Dratch Quotes

I'm working on a review for my friend's blog GIRLS LIKE GIANTS on Rachel Dratch's new comic memoir GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR... I already talked about it a bit here, and I do more analysis of the book in the GLG review. In short, the book is great and I highly recommend it. There are a lot of very funny and poignant parts that I couldn't broach in the review, so I thought I would include some handy quotes here. Most of the ones included here are the showbiz bits. A few toward the end focus on romance and pregnancy, but I left out the funniest ones because I didn't want to spoil them, just give enough enticement to read the book.

p. 9-10 "….When I first got hired on SNL, I was warned by the other actors: Don’t read what they say about you on the Internet. With newfound fame, that’s like telling a child, ‘Whatever you do, don’t look behind this door.’ My fellow cast member Ana Gasteyer would call the act of reading people’s comments about yourself on the Internet ‘cutting’, as in the mental illness of cutting yourself with sharp objects. She’d come in and say, 'I cut last night.' Occasionally, you would look online if you were feeling masochistic. Early in my SNL career, I stopped pretty much for good when I saw one comment that hit me in the face like a frying pan. Actually, that was the comment. It said I looked as if I had been hit in the face by a frying pan."

p. 14 "….Maybe all those meanies on the Internet were right; maybe a bunch of focus groups watched the (30 Rock) pilot and checked off a box marked 'No!' Maybe the way it works for a new show is a bunch of TV execs sit around a room with some wires and EKGs attached to their wangs, and when I was on screen, the needle dipped dangerously into the Code Red Anti-Boner Zone. I was starting to feel like the ten years of training and performing and sweating it out pre-SNL, plus the seven years at SNL, all went out the window because I didn’t have a symmetrical face…."

p. 44-5 (re: first appearance in 3^rd ep of 1999-2000 season as Calista Flockhart) "... Lorne is very careful about your first appearance on the show. He wants you to really knock it out of the park and do something that will wow the audience, not come on with a piece that just goes OK…."

p. 56 "Oh, to have a hit character on SNL: the inexact science, the alignment of the planets to be just so, every cog in the wheel having to spin precisely right so that the germ of an idea in your brain can be crafted well enough to make it through the elaborate process to become reality and be seen by millions which propels you into the status of cultural icon for the rest of history… or at least for that week."

p. 72 "…. I can report to you that at Burning Man, Sexy Cat Syndrome is in full effect. By that I mean that there are plenty of women there who would never dress up as a witch or ghost on Halloween. Even though they were San Fran Nature Girls, come Halloween they’d be Sexy Cats as much as any Bridge and Tunnel chick who comes into NYC on the weekends. Or maybe instead they’d say,  'I’m a space fairy!' but still find a way to wear just a G-string and some wings. These chicks had supermodel bodies and were traipsing around the desert in nothing but silver Grace Jones boots and body paint. Where were the old ladies with long gray hair and low-hangers? I’d come to the middle of the desert expecting a spiritual experience, only to feel the kind of inadequacy usually reserved for seeing a Victoria’s Secret ad. Fantastic…. the men who seemed inclined to disrobe, much fewer in number, were all Haight-Ashbury throwbacks over the age of seventy with long beards and leathery skin. Where was the equity?"

p. 97 (on people telling her "It will happen when you’re not looking!") "…. That’s what people would always tell me… These people are NEVER single, by the way. Have you ever, ever had a friend who is single say to you, 'It will happen when you’re not looking'? No. You haven’t. The people that say it always have a bright smile, happily ensconced in a relationship. 'It will happen when you’re not looking!' 

"Well, I could 'not look' like a champ! Not looking is easy! You just do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. Of course, this strategy completely goes against the other 50 percent of the time when those same people tell you, 'Get out there! Don’t sit at home!' or 'My cousin went on Match.com and now she’s married!'"

p. 214-5 "…. When I realized I had cheated the whole system and would have a baby without a marriage, I no longer cared about marriage. This great anxiety lifted from me. I didn’t have a time clock and I was going to have a baby and if love were meant to happen, it could happen whenever on its own time. Marriage started to seem like a silly social convention to me. Then I found myself in the position where the man I had been casually dating was going to be seeing me attached to a breast pump on a regular basis. At this point marriage made a lot more sense to me. If you have any desire to have a man stay by your side and he’s going to see you hooked up to a breast pump, you should probably be bound by a legal contract."

p. 217 "I looked down and realized that in my haste in the morning, I had slipped my maternity jeans on backward at six a.m. and hadn’t noticed all day long. The moment vanity officially leaves your life is when you look down to discover an asslike configuration where your front pockets should be."

And the ones that I think sum it all up in the best way.

p. 139 "…. I definitely wanted kids. But here I was at forty, forty-one, forty-two, now forty-three. I kept moving up the window of fertility and possibility, trying to block out the statistics with which I was bombarded, but to be realistic, I started to adjust to the fact that I wasn’t having kids. I was trying genuinely and oh so gradually to become OK with that; I had to focus on the benefits of my life. Some friends’ marriages were beginning to crumble and other friends were completely consumed with shuttling to soccer games and swim meets..."

  "…. for the most part, I realized that as we grow older, we adjust and roll with what we have in the present, though it may not be the future we had dreamed up for ourselves in the past…."

Weighty Writing

"Re: the quintessential lady writer. She was fat in high school. Whether she is still fat doesn't matter. It has already colored her point of view and made her very mad. She will always be fat inside. She beats you to death with her brains, but you don't know you're being killed because you're laughing so hard. Try to remember all humor starts with hostility (cf., comedy writer).

"She goes through a lot of therapy. Trying to get in touch with all those feelings nestled beneath all that fat. When she gets to them, and discovers she's as hideous on the inside as on the outside, she becomes truly furious. The finding of these feelings gives her total permission to forget about yours.

"She makes serious money with some clever writing. But money is more often the scorecard for men. Sex is her scorecard, critical to her self-image, probably because she was laid so infrequently when it was first coming on... Now lots of men who eschewed her company in high school sleep with her to curry favor but she never knows if they love her for herself or her one-liners. Too afraid to find out, she sharpens her skills, often on other women...

"Deep down, she just wants to be a cheerleader and fuck the quarterback... who just wants to fuck the tight end..."

Phillips, Julia. YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN. New York: Random House, 1991. Print. p. 425.

Straying or Staying?

"This is a radical oversimplification, but Hollywood tends to sort women into two categories: those with bodies that fall within the generally accepted parameters for commercialized beauty, and those who don’t. If an actress’s body falls within those parameters, all kinds of stories are available to her: she can have a career, a child, be a warrior, a lover, a genius, a drunk. But if an actress’s body doesn’t meet those standards, most of the stories she will be allowed to literally embody will be drawn from the non-conformity of her looks...."

Alyssa Rosenberg, "Lena Dunham's Looks, the Misogyny of the GIRLS Backlash, and Staying in Your Assigned Story", THINKPROGRESS

Comment to full text of story by respondent Elise S.: "I completely disagree with this statement: 'What’s fascinating about Hannah, and what guaranteed a backlash to GIRLS is the character’s absolute refusal to stay in her place. She’s hungry for sex but not grateful for it. She has no need for Adam or anyone else to teach her that she deserves to be treated well: Hannah knows that, demands it, negotiates her shaky way towards it.'

"1. There's no refusal to stay in her place because she HAS no place. This is a story about a girl who is utterly lost. She doesn't know who she is, where she's going, or what she wants out of her life other than she wants to write. That's all she's got.

"2. I don't know what sex scenes you're watching, but she's definitely grateful for it. That's why she keeps calling Adam despite the fact that he treats her like crap, and disappears for weeks at a time and only responds to her when there's going to be sex involved.

"3. She makes absolutely no demands about being treated well. She repeatedly puts herself into situations where she's totally disrespected. It's so infuriating to watch that I find myself yelling at her to get some self-respect.

"If anything, I think Hannah falls into the exact place that Hollywood expects her to - based on her looks. She doesn't fit the traditional norms of 'pretty' so she's free to allow herself to be disrespected. She's not allowed to be in a happy relationship with a traditionally Hollywood 'good looking' guy."