I spent Good Friday with Tina Fey. We had an amazing day together. It was not unlike that time Liz Lemon took some relaxants for a flight and ended up hallucinating she sat next to Oprah. In fact it was exactly like that.
I sat on the couch with her new memoir, Bossypants and hung off her every word. I even prolonged finishing it by interspersing the chapters with the relevant YouTube clips of her on SNL, Oprah, Letterman and 30 Rock.
I should probably state up front that there is no chance I could possibly give this book an unbiased or critical analysis or review. I simply LOVE her too much (as evidenced by drug-free visions of her while reading.)
But it’s not possible to not love her right? I’m sorry but I’m going to have to go right ahead and judge you if you don’t. She’s just so smart and funny and talented and honest and imperfect and successful and wow it was just such a pleasure to crawl inside her head for a while.
I guess I knew a lot of the the main parts of her story already; she was a theatre geek at school who surrounded herself with a group of older, mostly gay friends. She did years of, at times, questionable amateur improv and turned it in to a terribly awkward interview with Lorne Michaels that became a job at SNL. She was the first female head writer there and then got the chance to start her own show (the magnificent 30 Rock). Along the way she got married and had a baby. Also she was a virgin til she was 24 and is quiet happy for it to be a punch line ("I couldn't give it away") . In the book all of her successes and fumbling, awkward failures are told in excruciatingly honest and hilarious detail.
Naturally Tina is a great writer; sarcastic and self deprecating but she’s also very generous and kind. She even takes readers through all of the individual writers from 30 Rock – telling you their individual strengths and including her favourite parts of their material. (Sidebar here: Danny Glover from one of my favourite-ever-shows Community was a writer on the show for the first season or so.)
The most surprising part of the book for me was the sexism that was so present and accepted in the early part of her career at SNL and while she doesn’t say as much she was obviously integral in changing the culture there.
I guess in my “magazine bubble” I kind of thought those attitudes wouldn’t have existed in such recent times in a fun, progressive environment like SNL. Tina’s way (when she was a boss and even before) was always to deal with this stuff with her most powerful weapon; her super sonic sense of humour. (Hello Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin!)
Look, obviously I’m so love-drunk on Tina both pre and post reading this it’s hard to pick a high point though as a mag-lady I do LOVE her take on Photoshop...
“Some people say Photoshop is a feminist issue. I agree, because the best Photoshop job I ever got was for a feminist magazine called Bust in 2004. It was a low-budget shoot in the back of their downtown office. There was no free coffee bar or wind machine, just a bunch of intelligent women with a sense of humor. I looked at the two paltry lights they had set up and
turned to the editors. “We’re all feminists here, but you’re gonna use Photoshop, right?” “Oh, yeah,” they replied instantly. Feminists do the best Photoshop because they leave the meat on your bones. They don’t change your size or your skin color. They leave in your disgusting knuckles, but they may take out some armpit stubble. Not because they’re denying its existence, but because they understand that it’s okay to make a photo look as if you were caught on your best day in the best light.”
I also adored an anecdote when Amy Poehler first stared at SNL and snapped back at Jimmy Fallon when he made a sexist remark and inside her head she thought, “My friend is here! My friend is here!”
Yeh, so I liked it.
“ Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.”
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