This Week with Molly Shannon & Linkin Park

I had such a great time on this show. Molly was amazing and the whole cast was so happy to have her there. It was really cool to see how her performance changed from dress rehearsal to the live show, and it was especially sweet to hear the crowd reaction when she came out as Mary Katherine Gallagher. So if you were cheering in the studio audience that night, thank you very much. If you were cheering at home, we totally couldn't hear you.

Here are some of my memories from the week:

On Tuesday (writing night), around two in the morning, Will was recording vocals in the writers' room for the MacGruber theme so it could be played for the table read on Wednesday. The music and everything was on headphones so all we could hear was him yelling into a mic. He kept doing different takes with long pauses in between. Jason and I were trying to write this one piece, and our long silences would be broken with Will yelling "The dude's a raging alcoholic!"
over and over.

For the Fringe Debate sketch, they had to rig Maya up with this huge mechanical wig. It took a few people to set it on her head and plug it in. We didn't realize how much noise it was going to make. When they cut to Darrell all we could hear was Maya's wig going "whirrrwhirrrwhirrr". You get what that sounds like right? I can't describe it any better than whirrring.

I didn't have a chance to see the filmed piece for the monlogue until the live show and I loved all the Nineties details they used. Especially that Lou Bega song. Did I download the song from iTunes the next day? Maybe. That's private information.

The Sally O'Malley/Sopranos sketch was written by Steve Koren who used to write for Molly when she was in the cast. I kept thinking about being in a sketch with a character I used to watch all the time on TV. I was also enjoying Jason shrugging his shoulders and fidgeting the whole time.

Linkin Park were super friendly and nice. I'm always impressed when bands can rock out like that while being so well dressed.

I loved watching the Jeannie Darcy feature on Weekend Update. That is one of my favorite SNL characters ever, and I felt very lucky to get to see her perform up close.

When I did the blind BBQ guy on WU, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to throw that piece of steak forward at the right moment. Thankfully it flew off the fork, and it nailed the cue cards right over the middle camera. Yeah!

Before the live show and dress rehearsal, Maya and I perform a song with the band for the studio audience ("On My Radio" by The Selecter). It's been kind of sentimental doing the song these past few shows realizing how the end of the season is creeping up on us. The writers and cast are really close, so I think everyone is feeing this way right now. Except for the props department. I asked Tim, a props guy, "how do you feel about the end of the season coming up?" and he answered "for the BBQ thing, do you want a little steak or a big steak?"