Why Not Me? (16 page)

4:45 p.m.

Sometimes during the day there is a birthday in the writers’ room, so I will scurry over for a quick round of “Happy Birthday,” jam some cake in my mouth, and head back to set. It’s important to make a big deal about birthdays at work because we spend so many hours here, and enormous amounts of food makes you miss your family less.

5:00 p.m. and throughout the day

Around five p.m. and later, I get very silly. Ike and I have a terrible habit of setting each other off on laughing fits, or “breaking,” that makes it impossible to continue to shoot the show, and it’s worse in the afternoon because my tiredness is starting to set in. It can sometimes be a line of dialogue, but usually it’s something tiny: an especially belabored sigh, a little facial twitch, the way one of us chooses to plop down in a roller chair. I’ve even lost it by the way that Ike puts his glasses on. This happens about once a week and lasts seven to ten minutes. These are some of my favorite times with him and on set.

If I am lucky, at least once an episode we have some kind of party or birthday scene and I get to eat cake on camera. Prop cake is the sweetest kind of cake because, unlike with regular cake, it has no calories because my
character
is eating it, not me. That’s how it works. Also, I am
getting paid to eat cake.
It’s a Two-Caker Day when it’s a writer’s birthday and cake is called for in a scene—a day as rare and wonderful as Halley’s Comet.

5:30 p.m.

During another set-up, I take my golf cart over to the soundstage, where I do ADR, which stands for additional dialogue recording. That’s the disembodied voice you hear at the beginning of an episode. Such as this:

MINDY (voiceover)

It’s so great to be back in New York in the winter. Curling up in a warm bed next to the one you love. The only problem is, I’m pregnant and morning-sick as hell.

6:00 p.m.

Getting in a quick nap. I sleep so deeply, and so quickly, my writer Tracey Wigfield has commented that when I close my eyes to nap, “It’s like you die for a few minutes.”

6:15 p.m.

More shooting.

8:00 p.m.

When we are shooting, I am always able to find creative places to take quick naps. Eleven years into this, I am able to sleep through any amount of noise and temperature. Sometimes I wake up and hope I slept through a
Walking Dead
–type zombie apocalypse and I have to lead humans into a new world order.

8:15 p.m.

I am wrapped on set! It’s not like you see in plays and movies where someone yells “That’s a wrap!” and then the cast all changes into street clothes and grabs their backpacks and goes to a local bar. When we wrap, everyone tears off their costumes and races home to their neglected children, only to find they have begun to call the nanny “Daddy.” I go to my trailer to look over my lines for the next day and accidentally call Sonia my wife.

8:30 p.m.

I then wash my face free of makeup and throw on my street clothes and re-join the writers for dinner. Our writers get along very well, but the fights we’ve had over what we should eat for dinner are the most acrimonious Lannister/Stark throwdowns I’ve ever been a part of.

9:30 p.m.

After the writers leave, I head to editing. Here is my quiet sanctuary, where it is just me, the editor, a bag of McDonald’s, and the episode in front of me. “Let’s make something really special,” I say to my editor, Dave Rogers, who worked on
Seinfeld
and
The Office
. “Get your feet off the coffee table,” he replies. We have fun.

12:30 a.m.

About 50 percent of the time, I have enough energy to remove my clothes and put on pajamas when I go to bed. Otherwise I just fall asleep in the clothes I went to work in, which I like to think of as a sexy, ongoing walk of shame.

And then I sleep and dream of birthday cakes to come, both fake and real.