McBrayer excellently portray Kenneth, the career NBC page on 30 Rock, I understand what kind of commitment Leon wanted from me. I wonder if Leon is a consultant for the show. Or still a page.
I WORK FOR A TV PSYCHIC
Still babysitting, with no health insurance, I began to become a germaphobe, because I could not afford to get sick and go to the hospital. From a friend of a friend, I landed an interview for an entry-level job as a production assistant on a show I’ll call Bridging the Underworld with Mac Teegarden. This was a cable program featuring the psychic Mac Teegarden, who relayed messages to members of the studio audience from their dead friends and relatives.
The morning I interviewed for the job, I had an enormous pimple on my face. A giant pimple is bad news for everyone, but if you have dark brown skin and a huge whitehead in the center of your forehead, it is especially disgusting. It wasn’t even one of those stoic pimples that goes quietly when you pop it; this one was cystic and painful and had roots that seemed to extend into my brain. I wanted to postpone my interview but it would have been a last-minute change, and I wanted to hide the fact that I was a vain flake for as long as I could. (Coincidentally, Vain Flake is the name of my perfume, available at your finer drugstores and coastal Kmarts.) So, with my zit throbbing like a nightclub, I went to the interview.
My interview was with a segment producer named Gail and the exec producer Sally. Sally was a stout, masculine-looking woman, but not unattractive. She reminded me of a blond Rosie O’Donnell in her height: appealing, confident, and a tiny bit brusque.
They were both very nice, and seemed highly concerned about filling a position made vacant by their last PA, who had left abruptly for Teach for America. (Thank you, Teach for America! Luring away America’s finest minds so that the rest of us can snatch up their jobs.) My interview lasted eight minutes. I could type, I could get coffee, I didn’t have an accent. I guess Old Throbby on my forehead was my lucky charm!
Working for a TV psychic was not what my parents envisioned after investing in my degree, but the job had health benefits, and this pleased my mother. My mother is a doctor, and somewhat of a militant on the subject of health benefits, which is why I may seem slightly obsessed with them. The description of the PPO was more exciting than the job itself. I was working at a job that was vaguely in the world of television making $500 a week! Cue Madonna’s “Holiday”! It’s margarita time!
I always thought mediums were supposed to be old crones with glass eyes of the Drag Me to Hell variety, but Mac Teegarden turned out to be a wildly normal guy. He was a thirty-ish former phlebotomist and ballroom dance instructor with a Long Island accent. He was attractive in a Mario Lopez way, with slicked-back hair and a wardrobe of tight long-sleeve T-shirts. He looked like the kind of guy who lifts weights twice a day, is a great husband, and goes to Manhattan nightclubs with his wife four months after Justin Timberlake went there. I liked him a lot.
My immediate boss was Gail, the one who’d interviewed me. Gail was forty, single, and loved the world created by Sex and the City more passionately than any other person I knew; I think she would’ve disappeared into the show if she could have. (Let me take a moment here to stress again just how pervasive the Sex and the City culture was in New York in 2002. You could be an NYU freshman, a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker, or an Orthodox Jewish woman living in a yeshiva: you watched Sex and the City. ) Without knowing me at all, Gail nicknamed me Minz. I respond very well to people being overly familiar with me a little too soon. It shows effort and kindness. I try to do this all the time. It makes me feel part of a big, familial, Olive Garden-y community.
Gail would talk at length on Mondays about Sex and the City (the day after