yes please(12)

At this point, my relationship to Amy was the same as everyone else’s. I was a fan.

I auditioned for SNL in 2001. My manager called me to tell me I had been hired. He then listed the other new cast members, one of whom was Amy. My first thought after hanging up the phone wasn’t “Oh my god, I’m going to be on SNL,” it was “Oh my god, I might get to be friends with Amy Poehler.”

I am happy to say we were friends right away.

I won’t bore you with the details of our many years of friendship and collaboration on the show for no other reason than it is likely Amy has dedicated dozens of pages to that topic in this very book. I wouldn’t be surprised if a photo of me graces the cover of this book. To take up any more time talking about it would be redundant.

Instead I will pick up the action years later on the Saturday before the Saturday Amy became a mother. Josh Brolin was hosting the show that week, but this fact would soon be rendered a footnote when Sarah Palin agreed to do a cameo.

In 2008, under intense pressure from the comedians’ lobby, Senator John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. This brought much good fortune to SNL in the form of Tina Fey’s mimicry. However, the fact that Governor Palin would actually be appearing on the show was not immediately greeted with cheers.

It wasn’t that we weren’t excited to have her on; we just didn’t know what to do with her once she got there. When you perform a sketch about a person when they’re not in the room you have a great deal more freedom than when they are in the room. It was understood that we’d have to write a sketch with Tina and the governor, and we did. It was a soup of moving parts; Alec Baldwin, Lorne, and Mark Wahlberg made cameos, there were some jokes, and it went well.

Sensing that the audience might want more, on Friday night Lorne suggested using Governor Palin a second time, on “Weekend Update.” We sat in our weekly joke read kicking around ideas that failed to inspire any enthusiasm. For a laugh, someone said the governor could do a rap, perhaps starting with the line “I’m Sarah Palin and I’m here to say . . .” Someone else suggested that the governor could get cold feet and Amy could do the rap instead. I don’t remember if either of these ideas was meant to be real but I do remember that Amy’s eyes went wide with glee and she left the room with a notebook in hand. The next time I saw her she was on the phone with the wardrobe department barking orders like mission control trying to get a shuttle back. “I need Eskimo suits for Fred and Andy, a snowmobile suit for Jason, and a moose suit for Bobby.”

Take a second here. Go back and watch the Palin Rap one more time. Maybe you forgot how convincing and believable Sarah Palin was when she said she wasn’t going to do the piece; maybe you forgot exactly how pregnant Amy was when she stood up from behind the desk; you probably remember that Amy was good but you likely forgot exactly how good. It is a performance without artifice. She’s not play-rapping. She’s rapping. I still get goose bumps when I think of Amy screaming, “I’m an animal and I’m bigger than you!” And the whole time she was doing it, for every single second of it, there was a little person sloshing (that’s the correct medical term, yes? Sloshing?) around in her belly.

That person, Archie, is getting older every day, and soon he will be aware enough to watch and appreciate what his mother was doing on national television the week before he was born. When I want to smile, I think of that.

A week later, on the Friday before the Saturday that Amy became a mother, the entire cast stayed late to block a sketch called “The Barack Obama Variety Half Hour.” On a normal week, the last piece rehearsed was usually a smaller piece with a handful of cast members cursing their luck that they had to stay at the studio until eleven P.M. the night before a show. This time, having everyone there together was a luxury and a delight.

While we waited for the cameras to set up, Maya and Fred started a bit pretending they were onstage for the seventy-fifth anniversary of SNL. Moving slowly and speaking softly, they delighted us with wooden award-show banter wherein they tried to remember the lines to their old sketches. Bill Hader took the stage pretending to be his own son and gave a speech about how much his “pops” had talked about working on the show before he died.

We were all enjoying ourselves that night, but no one more than Amy. She was laughing the hardest but that wasn’t surprising. In my time at SNL no one was quicker or more gracious with a laugh than Amy—never more so than at the weekly table read, when it was needed most. When a new cast member or writer had a piece bombing to such silence that you could almost hear their pores expelling sweat, you could always count on Amy to give them a laugh. Though to be fair, it was less a laugh and more of a cackle. The writer Alex Baze described it as the sound one hears when running over a raven’s foot with a shopping cart. It is, without exaggeration, one of my favorite sounds on earth.

We all headed home around midnight, in a great mood.

A quick but necessary tangent: For years Amy has called me “Coco” and I have called her “Moses.” These nicknames sprung from a “Weekend Update” joke about a six-foot-tall camel named Moses and his tiny pony sidekick, Coco, who had escaped from a zoo in Texas. I don’t remember the joke but I do remember that we laughed every time we said “a six-foot-tall camel named Moses and his tiny pony sidekick, Coco.”

At three A.M. or so on Saturday morning Amy texted me. “Water broke, Coco! You’re gonna do great!”