It's Saturday Night Live's RACHEL DRATCH '88.
If the events of Rachel Dratch's last summer were sold as a Hollywood script, it would surely be as a feel-good episode of Touched by an Angel. Living in Los Angeles, her once-promising career as an improvisational comic at a dead- end, Dratch was about to accept a job as an office temp. Then Chicago's Second City, the legendary comedy incubator, called with a lifeline: the group had agreed to produce a two-woman show, writ- ten by Dratch, and wanted her to star in it.
Soon after the show opened in July to rave reviews, she received another call, this one from the producers of Saturday Night Live. Before summer's end, she had moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan for the gig of a lifetime: as the only new performer added to the show's cast this season. As she sat in a make-up chair at NBC Studios one night in late September, moments before the lights went up on the show's 25th anniversary special, Dratch literally pinched herself as she stud- ied the faces looking out from the surrounding mirrors: Lily Tomlin, Elvis Costello, Christopher Walken and Dan Aykroyd.
"I was too shy to say anything," she says. "It was my first day." In an industry where confirmed sightings of humility are as rare as those of J.D. Salinger strolling past Lou's, it is deeply comforting that Dratch—a doctor's daughter who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, worshiping Gilda Radner—is as awestruck as you'd be ifyou had traveled from the Col- lis Center to NBC in fewer than a dozen years.
"This sounds so corny," Dratch, 33, says one recent night over a dinner of guinea hen (she thought it would sound fanny to order a hen) in Manhattan, "but when Don Pardo says your name at the beginning of SNL, you feel like you're in a dream."
Dratch knows what you're probably thinking: Didn't SaturdayNight Live lose its comic edge long ago, sometime after John Belushi and Radner died, and certainly by the time Eddie Murphy left to make Beverly Hills Cop lIP Is it even on the air anymore?
In fact, the show is not only alive and in the midst of a creative renaissance, but in Dratch's line of work—writing and performing in rapidly spun comedy sketches—a slot on Saturday Night remains the pinnacle.
"A lot of comedians like to bash SNL," she says. "All of them would kill to be on it."
Besides, she adds, "When you work on the show, you're not thinking about what it isn't. You're just trying to make it the best it can be."
The pace can be grueling: Tuesday is always an all-nighter, when the show for the coming Saturday is written. And sketches that are in the show as of the dress rehearsal, earlier Saturday night, are often cut just before air time.
Not that it's all hard labor.
On a Saturday night last fall, for example, millions of Americans watched Dratch make out with Dylan McDermott, the hunky star of The Practice. (Asked to rate him as a kisser, she says: "I wasn't thinking about it. It was my first time. I was too nervous.") Weeks later, she was seen pressing her lips against those of the country music star Garth Brooks. Though she and Garth kissed until they were blue in the face, it was only because they were playing Smurfs.
And on the February 19 show, she was visibly groped by one of Hollywood's most sought-after leading men, Ben Affleck, in a scene—written by Dratch—where his character tries to steal her away from her boyfriend. ("It wasn't much of a grope in dress rehearsal," she laughs.)
But Dratch has done much more than raise the guest hosts' blood pressure. TV Guide awarded her one of its "cheers" for her dead-on impersonation of Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart. Transforming herself into Ally, the 5'1" 115 -pound Dratch had perched her face atop a body that was little more than a broomstick and told a mock interviewer: "I want to be small enough to sleep in an envelope."
And on that February show hosted by Affleck, Dratch earned the ultimate honor: she was selected to utter the famous words, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" A sketch she wrote and starred in—as the comic strip character Marcy, being interviewed by a mock Ted Koppel about the death of Charles Schultz—was selected to open the show.
Dratch's arrival at the fabled Studio 8H last September followed nearly four years of toiling at Second City. As a Second City alumna, her name is now etched on a family tree that includes Bill Murray (who starred on SNL from 1977-80), Chris Farley (1990 and John Belushi (1975-79), and from the troupe's Toronto branch, Aykroyd (1975-79) and Radner (1975-80).
On Second City's Mainstage Dratch gave birth to several memorable characters. One is a mall rat from a Boston suburb who likes to say things like "wicked pissah." Another is a grown-up child star whose cutesy manner just doesn't cut it as an adult, and a third is an 800-pound woman—there are two other people inside her costume—on a mission to avenge the plight of fat people.
Asked what makes Dratch so funny, screenwriter Jonathan Danziger '88 first delineates what she is not: "She wouldn'tnecessarily be die one you would choose to say, 'Two nuns come into a bar...
Dratch agrees. "A lot of the comedians I know are 'on' a lot. They're constantly joking. I'm not like that," she says.
The secret to her appeal, according to Danziger, is her demeanor. "She's got an incredibly expressive face," he says, "and she knows how to use it." Danziger would be the first to tell you that Dratch's talent was not immediately evident to him—and, you will soon learn, he was not alone.
As the director of their class's Freshman Cabaret, Danziger dealt Dratch her first rejection at Dartmouth: After auditioning her and about 200 other classmates, he did not select her for the 40 person cast. Fifteen years later, Danziger is still scratching his head as to why. "I screwed up," he says. "I've told her that."
Dratch first waded into comedy during her sophomore year, when she heard about a new improvisational comedy group called Said and Done.
"I was like, 'I bet I can do that,' " Dratch says. The group, which had no real leader, steeped itself in the comedic philosophy of Del Close, a guru of the Chicago improv community who encouraged his actors to build an entire play off one suggestion from the audience—like the words "fork" or "western" or "kung fu."
"We just went out and did it," Dratch says of her improv gigs, which didn't extend beyond Collis and Fraternity Row. Not that her career choice was entirely clear anyway. "I wanted to be a therapist too," she says.
After graduating magna cum laude in 1988 with a degree in drama and psychology, Dratch joined a children's threater tour across the South before moving near Wrigley Field in Chicago with another drama-minded classmate, Sonja Kuftinec '88.
Soon, disappointment struck again: After she and Kuftinec auditioned for the Second City Training Center, which groomed actors to join the Mainstage, Kuftinec was hired. Dratch was not.
"I was like, 'Oh my God! Why have I moved here?'" Dratch recalls. But she was accepted the following year, and by the spring of 1995 she made it to the major leagues, writing her own show for the Second City Mainstage. Over the next three years she would star in four Second City revues.
The producers of Saturday Night Live had always scouted Second City for talent, and in 1995 they asked almost every member of the Mainstage cast to fly to New York to audition for SNL—ex-cept Dratch.
"I thought I'd have to alter my track," she recalls. "I wasn't going to be on SNL."
In 1998, though, SNL did call. With Lome Michaels, the show's founder, cloaked in darkness in the audience, Dratch walked onto the SNL stage for her tryout. No one, she says, even greeted her with a "hello." She quickly ran through three bits she had written. Then, as requested, she did three imitations: Calista Flockhart, CNN war correspondent Christiane Amanpour and Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who Dratch imagined as a diplomat negotiating peace with the British kiddieshow characters the Teletubbies.
Alas, neither Dratch nor any other woman was hired for the cast that fall. By the spring of 1999, Dratch had quit Chicago for L.A. But the buzz surrounding her twowoman show last summer earned Dratch a second audition with SNL in New York last July. Michaels called her within weeks to offer her a spot as a featured performer—a traditional entry-level position—on a one-year contract that expires this July.
Over the course of this season Dratch, who returned to Dartmouth in February to host a comedy show with SNL vets Darrell Hammond and Jim Breuer, has given Michaels many reasons to extend her contract. She hit a home-run as Flockhart. She wrote and starred in a sketch in which her teenage Boston character drunkenly attempts to get a Christmas job at a Hickory Farms in a Massachusetts mall while simultaneously making out with her boyfriend. And she and Tina Fey, a fellow Second City alum, wrote a brilliant piece in which Dratch and the actress Jennifer Aniston of Friends morphed into London street urchins straight out of Oliver who are hired by a wealthy family as Christmas lawn ornaments.
"Rachel's comedy is never at anyone's expense," says Fey, now the show's 29-year-old head writer. "It's very joyful, celebratory."
Dratch seems littde changed by being on live national television. Indeed, she was taken aback when, while walking in Harvard Square over the show's Thanksgiving break, someone excitedly accosted her with the loud yell, "S-N-L!"
"I turned around and said, 'You're the first person who recognized me!' " she recalls, beaming. "He just gave me the thumbs up and said,' You're awesome!'"
"A LOT OF COMEDIANS LIKE TO BASH SNL, ALL OF THEM WOULD KILL TO BE ON IT," RACHEL DRATCH
JACQUES STEINBERG is a national educationcorrespondent for The New York Times. Hewas editor in chief of The Dartmouth in 1987.
