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KRISTEN: Yes! I always think that when I listen to this!

ME: That’s hilarious. Hey, do you want to go get some lunch and then hit Crabtree & Evelyn?

KRISTEN (as though I’m an idiot): Uhhh yeah. I mean if we can even fit out the door of this tiny office.

ME: You’re so bad.

(We laugh and laugh.)

KRISTEN: Seriously, I wish we could’ve gone to Woodstock together.

This interaction didn’t happen. As it turned out, Kristen Wiig was kind of busy at Saturday Night Live. She was almost never in our office. She was either rehearsing on set, at a fitting, or writing sketches with other people in their offices. It made sense, but it was disappointing.

At dinnertime, one Wednesday night, some production assistants brought out huge bags of food and put them on the main writers’ conference room table. People trickled out of their offices to eat. I had spent the last four hours trying to write a sketch where Bill Hader was a pregnant female cat. I don’t know why, but it seemed so funny to me at the time. Like so funny I would stop and look up at the ceiling thinking: “Oh man, this is gonna be so great when the others hear this aloud. Like ‘Land Shark’ for a new generation.”

Among some of the writers were Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Rachel Dratch, and Tina Fey. It was a pretty awesome group, especially because a Tina sighting was rare back then, since she was editing her pilot (which was the pilot for 30 Rock). While they all talked and goofed around, I sat at the table listening and smiling and saying nothing, like an upbeat foreign exchange student who spoke very little English.

The last time I had felt like that was when I was in ninth grade and I would have to wait after school in the eleventh-graders’ student center for my brother to get his stuff so he could drive us home. I stood there smiling like an idiot, just excited to be in the presence of all these cool older people. “Stop smiling so much,” my brother said to me once when he came to get me. “You look like a maniac.”

I cowrote one bit that made it to air. It was a segment for Weekend Update where Chad Michael Murray was talking to Tina and Amy about why he needed to get married so much instead of just date women. Because even though he doesn’t affect anyone in the slightest, I simply felt Chad Michael Murray needed to be satirized! Will Forte played the part valiantly. That might have been the most unnecessary little piece of comedy ever to grace Saturday Night Live. “Mom, Dad, I wrote a sketch for SNL. I’ll explain who Chad Michael Murray is later.”

My Bill Hader pregnant cat sketch got read at the table and went over so poorly I remember wondering if I should fake meningitis so that I could blame that for such a bad sketch. Or if I could, at all, play it off as so ironically terrible it was good. What? I’m not hipster enough for that? I started writing my agent an e-mail asking if I could leave after my first week there. I was literally in the middle of writing it when I heard a knock on my and Kristen’s door. It was Amy Poehler.

ME: Hi. Kristen is on the stage, I think, but I can leave her a message.

AMY: Oh, I wanted to talk to you.

Amy went on to ask if I was going to go out with some of the writers and actors after work. I nodded yes, which was a huge lie. I had planned on sprinting back to the Sofitel (where they were putting me up a few blocks away) and falling asleep watching the syndicated That ’70s Show, which I had done every night since I landed in New York. But Amy, being warm, prescient, Amy, said knowingly, “Why don’t I just wait here for you and we can walk over together?”

Everyone has a moment when they discover they love Amy Poehler. For most people it happened sometime during her run on Saturday Night Live. For some it was when she came back to the show in 2009, nine months’ pregnant, and did that complicated, hard-core Sarah Palin rap on Weekend Update.

I first noticed Amy when I was in high school and I saw her on Conan’s first show. She was in a sketch playing Andy Richter’s “little sister