Free Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling Page B

message, and the show was over. Then a producer would pull that particular audience member aside, interview him further, and create a segment around him. I was one of the assistants who scurried around the selected audience member, collecting photos and getting him or her to sign releases.
    When the audience members went back home, some of them would continue to call me. They saw me as the messenger’s messenger. I have to admit that it was far more interesting to play a psychic conduit than it was to scan photos all day long. I spent hours talking to people, uninterrupted, about their loved ones who had passed away. I had no new psychic information, but I was someone new to talk to and confide in. I was great at it, and it became the best part of my day. It was strangely a lot like babysitting. People wanted to talk to me about what interested them, and I was good at listening to them and not telling them to stop talking. This would come in handy for me later when I became a producer on The Office.
    If I had to testify under oath, I would admit, no, I don’t believe Mac Teegarden is psychic. I’ve just been made too aware of people like Carl Sagan and basic science and stuff. I am certain, though, that Mac Teegarden provided an enormous amount of comfort to people who had unexpectedly lost loved ones. I don’t know if it was psychic, but it was cathartic, and therapeutic, and it helped people.
    MINDY KALING, SEXUAL HARASSER
    I was living in Brooklyn with Brenda and Jocelyn, but Bridging the Underworld was taped in Queens. If I took the nicer subway, it meant I had to go through Manhattan every morning to get there, and that took a really long time. The subway line that ran the short way was the G line, which stopped exclusively in Brooklyn and Queens. That might be the only time the word exclusive has been used to describe the G train. At that time, the G train wasn’t so hot. (My apologies to the train. I’m sure it’s amazing now, with, like, a community garden and charter school in it. But not then.)
    My coworker Rachel also lived in Brooklyn and took the G with me. Rachel was a pretty Jewish girl my age who was the heiress to a gourmet pickled Jewish food dynasty in L.A. She was an amazing cook who made her own bagels—a supremely cocky thing to do in New York—and other delicious food. When I went over to her house to watch TV, there would be homemade rugelach for snacks.
    Rachel and I jokingly (and hilariously) called the G the Rape Train. One morning at work we were joking about it in the commissary. We did not see Sally, the producer, standing a few feet away.
    “Did you hear the Rape Train added new stops?” I said to Rachel.
    “Yeah? What are they?” she asked.
    “Lurk, Stalk, Stab, and Dump Body,” I said, very pleased with myself. Rachel laughed. We high-fived.
    Suddenly, Sally appeared behind us. She looked really upset.
    “Do you girls feel unsafe when you come to work in the morning?” Sally asked.
    I was surprised she’d heard us. When you’re that low on the totem pole, you sometimes think you’re so unimportant that no one can hear you. My sense of invisibility had made me loose-lipped.
    We hastily assured her that it was just our unfunny, pejorative nickname for the train, and that, based on the empirical evidence we had gathered so far, real rapists didn’t traditionally attack two girls at once at seven in the morning, and that we were the real creeps, and we were sorry.
    Sally looked displeased. “It’s not a very funny thing to joke about,” she said. “It’s extremely inappropriate.” She turned and left.
    We were horrified. Later that morning, Rachel and I both got notes saying Sally wanted to see us in her office.
    “She’s going to fire us for sexual harassment!” Rachel worried.
    I was freaked out. Sexual harassment was a real thing. You can’t just joke about rape at work. We had endured a lengthy sexual harassment seminar on how fireable this behavior was. Sarah