette holder sticking out of his mouth. Christopher Walken was right, after all; ape suits are funny.
During rehearsal of the “Planet of the Apes” sketch, Heston slapped Farley down pretty good. Farley, along with Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, and me, was playing a slave, and he was getting bored, so he started mumbling, “I’m a slave, I just beat my dick all day.” Then he whipped it out and actually started masturbating. Though we were all in a cage about forty feet from Heston, the man who will always be Moses to me saw what was happening and yelled in that biblical-sounding voice, “Knock it off!” Farley was so shocked that he quickly scooted it back into his pants. “I’m sorry, Mr. Heston,” Chris said sheepishly.
The night of the ape sketch, I stayed for Good-nights. The musical guest on that show was Paul Westerberg, who had been the lead singer of the Replacements, one of the truly great American bands. They had split up and now Westerberg was going it solo. We were all excited and honored to have him. It seemed as though everyone was a fan—except Mr. Heston. When we all gathered onstage at the end of the show, Charlton Heston announced: “I would like to thank Paul Westerfield!” Paul Westerberg leaned over and whispered a correction into Mr. Heston’s ear. Charlton Heston looked back into the camera and bellowed, “Excuse me. Paul Westerfield!” Like I said, he was pretty old.
I continued scanning the photos on the wall and slowly began to realize there was something missing from all the pictures: me. Photograph after photograph had cast members and hosts and musical guests for last season. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find myself in any of them—because I wasn’t in any of them.
Slightly baffled, I rode the elevator back up to the seventeenth floor to see if any new photos were hanging in the hallway. Sure enough, there were, but I wasn