Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [66]
My new dressing room was an old elevator shaft. I didn’t think that my little box room was a fitting place for my “Phil Hartman USA!” autograph, so I brought it back upstairs to my office and hung it above my desk, the same as last year.
The night of the live show, there wasn’t anywhere in the room to hang my costumes, so the wardrobe department had folded them and set them down across the recliner. I threw them on the floor and sat down. If anyone asked me why my clothes were wrinkled, I would tell them because my dressing room is a goddamn elevator shaft. I sat in the chair and stretched my arms out to see if I could touch both walls at the same time with my fingertips. I was a few inches short. I took two pencils and held them in my hands and stretched out again. With the pencils in my hands, I could write on both walls at once. So I sat there with my pencils, waiting for the show to begin, and scribbled parallel lines on the walls from my seat.
Since there was no television, I quickly grew bored with my cave drawings. I sat there in silence for a while and enjoyed the quiet. I assumed the tranquility was due to the fact that the room did not have an intercom box in it. Would someone come and get me when it was time for me to be onstage, or would I have to go outside every minute and check? As showtime grew closer and closer, my tension increased. I would always get an adrenaline rush before going onstage, but as Tom Petty once wrote, the waiting is the hardest part. So I sat in my tiny room on the recliner with my feet against the door. If anyone tried to come in unannounced, I would be able to block them from entering. Despite my surroundings, I felt fantastic. I knew that all the anxieties and nervousness I was feeling were appropriate. I was alone in the smallest room in the building with nothing except my thoughts, but at least I didn’t think I was going to die.
I approached the new dressing room as a desensitization exercise. A lot of people I knew would have gone bananas in such a little room. I was feeling just a little claustrophobic. My claustrophobia wasn’t what eventually drove me from the room. I don’t know how long I sat there (no clock or watch), but I started to get nervous that everyone had forgotten about me. No one had knocked or stuck a head in. I could hear people standing in the hallway right outside my door talking.
Occasionally I heard people run past. They were all doing something. Why wasn’t I? I had already been late for a rehearsal once that week, and knew that being late twice would make me look like a complete jackass. So I decided I would go down to the stage and see for myself what was going on. I stood up, sucked my stomach in so the doorknob wouldn’t graze it, and opened the door to find myself standing face-to-face with thirty strangers.
The moment the door opened, they all turned to see who was emerging, and I could see their faces register disappointment instantly when I stuck my head out. No one in the group looked familiar to me. In fact they all looked wide-eyed and out of place. As the line of people moved past my doorway, I spotted an NBC page in a blue blazer bringing up the rear. The people outside my door were in a tour group. They were walking through the hallowed halls of Saturday Night Live listening to tidbits of history about the show. I’m sure everyone in the tour group had been hoping from the moment they stepped inside the building to see one of the show’s stars. They got me instead. I felt like an animal in the zoo.
I stood there to see how many of the tourists recognized me. I still had the pencils in my hand, making me fully prepared in case any of them asked me for my autograph. I positioned myself directly underneath the JAY MOHR sign on the door and tried to make eye contact with all of them. Thirty pairs of eyes looked back at me, but none had a flicker of recognition. Instead, they were all craning their