I heard someone saying my name, but at first I was so deeply asleep that I incorporated the voice into my dream. I thought it was Bernard, the janitor, coming to empty my trash can, and, senselessly, I mumbled, “You can leave the mollusks.” I felt a hand lightly pat my shoulder, and the person said, “Sally, I’m really sorry to bother you”—not a commonly uttered phrase at TNO—and I pulled the T-shirt off my eyes and the earplugs from my ears, sat straight up, and said, “What do you want?”
Hunched over the couch at such an angle that my sitting up had brought our faces within a few inches of each other was Noah Brewster.
“Sorry,” he said again. Even in my disoriented state, I noted that he looked, in his cheesily handsome surfer way, uncomfortable. Though I was accustomed to being awakened by random people in an office in the middle of the night, perhaps he was not accustomed to waking people in this fashion.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Well, Bob O’Leary suggested—should I give you a minute? I can come back.”
“Now is good.” I wiped the back of one hand across my mouth in case I’d drooled in my sleep, which it felt like I had.
“Bob said you’d be the best person to help with the sketch I’ve been working on.” Bob O’Leary was a longtime supervising producer at TNO, one of the many magicians who had been there since the beginning and made the show run, while remaining almost totally unknown to the public. Noah was no longer leaning toward me—he was standing straight up—and I noticed then that he was holding a few papers.
I pointed at them. “Is that the sketch?”
“Seriously, though, if you need a minute—”
“I’ll read it now.” I extended my arm, and when he passed me the script, I swung my feet off the couch. I gestured toward the couch’s other end. “You can sit. This is the idea you mentioned at the pitch meeting?”
He nodded as he sat. “Should I tell you what it is or just let you read it?”
“Let me read it.”
I grabbed a blue ballpoint pen and pulled a two-month-old issue of The Atlantic off the windowsill to use as a surface to write against, and began reading. I was dimly aware of Noah Brewster a few feet away from me, scrolling on his phone. It would have been a lie to claim I didn’t feel some vestigial stress about keeping a huge celebrity waiting. I still often recalled an observation made by a writer named Elise with whom I’d overlapped for my first two years, which was that when we nonfamous people talked to famous people, we wanted the encounter to be finished as soon as possible so that we could go describe it to our nonfamous friends. But my stress was mostly offset by the knowledge that I was keeping Noah Brewster waiting for his benefit. The overriding goals of any episode of TNO were to entertain and to make the host look good; a genuinely funny or endearing host could reap the benefits in terms of public perception for years.
The sketch was seven pages, set in a dance studio, and featured a musician meeting with a choreographer in the presence of two record label executives, an agent, a manager, and a videographer. The choreographer was saying things like “When you do rainbow arms, the people sitting all the way in the back will feel your passion” and “A retrograde will bring closure to the song in your heart.” In reply, the nameless musician was saying things like “But I’m a singer-songwriter. I’m not a member of Cirque du Soleil.” In the ten minutes it took me to read, I marked the script in a few places, though more gently than I would have for a cast member or fellow writer’s work. About two-thirds of the third page achieved nothing and could easily be cut, but instead of drawing a blue line through that section, I made a question mark in the margin next to it. On page four, when the choreographer asked the musician if he’d ever considered incorporating some kind of panther into his show, I laughed out loud.
After I’d finished, Noah Brewster and I made eye contact, and I said, “Is this based on personal experience?”
“It’s been a while, but when I first started playing arenas, the record label had me work with a choreographer who had a lot of ridiculous suggestions. Her ideas made sense from a visual standpoint, in terms of the size of arenas, but they were really influenced by the boy band craze and completely off for me personally. Just all these very melodramatic hand gestures and pauses.”
“Your script is actually in pretty good shape, although I think it can be tightened. Do you want me to give you feedback and you go work on it or we can revise it together now?”
“I’d love to get your help revising. Bob said you’re a genius with structure.”
“Ha,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that’s a euphemism for being more hardworking than funny. Can you email me the version I just read?” I stood, stepped toward the desks, and pulled over Danny’s chair so it was next to mine.
As I took a seat in my chair, Noah sat in Danny’s. He was tapping his phone, and he said, “What’s your email?”
I gave him my address and asked, “How long have you been working on this?”
He smiled. “I’m tempted to pretend I started it earlier today, but at least a few weeks. Whenever it was that I got the confirmation I’d be hosting.”