Yes Please (7 page)

H
ELLO, EVERYONE. MY NAME IS SETH MEYERS
and I will be writing this next chapter so that Amy can take a break. It is very hard to write a book. I haven’t written one myself but I know it’s very hard because every time I have seen Amy in the past year she has greeted me by saying, “Hello,” quickly followed by, “It is very hard to write a book.” At one of these meet-ups I offered to write a chapter for her so she could rest. She said, “Yes please.” After I complete this favor for Amy I will only owe her one thousand more favors. I am not unique in my great debt to her. Most of Amy’s friends owe her around one thousand favors. She never holds it over you though. She’s not that kind of person.

I’m going to write about the night that Amy gave birth to her first son, Archie.

Before I get there, a bit of background. I first saw Amy Poehler perform in Chicago at a theater called ImprovOlympic in the midnineties. That theater is now called “iO” because the Olympics threatened to sue. The International Olympic Committee was worried people would walk into a one-hundred-seat theater on the corner of Clark and Addison and wonder why no one was jumping over hurdles.

The night I first saw Amy, she and the other performers were playing an improv game called “The Dream.” She asked for a volunteer to come onstage and tell her about their day. I raised my hand and she picked me. My first conversation with Amy was in front of an audience: me in a chair, her standing beside me. She was charming, funny, sweet, and sharp, and I left thinking, “I would like to be her friend.”

The next time I saw Amy perform was with Tina Fey in the same theater. They were workshopping a show called
Women of Color
. I would learn later that it was the only performance of that show. Amy would move to New York soon after and Tina would quickly follow. There weren’t a lot of people in the audience that night and for a while I thought seeing Amy and Tina perform in Chicago right before they left and got famous would be the most interesting thing that ever happened to me. In my mind it was like seeing the Beatles in Hamburg. And much, I’m sure, like someone who saw the Beatles in Hamburg, I talked about it so much that my friends eventually said, “
Genug
.”

At this point, my relationship to Amy was the same as everyone else’s. I was a fan.

I auditioned for
SNL
in 2001. My manager called me to tell me I had been hired. He then listed the other new cast members, one of whom was Amy. My first thought after hanging up the phone wasn’t “Oh my god, I’m going to be on
SNL
,” it was “Oh my god, I might get to be friends with Amy Poehler.”

I am happy to say we were friends right away.

I won’t bore you with the details of our many years of friendship and collaboration on the show for no other reason than it is likely Amy has dedicated dozens of pages to that topic in this very book. I wouldn’t be surprised if a photo of me graces the cover of this book. To take up any more time talking about it would be redundant.

Instead I will pick up the action years later on the Saturday before the Saturday Amy became a mother. Josh Brolin was hosting the show that week, but this fact would soon be rendered a footnote when Sarah Palin agreed to do a cameo.

In 2008, under intense pressure from the comedians’ lobby, Senator John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. This brought much good fortune to
SNL
in the form of Tina Fey’s mimicry. However, the fact that Governor Palin would actually be appearing on the show was not immediately greeted with cheers.

It wasn’t that we weren’t excited to have her on; we just didn’t know what to do with her once she got there. When you perform a sketch about a person when they’re not in the room you have a great deal more freedom than when they are in the room. It was understood that we’d have to write a sketch with Tina and the governor, and we did. It was a soup of moving parts; Alec Baldwin, Lorne, and Mark Wahlberg made cameos, there were some jokes, and it went well.

Sensing that the audience might want more, on Friday night Lorne suggested using Governor Palin a second time, on “Weekend Update.” We sat in our weekly joke read kicking around ideas that failed to inspire any enthusiasm. For a laugh, someone said the governor could do a rap, perhaps starting with the line “I’m Sarah Palin and I’m here to say . . .” Someone else suggested that the governor could get cold feet and Amy could do the rap instead. I don’t remember if either of these ideas was meant to be real but I do remember that Amy’s eyes went wide with glee and she left the room with a notebook in hand. The next time I saw her she was on the phone with the wardrobe department barking orders like mission control trying to get a shuttle back. “I need Eskimo suits for Fred and Andy, a snowmobile suit for Jason, and a moose suit for Bobby.”

Take a second here. Go back and watch the Palin Rap one more time. Maybe you forgot how convincing and believable Sarah Palin was when she said she wasn’t going to do the piece; maybe you forgot exactly how pregnant Amy was when she stood up from behind the desk; you probably remember that Amy was good but you likely forgot exactly
how
good. It is a performance without artifice. She’s not play-rapping. She’s rapping. I still get goose bumps when I think of Amy screaming, “I’m an animal and I’m bigger than you!” And the whole time she was doing it, for every single second of it, there was a little person sloshing (that’s the correct medical term, yes? Sloshing?) around in her belly.

That person, Archie, is getting older every day, and soon he will be aware enough to watch and appreciate what his mother was doing on national television the week before he was born. When I want to smile, I think of that.

A week later, on the Friday before the Saturday that Amy became a mother, the entire cast stayed late to block a sketch called “The Barack Obama Variety Half Hour.” On a normal week, the last piece rehearsed was usually a smaller piece with a handful of cast members cursing their luck that they had to stay at the studio until eleven
P.M
. the night before a show. This time, having everyone there together was a luxury and a delight.

While we waited for the cameras to set up, Maya and Fred started a bit pretending they were onstage for the seventy-fifth anniversary of
SNL
. Moving slowly and speaking softly, they delighted us with wooden award-show banter wherein they tried to remember the lines to their old sketches. Bill Hader took the stage pretending to be his own son and gave a speech about how much his “pops” had talked about working on the show before he died.

We were all enjoying ourselves that night, but no one more than Amy. She was laughing the hardest but that wasn’t surprising. In my time at
SNL
no one was quicker or more gracious with a laugh than Amy—never more so than at the weekly table read, when it was needed most. When a new cast member or writer had a piece bombing to such silence that you could almost hear their pores expelling sweat, you could always count on Amy to give them a laugh. Though to be fair, it was less a laugh and more of a cackle. The writer Alex Baze described it as the sound one hears when running over a raven’s foot with a shopping cart. It is, without exaggeration, one of my favorite sounds on earth.

We all headed home around midnight, in a great mood.

A quick but necessary tangent: For years Amy has called me “Coco” and I have called her “Moses.” These nicknames sprung from a “Weekend Update” joke about a six-foot-tall camel named Moses and his tiny pony sidekick, Coco, who had escaped from a zoo in Texas. I don’t remember the joke but I do remember that we laughed every time we said “a six-foot-tall camel named Moses and his tiny pony sidekick, Coco.”

At three
A.M
. or so on Saturday morning Amy texted me. “Water broke, Coco! You’re gonna do great!”

And that text is pretty much all you need to know about Amy. Instead of focusing on any of her fear, her excitement, or the anticipation that comes with giving birth for the first time, she sent
me
words of encouragement. And when I went out to do “Update” without her I was glad she had. I was nervous and lonely but I remembered that “You’re gonna do great!” and felt better. Amy is rarely wrong.

Doing comedy for a living is, in a lot of ways, like a pony and a camel trying to escape from the zoo. It’s a ridiculous endeavor and has a low probability of success, but most importantly, it is way easier if you’re with a friend.

So that’s my chapter. I am going to shake Amy awake now so she can continue with the hard work of writing a book for all of us. I hope she got some rest!

© Liezl Estipona

BIRTHING PLAN

To all Caregivers, Doctors,

Obstetrical Fellows, TMZ Interns,

and Hospital Staff:

We are looking forward to the birth of our child and ask that the following wishes be respected during our birth process.

We have chosen to give birth in a hospital because of the outstanding facilities it makes available to us. We would also like to deliver our baby in a hospital since we spent most of our twenties getting stoned and watching episodes of
ER
, and so we know that delivering a baby is the best way to cheer up an attractive but beleaguered doctor. Please make sure our doctor is handsome and “cares too much.” We considered a home birth, but we just got our hardwood floors redone. We also considered a birthing tub, but the mother is concerned the water won’t be warm enough. Is it too late to flood the hospital room? Or turn it into a really fun foam party? We are sorry for asking. The mother is very pregnant and would like to remind everyone her brain has turned into spaghetti.

Those we plan to have present at our birth include: Baby, Mother, Father, Grandparents, Lawyers, Agents, Lottery Winners, Lookie-Loos, Midwife, First Wife, Life Coach, Finnoula the Doula, Unexpected Ghosts, Bossy Astrologist, and the entire cast of
Cheers
. All other visitors and unnecessary staff may be turned away, unless they are wearing something cute. Or bring hot wings for the father.