Free Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen Page A

talk dirty, because she believed that fat people had a right to enjoy themselves. I agreed.
    My job through college was running a pushcart at Faneuil Hall—the prototype for renovated urban outdoor malls—in downtown Boston. I sold Deadhead gear, Mexican blankets, Baja pullovers, and little woven bracelets. I was always broke in college—I have no clue what I spent my money on but I had none—so I took a lot of shifts and would just sit in my high director’s chair and listen to Tracy Chapman and the Dead and read No One Here Gets Out Alive and hypothesize about whether Jim Morrison was really dead. My best day was when Lisa Whelchel (“Blair” from Facts of Life ) showed up in the mall and I ditched the pushcart for about an hour to follow her around at a respectful distance. Essentially my job consisted of watching idiots walking into each other all day (spend a day watching tourists and you’ll see that they really do become herdlike and walk right into each other) and endlessly answering two questions:
    “Where’s the bathroom?”
    “How do I get to Cheers?”
    Occasionally I would make sure that people knew that when they went to Cheers—by the way it’s not even called that, it’s called the Bull and Finch Pub, and it doesn’t look a thing like the set of the damn show—they would not be seeing Sam and Diane. The irony is that I would’ve been one of those people if I was visiting Boston for a weekend. But I wasn’t, was I?

     
    My other job during college was as a waiter at a restaurant on Boylston Street. The job of waiter may have been created especially for me. I loved talking to strangers and getting them drunk and then getting tipped for it. Sadly, I got fired—for the one and only time in my life—for accepting a “shift drink” after closing time. Every waiter was entitled to one free drink, but the glitch was that I was not twenty-one years old. Maybe that’s why I drink on my show now.
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    All my obsessing over my imminent death led me to finally go get an AIDS test at the end of my senior year. After many sleepless nights, with a backdrop of intense buildup and drama, Jackie came with me to get the news. And I was negative. I felt like I could do anything. Finally, I felt I had the opportunity to live a full life. Now I knew I had to strive to enjoy life, take opportunities, follow my dreams, showcase my worth.
    That meant moving to New York after graduation and getting a job as a waiter until something opened up at CBS. I didn’t even have to get the waitering job—CBS hired me as a newsclerk on CBS This Morning before I had a chance to unpack my bags.
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    Newsclerk—I hated the sound of it. The “clerk” part was what bugged me. But then again, look what I was doing: I answered phones, ripped scripts, collated packets for the anchors, and did irritating grunt work for producers, some of whom seemed to me like Michelangelos of the mediocre. I was a ball-and-chain to the ringing phones and absolutely stank at ripping scripts, but my respite was how I began each morning, running the Green Room, which was always a parade of insanity—a coffee-based cocktail party featuring an always unusual guest list. One morning, Tip O’Neill asked Sammy Davis’s widow, Altovise, if she was “here to sing.” She said, “No, but my late husband was the greatest singer of all time.” Why do white people always assume black people are going to sing?!? Every morning saw some type of weird interaction, and I lived for those moments.

     
Me as a newsclerk at CBS. This is what we used to call a computer.
     
    Even though it sometimes took years to get promoted, and the show always seemed to be a hair away from cancellation, after about six months I was convinced I’d outgrown my role as a newsclerk. They’d been letting me produce live segments, and when Connie Chung filled in for Paula Zahn, I produced a whole series for her about soap stars (I’m pretty