Gasping for Airtime - Jay Mohr [80]
A few minutes before the meeting ended, Roseanne gulped a bellyful of air and let out a monster. With a stern look, the assistant stage manager, Bob Van Rye, shushed her. The scoldings only made Roseanne’s burps more important to her. When the meeting was over, she walked out of the office burping. My take on this is that she is obviously mentally ill.
Initially, the weird stuff that would happen in meetings with the hosts would incite panic attacks. But by the midpoint of the second season, these happenings simply amused me. On show number ten, I wasn’t in any sketches, Luscious Jackson was the musical guest, and Jeff Daniels got his face ripped off.
The culprit was a prosthetic. When prosthetics are applied, the makeup department uses a special glue that cannot be taken off your face without first being loosened by an acetone solution. To remove the prosthetic, the makeup people would dip the edge of their paint-brushes in the solution, slice little lines through the prosthetic pieces, and then slide the brush up under the prosthetic to separate it from the skin. There was no other way to get it off.
But somehow, there was a mixup on the Friday night that Jeff Daniels had his life cast removed. The jar of solution labeled as prosthetic glue was in fact some kind of Krazy Glue. When the life cast was being taken off Jeff, the acetone solution wasn’t working. The makeup artist tugged and pulled on the prosthetic and it became obvious that something was wrong. Someone had Krazy Glued the prosthetics onto Jeff Daniels’s face!
I was later told that it was around midnight on Friday when Jeff finished rehearsals and the makeup department began removing his life cast. There weren’t any doctors available at that hour, and taking the star of Saturday Night Live to the emergency room the night before his live performance wasn’t a viable option. Someone at the show had the bright idea to call downtown to the New York University Medical School, and an hour later, four or five interns arrived at the eighth floor of 30 Rock and began the process of injecting Novocain through the life cast into Jeff Daniels’s face.
After Daniels’s face was numb, the interns ripped the prosthetic pieces off his face, taking off a layer of skin with it. The story was that Jeff was in so much pain that he ripped the arms off the makeup chair, a feat requiring near superhuman strength, as the chairs were built like old barbershop chairs.
It was quite a mystery as to how the mixup occurred. The makeup artist swore the jar was labeled correctly—meaning that someone had deliberately switched the safe glue with the Krazy Glue. The makeup artist who put the glue on was a guy named Jack, and he was always straight with me. Honest and professional, Jack was another lifer who had been with the show since the first episode. If he said the jar was labeled correctly, then it was labeled correctly. In fact, the other makeup artists were kind and honest, too, and I couldn’t imagine any of them pulling such a nasty stunt. But someone was hiding the truth, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever figured out what really happened.
Jeff Daniels, however, was the ultimate pro. He returned on Saturday night and did the show. I couldn’t detect any layers of skin missing from his face.
When George Foreman hosted, he didn’t bring his grill, but he did talk to me about real fear. That week I had a bit part in a “Motivational Speaker” sketch with him about a