Romantic Comedy(13)
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
“Yeah, that was a real slap-down from him in Nigel’s office.”
I thought of telling Danny about my recent encounter with Noah, but how would I tell it? I wasn’t sure. Instead, I said, “Thanks for noticing.”
Danny smirked as he handed back the pages. He said, “Chuckles, everyone noticed.”
Wednesday, 2:57 p.m.
In the interlude between turning in my sketches and the table read, I took a cab home, fell asleep for an hour, woke, showered, and walked to the Seventy-ninth Street subway station. As I stood on the platform waiting, I read the texts that had come in during my nap, which included two from my college roommate, Denise, the pediatrician, who lived in Austin. Responding to my question about if Viv’s ophthalmologist could ask her out, Denise had written:
Doctor should not ask her out. But I don’t know specific laws or rules. I know it is different with psychologist/psychiatrist where it might be unethical.
Then: Is this for a sketch or real life?
Real life, I typed back. Can my friend ask the dr out?
From Henrietta, to both Viv and me, there was a photo of a bag of coffee-flavored potato chips, along with a text: Did we know these exist?
When I reached the seventeenth floor of 66, Henrietta and Viv were sitting on the couch of my office, and Danny was at his desk. Viv tilted the potato chip bag in my direction, and I took one, which looked like a regular potato chip topped with a dusting of cinnamon. I bit off a tiny amount as Danny said, “It’s not the worst thing ever.”
I swallowed. “Or is it?”
Danny reached out and took a few more, stuffed them in his mouth, and said while chewing, “They’re wrong but weirdly compelling.”
Henrietta said, “Like Log Cabin Republicans.”
“Or that monkey in Japan who was caught trying to fuck a deer,” Viv added.
As we all walked down the hall to the conference room, I said to Viv, “My college roommate said Dr. Eyeballs isn’t supposed to ask you out, but I asked if you can ask him. I’m waiting to hear.”
Viv grimaced. “Yeah, I don’t really do that.”
“What’s it like to be so beautiful you never have to make the first move?”
She laughed. “Advantageous yet burdensome. Also, in my case, complicated by America’s ongoing misogynoir.”
The conference room was full as we entered, with most seats taken around the pushed-together tables in the center, as well as around the perimeter of the room. There were even more staff members at read-throughs than at pitch meetings, including from hair and makeup, wardrobe, set design, and the music department. Spread over the tables were scripts of the sketches and, because we’d be there for three hours, bottled waters and scattered platters of sandwiches, salad, cut-up fruit, chips (presumably not coffee-flavored), and cookies. Whether you considered this meal breakfast, lunch, or dinner depended on how late you’d been up the night before.
Danny, Viv, and Henrietta all took seats at the table that had been saved for them. I took a second-perimeter seat, my back to the windows that overlooked muffled honking traffic and muffled frolicking tourists seventeen stories below. Noah Brewster was in the middle of the tables’ south side, to the left of Nigel, who always narrated the stage directions in all the sketches. The worse the sketch was being received, the faster he read.
It happened that I was about twenty feet from Noah but directly in front of him, and when we made eye contact, he smiled and I felt a wild surge inside me, though I wasn’t sure if it was panic, excitement, or something else. He was painfully handsome, yes, but I had already known that. I reflexively looked away, as if we were strangers who’d accidentally locked eyes on the subway. Then I realized that looking away had been rude and odd, because we weren’t subway strangers. We were, if only for this week, colleagues, and part of my job was to make him comfortable. I quickly looked back, saw that his smile had been replaced with a more quizzical expression, and forced a smile of my own. When I did, he raised a hand and waved. Then a cast member named Bailey, TNO’s first nonbinary performer, leaned in from Noah’s left and said something, and Noah turned toward them and replied, and they both laughed.
Elliot, the head writer, called the meeting to order by sticking two fingers in each corner of his mouth and whistling, and we got down to it. Cast members who’d turned in sketches always gave themselves the leading role, which they’d read, whereas writers assigned roles to various cast members, and these assignments sometimes stuck and sometimes didn’t. If Nigel decided a cast member, especially a favored one, had a “light week,” he might unilaterally make reassignments as a sketch advanced.
We started with a sketch about the porn actress alleging that Trump had paid her to keep quiet about their affair, then there was a sketch where Noah was performing the national anthem before an NFL game as a duet with a famous diva played by Henrietta, and they were competing over the high notes. The first sketch to make me really laugh was the one now titled Blue-Eyed Soul, by Tony, in which Noah was the white politician preaching to a Black congregation.
Even after nine years, I found table reads fascinating because they represented the intersection of multiple creative and psychological forces. In a room filled with the people who mattered in my life, but with no outside audience, I was always desperate with curiosity to find out how my sketches would be received and what the other sketches were like; I was often shocked by the brilliance of some sketches and the crumminess of others; and it was unsettlingly easy to infer social dynamics by the laughter and warmth, or lack of, with which a sketch was received. More than once, it had been at a table read that I’d first suspected two people were romantically involved, or that someone was going to be let go at the end of the season.
An hour and five minutes in, we got to The Danny Horst Rule. After what I’d thought of as my best line, there was only half-hearted laughter, while, to my chagrin, the loudest laugh lines were the ones Danny had written for himself. Still, I could feel that the sketch’s catchily self-referential premise meant it was likely to make it to the next stage.
Formal feedback didn’t happen during a table read—whether your sketch ended up in the lineup for the show was the feedback. But before we went on to the following sketch, the writer Jeremiah, who was sitting behind Nigel, said, “What I really respect is Sally’s fearlessness in the face of offending half the staff here.”
From my chair against the window, I said, “I’ll take that as confirmation that it strikes a chord.”
A writer named Jenna said, “And they lived heteronormatively ever after,” and Bailey leaned back from the table to fist-bump Jenna.