Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [25]
My interview was with a segment producer named Gail and the exec producer Sally. Sally was a stout, masculine-looking woman, but not unattractive. She reminded me of a blond Rosie O’Donnell in her height: appealing, confident, and a tiny bit brusque.
They were both very nice, and seemed highly concerned about filling a position made vacant by their last PA, who had left abruptly for Teach for America. (Thank you, Teach for America! Luring away America’s finest minds so that the rest of us can snatch up their jobs.) My interview lasted eight minutes. I could type, I could get coffee, I didn’t have an accent. I guess Old Throbby on my forehead was my lucky charm!
Working for a TV psychic was not what my parents envisioned after investing in my degree, but the job had health benefits, and this pleased my mother. My mother is a doctor, and somewhat of a militant on the subject of health benefits, which is why I may seem slightly obsessed with them. The description of the PPO was more exciting than the job itself. I was working at a job that was vaguely in the world of television making $500 a week! Cue Madonna’s “Holiday”! It’s margarita time!
I always thought mediums were supposed to be old crones with glass eyes of the Drag Me to Hell variety, but Mac Teegarden turned out to be a wildly normal guy. He was a thirty-ish former phlebotomist and ballroom dance instructor with a Long Island accent. He was attractive in a Mario Lopez way, with slicked-back hair and a wardrobe of tight long-sleeve T-shirts. He looked like the kind of guy who lifts weights twice a day, is a great husband, and goes to Manhattan nightclubs with his wife four months after Justin Timberlake went there. I liked him a lot.
My immediate boss was Gail, the one who’d interviewed me. Gail was forty, single, and loved the world created by Sex and the City more passionately than any other person I knew; I think she would’ve disappeared into the show if she could have. (Let me take a moment here to stress again just how pervasive the Sex and the City culture was in New York in 2002. You could be an NYU freshman, a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker, or an Orthodox Jewish woman living in a yeshiva: you watched Sex and the City.) Without knowing me at all, Gail nicknamed me Minz. I respond very well to people being overly familiar with me a little too soon. It shows effort and kindness. I try to do this all the time. It makes me feel part of a big, familial, Olive Garden-y community.
Gail would talk at length on Mondays about Sex and the City (the day after the show aired) and how it perfectly mirrored her life. I could tell she wanted to have a TV-show-worthy Manhattan existence, and I knew I was a disappointment to her when I failed to fill the adorable minority sidekick role. (By the way, I in no way mean to impugn the fun job of minority sidekick. Minority sidekicks always get to wear Hawaiian shirts and Tevas and stuff. I would gladly be the Indian female version of what Rob Schneider is to Adam Sandler, to just about anyone.)
“How is your love life, Minz?” she would ask hungrily, hoping to be entertained by raunchy details.
I had none. “Um, you know. So hard to meet guys,” I answered vaguely, hoping my lack of a sex life would seem mysterious and not pathetic.
“You’re such a Charlotte,” she replied. Gail found lemons and made lemonade. That’s the one nice thing about being a dork about men: you can sometimes play it off as restrained and classy.
Gail loved to talk about how stressed she was. She would do this thing where we’d be walking in the hallway, and suddenly she’d stop in her tracks, rub both of her temples with her index and middle fingers, and theatrically let out a deep guttural moan: “Mooog.”
“Mooog. Minz. I am