Dear Viv,
This is a very kind offer! I have enjoyed TNO over the years, and I was aware that you were a cast member, although at your appointment I wanted to keep the focus on your eye :). In order for me to accept a social invitation from a patient, the patient would need to switch to a different practice (i.e., a different doctor at this clinic). Given that you are already a patient of Dr. Trumbull, a switch should not be onerous, but I want to be clear that I cannot continue to treat you medically if I attend the show.
Many thanks,
Theo
“What’s bad about this?” I asked. “He’s being responsible.”
“It’s so half-hearted. Many thanks is one degree away from Best regards.”
“He’s saying he can’t fall in love with you while he’s still your doctor. Tell him you’ll go back to seeing Dr. Trumbull, and the lovefest can start.”
“Excuse me, Viv,” said Trey, a production assistant in a headset. “Evelyn needs you in wardrobe for your Danny Horst Rule fitting.”
Viv looked at me. “This is the one where it’s my talent and not the outfit that has to make me look cute in front of Mr. Many Thanks?”
“I actually told Francesca not to give you a unibrow, so you’re welcome,” I said. “But it’s Dr. Many Thanks.” As Viv walked toward the wardrobe department, I called, “That’s a good email!”
From the studio, I heard someone, probably a roadie, say, “One, two, mic check, one, two,” and it was then that I realized that the guitar tuning I’d heard before was for Noah Brewster’s song rehearsal. Thursday afternoon was the time that musical guests, who of course usually weren’t also hosts, showed up to rehearse. These casual, free quasi concerts were a huge perk of working at TNO, and the bigger the act, the more people “just happened” to be passing through the studio, including employees of other shows at the network. Several times, I’d stopped to watch a musician I was minimally familiar with and walked away forty minutes later a fan.
I turned around and reentered the studio proper, walking toward the main stage, which was known as Home Base. The floor in front of Home Base was currently a mess of disorganized audience chairs; multiple cameras, including the iconic crane that for every episode swooped in for the guest host’s entrance; and random set walls. Crew members were wandering around, while about twenty people were actively watching Noah, including Autumn, two of her assistants, and a cast member named Lynette. I sat on a chair about fifteen feet from the stage’s lip. Noah, who stood with a guitar hanging from a strap over his left shoulder—he wore clothes similar to the ones he’d had on the previous day, a gray T-shirt, dark jeans, and black suede sneakers—was talking to the drummer and the sound engineers. A bass guitarist stood on one side of him and a rhythm guitar player on the other, and toward the rear of the stage were a keyboard player and two backup singers.
“All right,” Noah said. “We’re going to try ‘Ambiguous’ now.
“You texted me late,” he sang into the standing mic. “Like it hadn’t been years…”
I’d never heard the song, which I assumed was on his forthcoming album. It was somehow both energetic and mournful. Noah closed his eyes as he sang—“This is always your way / Like it isn’t too late”—and his blond hair flopped around as he did something that wasn’t exactly dancing, but was a kind of rhythmic bouncing that nudged me into the vicinity of embarrassment. Which was ridiculous! Noah didn’t need me to feel embarrassed on his behalf; this was what he did, and had done thousands of times before stadiums full of people. After he opened his eyes, he occasionally glanced down as his fingers changed chords, sometimes stepping away from the mic as he did. Other times he was looking out into the studio, and because I was so close to the stage, we soon made eye contact. A jolt went through me similar to the jolt at the table read. But how had Noah Brewster earned the right to unsettle me?
As he continued singing, we continued making intermittent eye contact that turned into sustained eye contact. Was he mocking me? Proving something about my musical ignorance or his talent? Or was he, like, serenading me? In the most literal sense, he was definitely serenading me—he was standing on a stage with a guitar, and I was a few feet away, and he was singing—but what did it mean? Perhaps, as was often the case with human interactions, it meant nothing. Yet instead of the jolt induced by our first eye contact dissipating, some feedback loop was occurring in me, a thrumming awareness of my own physical body.
The song lasted probably three and a half minutes and ended with a multi-guitar flourish, his bandmates clustered around and synched up with him, and I felt both transcendently alive and immobilized. It was only when I heard other people clapping, though there weren’t enough of them in the space to achieve a critical mass, that I realized I ought to clap, too.
Noah grinned, and I thought that surely I was experiencing the ache of being around incredibly beautiful people. I’d believed that I’d become immune, but it seemed I was having a breakthrough infection.
Noah was looking at me as he said into the mic, “Thanks, everyone. This next one is called ‘Inbox Zero.’?”
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and when I pulled it out, I saw that I had three texts from the supervising writer, Kirk, who was Elliot’s deputy.
Sally can you come to writers room, said the first.
Then, About to discuss Cheesemonger
Then, Where are you
Needing to leave Noah’s rehearsal was both a relief and a disappointment. For his next song, I didn’t want him to keep singing to me. And also, I didn’t want him to stop singing to me.
THURSDAY, 1:40 P.M.
For rewrites, any writer who wasn’t at a rehearsal, along with a few producers, met at the big table in the writers’ room, all of us with multiple freshly sharpened pencils and our own printed copies of the sketches. Weirdly, given that News Desk and the host monologue were probably the public’s two favorite parts of TNO, they were handled separately and written last, the monologue primarily by Elliot and News Desk by Danny, Hank, and Roy.