Free Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch Page B

myself from being such a bitch. As my mom would call it, I was acting like “Madame Full Charge.” The following behavior by this band of players always served to take me around the bend: to make sure the audience understood Shakespeare’s language, or to be certain they got a joke, the actors would literally use finger quotes or cheap and stupid gestures while performing. Bunny ears around Elizabethan dialogue . . . While I will admit the paint color was none of my business, I found this absolutely galling.
    I just wanted the experience of acting in a Shakespeare company to be the Shakespeare company experience I had in my head, but instead of accepting the gig for what it was and finding what I liked and leaving the rest, I fought it so hard that no one liked me anymore. There was no “going with the flow” for Jane Lynch. So I took control of the one thing I could. I pulled the ultimate “diva” and quit.
    One night, as I was putting on my makeup before a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , I announced to the cast in a war-weary tone, “After this show . . . I am done with the company.”
    You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief. No one said anything for a moment, until one guy quipped, “You’ll never get a gold watch that way.”
    No one chased after me and begged me to stay, and at first that pissed me off. Then it really hurt my feelings. The thought did cross my mind that I had gone too far . . . and that, in fact, I had been the one who rejected them . . . but still, the old “I have been rejected, no one wants me” pity party began again.
    My career as an office worker was a nonstarter, but I still needed to make money. Fortunately, I was able to take my prodigious Shakespearean talents to a new, more challenging, venue: America’s Shopping Place.
    It was 1987 . America’s Shopping Place was one of the first home-shopping TV shows in the country, part of television’s new retail frontier. It stayed on the air into the wee hours of the morning, with live hosts describing products and taking phone calls from insomniac shoppers. I showed up at the studio for what I thought was an audition. It turned out their idea of an audition was to throw me into makeup and put me on the air. There I was with a pretty young woman named Kendy Kloepfer in front of two huge cameras waiting for the red light to come on. Kendy was a sweetheart and exactly the kind of girl they wanted on the air—feminine, adorable, and good on her feet. I was not as feminine or adorable as they wanted, but I was good on my feet.
    Kendy and I would stand in front of the cameras, talking about whatever we were supposed to be selling—cubic zirconia jewelry, electronic flea collars, grandfather clocks. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the best training in the world for an improv actor. Television home shopping was uncharted territory, so we had to fly by the seat of our pants and make things up as we went along. We’d smile into the camera and do our pitch. “Flea season is upon us!” or “Now, this bracelet is a delightful way to say ‘I love you’!” Then they’d switch to a close-up shot of the product so we could read the product specifications out of a wire-bound notebook. Then the camera would suddenly be back on us, and we would have to be ready with a big smile and a clever line.
    I loved everything about the job—being on camera, improvising, bantering with Kendy. The problem was that the producers did not love me. They wouldn’t even look up at me when I came into the studio chirping “Hey, everybody!” They never fired me, but they never told me I had a job either. I would get a call a few hours before I needed to be there. I’d drop whatever I was doing to show up to do the graveyard shift of America’s Shopping Place . Did I mention I loved this job ?
    But it was all to no avail, because no matter how good I was at improvising my enthusiasm for jewelry and housewares, I