Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [67]
As I closed the door, I angled my body so they couldn’t see inside my dressing room. One by one, they went past. They all looked so expectant and hopeful, and I was trying to deliver by standing directly in front of them under a sign with my name on it. When the last of the tour group had passed, the NBC page in the blue blazer looked at me with a puzzled look on her face. She was trying to place me—or so I thought. Once she put one and one together and figured out who I was, she would probably point me out to the tour group and I would be stuck there all night signing autographs and answering questions about Farley. She pointed behind me, no doubt reading the name on the door and figuring it all out. “Has that door always been there?” she asked.
I told her it had been, and then tried to be as tiny as possible and just get away from all of them. I walked a few feet down the hallway and then turned back around. I ripped the sign with my name off the door. Why advertise that you have the smallest dressing room in the history of Saturday Night Live?
Later in the season, I learned that my dressing room crisis wasn’t the worst ever, because at least I had a dressing room. I was bitching and moaning to everyone about it one night when Mike Myers pulled me aside. Mike told me that the size of my dressing room was indeed bullshit, but he had it much worse when he was first hired on the show. He went on to tell me that for the first two years he was on the show, he didn’t have a dressing room or an office. Mike Shoemaker had informed him that they simply did not have any room for him, so for two years, Mike Myers sat on the floor across from the elevators with his notebooks spread out around him.
I couldn’t believe it! We’re talking about Mike Myers. He told me his legs cramped from sitting Indian-style for hours at a time. When I asked him if he complained to anyone, he told me that he hadn’t because he was worried that he had never actually been hired. Mike apparently had never been given the welcome aboard from Marci or Mike Shoemaker or Jim Downey. Chris Farley never fake-vomited in his lap. The fact that he was forced to sit on the floor until a meeting was called or rehearsals began made him reluctant to broach the issue. He told me that after a while he figured that if the only place they had for him was on the floor across from the elevators, the next spot for him was probably out on the street.
Having gone mad my first season on the show feeling like an outcast, I was curious how Mike handled his own situation. He said that after a few weeks passed, he started bringing a tennis ball to work with him. Whenever the elevator doors opened on the seventeenth floor, Mike would throw the ball into the elevator as hard as he could so it would ricochet off the back wall of the elevator and bounce back. This version of catch was the way he worked out his frustrations. I asked him what he did when there were actually people in the elevator. Mike gave me a funny grin. “Oh, that was when it was the best!” he said.
I felt good about my conversation with Mike Myers because I was communicating with others about the show—something I was unable to do my first year. I appreciated the fact that Mike had taken the time to commiserate with me. It was somehow comforting to know that one of the show’s biggest stars had gone through even more bullshit than I had.
After being inaugurated into my new dressing room, I walked back to the studio. The sketch I was in wasn’t even close to being rehearsed. The camera blocking was taking longer than expected, and the cast was still rehearsing one of the first sketches in the rundown. I probably had about an hour to kill. I wasn’t going to go back to my new dressing room, so I went to my old one. I was hoping that the topic of conversation being “this used to be my dressing room” would take up some of the time.
I knocked on the door that read CHRIS ELLIOTT and there was no answer. I opened the door and Chris wasn’t inside. Tim Meadows was coming