Free Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller

glacial formations.” This evolves into a discussion of glaciers, which ends with, “We have a lot of things to thank the glacier for — but who do we write to?”
    To offscreen director Dave Wilson in the control booth, Aykroyd asks obligingly, “More characters? More accents? Cleaner look?” But he’s dismissed to be replaced in front of the camera by Laraine Newman, who instantly becomes a chirpy and perky airline attendant: “Hi, my name is Sherry and I was made to fly…. When I was first thinking about becoming a stewardess, all my friends were really bugging me. They were coming up to me and saying things like, ‘Well, God, Sherry, why do you want to be a stewardess,’ you know? And I had to just sit down with myself and get super-reflective and ask myself, ‘Well, gosh, Sherry, why do you want to be a stewardess,’ you know? And I really realized that it’s because I love people. I really do. I love to serve ’em and try to help ’em fall asleep sitting up, you know?
    “Well, the real reason was, I had to get out of the Valley. I’m not kidding, man, it was really getting hairy. My boyfriend, Brad, and I were just falling apart. We had this really nice relationship, we were going to get married and everything, and like, he installed stereo systems and customized fans, you know, and all he ever talked about was woofers and tweeters and push-pull rods, man, and it was really boring. It really grossed me out royal. And my relationship with his parents wasn’t too cool either, because I wasn’t Jewish, you know, and I, like, made a peach cobbler and I heard them say, ‘Well, look. The shiksa made us a Presbyterian pie….”
    Bill Murray follows, introducing himself as Washington Redskin Dwayne Thomas and saying, “You know, professional football has been good to me.” He laments having been sentenced to “one-to-twenty in Texas for possession of herb,” then turns into interviewer “Jerry Aldini” and soon is doing an early version of Nick, the awful lounge singer, a character that helped establish him, after some early audience resistance, as a true star on Saturday Night Live. First he does a freewheeling version of the show tune “Hey There” from The Pajama Game : “Hey there, you with the starrrrrs in your eyes. Nobody told you what day it was, Nobody was surprised.” He pantomimes playing a cocktail piano, using the desk in front of him as a keyboard, threatening to sing and play “something by Bobby Vinton, something from his new ‘Polish Is Cool’ album….”
    Gilda Radner, surprisingly, seems the least at ease in front of the camera. She giggles, looks off toward the wings where Lorne Michaels is standing. “I’m not going to talk about food,” Gilda says, “I’m not going to talk about guys…so I don’t have anything to say at all.” She rambles for a few seconds, then asks, “Wait — can we get an audience in here?” Aykroyd, just out of camera range, tries to help by asking such questions as what Gilda would do “if your period came on right now,” then pretends to be Peter Marshall, host of The Hollywood Squares, and poses a question to Gilda: “Is it true that women accelerate more than men on expressway ramps?” Gilda: “Only if they’re with a man.”
    She offers to do her “only character, Colleen,” a clueless girl with the same goofy and faraway look no matter what the circumstances. Thus she looks exactly the same, blank and baffled, as she goes through a brief series of impressions: “This is Colleen at a Nureyev ballet…. This is Colleen going to an Irish festival…. This is Colleen having her first sexual experience.” All are the same.
    Frustrated and restless, Gilda announces, “Lorne said if I just sat here and stared down the camera, it would take a lot of guts,” then asks plaintively, “Can I go now — back to Toronto?” Lorne, off-camera, shouts, “Gilda, that was great.”
    Chevy Chase, in contrast to Gilda, looks supremely