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A few days before lockdown in March 2020, I celebrated my birthday. Before getting cast on SNL in fall 2018, I had come up as a comedian in the Los Angeles comedy scene, so by early 2020, I still didn’t feel quite like a New Yorker. After my birthday dinner, thrown by Heidi Gardner and attended by other SNL-ers, I was walking back to my studio apartment in Midtown, and as I got closer to my place, I looked up and saw the New Yorker sign in red lights shining in the city skyline. I sighed “Ah, yes. How symbolic. I think I may officially be a New Yorker.”
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It didn’t even take 48 hours for that little bubble to burst. Days later, I’m hunkered down in my studio apartment, way too close to Port Authority. For anyone who knows New York City geography, it’s not the most ideal place to be on a regular day, let alone during the height of a pandemic. For anyone who knows New York City geography and knows me personally, I’m still upset you didn’t give me a heads up before I signed my lease.
After two weeks in lockdown, which happened to coincide with our previously scheduled hiatus, it was unclear how, if, or when we’d be returning to work for new episodes of SNL. I’m not sure who made the call, but since we couldn’t be together in the studio, we were notified that we’d be producing the sketches from home. Talk about unprecedented times. Neither I, nor my castmates, really understood what this meant or how it would look, but we rose to the occasion. We figured out rather quickly that at-home episodes were exactly what they sounded like. They wouldn’t be live episodes but we’d be shooting sketches on our personal electronic devices and directed via Zoom. This ultimately meant there was no Monday night pitch meeting, no writing night, no table read, no blocking, at least not for those first two at-home episodes. (I think we had a table read for our final at-home episode and I remember this because, somewhere out there, there…
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