Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [70]
After rehearsing the “Buh-Bye” sketch, I stopped by the graphics department for a roll of duct tape. I spent the rest of the evening standing on my chair putting duct tape across Joe Dicso’s mouth on my wall. None of the other volume knobs in the dressing rooms were broken, just mine. Duct-taping someone’s mouth might be effective, but it had little effect on Joe’s voice coming out of the box. His voice was just as loud as it had been. It just sounded like somebody else’s. I was still being tortured every time an announcement was made, but I was glad the voice no longer sounded like Joe’s, because I liked Joe.
Later in the season, I received a one-week reprieve from my elevator shaft dressing room when one of the main cast members had an illness in his family and couldn’t be at the show on Saturday. To me, that meant a dressing room had just opened up. I badgered Marci Klein all week, saying that if anybody deserved to get the new dressing room, it was me. Marci agreed with me and assured me that come Saturday it would be mine.
The free dressing room was like the SNL presidential suite. It was a two-person corner room with enough space for two couches and two chairs and doors on both sides. One of the walls had a long mirror encircled with bright lights running across it. The place was twice the size of my first dressing room and ten times (no joke) the size of my new tiny one.
On Saturday, Marci kept her word and handed me the keys to the corner dressing room with the two doors. I put my backpack on the floor and started shadow-boxing. I had so much room that I could have jumped rope and jogged. I sat on both couches and measured them up against each other. Which one was I going to sit on all day? I had asked out of another courtroom sketch in which I played another speechless bailiff. Since I wasn’t in any other sketches, I had planned on watching golf with the lights off and sleeping until the show was over. I took off my shoes and lay on the winning couch to settle in. I was drifting off to sleep when there was a knock on one of the doors.
Marci was in the hallway outside my door standing with Beverly Hills 90210’s Brian Austin Green, who had a walk-on part on the show, and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, his girlfriend at the time. Marci introduced the three of us and informed me that they would be sharing the dressing room. We all shook hands and then Marci walked out of the dressing room and shut the door behind her. The dressing room didn’t look so big anymore.
The three of us sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Finally, Brian asked me if he could change the music on the boom box that I had brought to work that day. The CD that was playing was Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I asked him if he was serious and informed him that it was one of the greatest albums ever made. Brian Austin Green looked at me and said, “I only listen to rap.” Great. I was no longer spending the evening alone, napping in a giant dressing room and listening to jazz. I was now sharing a dressing room with two teen idols who took over my radio and played rap all night. I like rap a lot, but the fact that Brian Austin Green was picking which songs we were listening to was torture.
My evening was ruined until I started thinking about how much it must have sucked for Brian Austin Green. This poor guy