00:00Ah! Really? Oi! Yeah! Ha, ha, ha! Okay. Um, I was, usually I do these things where I don't think about it and I just show up and I talk about cheese and then I get off the stage and hope that nobody realize that I don't know what I'm talking about. But it is Lauren Graham, so as Arthur Miller said, attention must be paid.
00:23So I wrote shit. Um, oh God, I'm sorry, I wasn't going to swear. Um, I wrote stuff. Um, okay. Now let's pretend that I'm an actor and I can actually public speak. Just pretend, go with me. Um, okay. It was a cold, rainy day in grim, sad, soggy Burbank, California. I hate Burbank, so it's always grim and sad and soggy there. Um, so we sat huddled in a drafty room in a sad trailer park structure that housed the WB main offices at the time, hands clutching lukewarm coffee, worried, shaking,
00:53nauseous, knowing that soon we had to go to Canada. And this was pro, this was pre-Trump Canada, not the hot Canada. They're like, fuck you, America, Canada. This is the, oh, I'm so sorry, Canada. And we can't drive Canada. It was that Canada. And we had everybody. We had the kid. We had the grandparents. We had townspeople. We had the hot love interest. We just didn't have the girl. We just didn't have the girl. We had auditioned literally every, I'm already off book. I can't read.
01:21We had auditioned literally like every actress who claimed to be in their early thirties in the entirety of America. Yeah, there was a lot of stretching. And nobody, nobody came in. Nobody had the, you know, the smarts or the sharp. Nobody looked good in jeans. Nobody just had the whole package.
01:41And my husband often says that I am the queen of writing uncastable parts. And this one I thought, yeah, I'm, I'm literally never going to find this girl. And that's fine. You know, I've had a good life. Um, I can teach a learning annex class.
01:57And somebody will hire Valley College, right? That's not far. I can go there. Um, and then suddenly, yeah, the door opened, door opened. And in she walked this girl with a look on her face, like, oh, good. Another 13 and out gig. Can't wait. Um, she sat down, she opened her mouth.
02:19And now Lauren was already contracted to another show that hadn't been picked up yet. So I didn't really want to meet her ever. Cause I thought if I fall in love with her and I can't have her, I'll just kill myself. Cause I'm very dramatic.
02:33And we literally were out of people. So she came in, she sat down, she said like two words. I'm like, God damn it. It's her. And it was her, not just because she was the only one in 40,000 women who pronounced Jack Kerouac correctly.
02:48I don't, I don't understand why people just can't look up. I don't know who this writer is. There's internet. You can find, ask, go to a bookstore. Hey, how do you pronounce this? I mean, it's really not hard.
03:01Um, only one, one out of 40,000, but she was just like, you know, she was kind of like if, if Carol Lombard and Barbara Stanwyck had a baby that didn't have any sort of alcoholism or drug addiction or a bad, like plane crash, that was Lauren Graham.
03:18I think that like, if it was the old studio system days, Lauren would have been, you know, she would have been Catherine Hepburn. She would have been, you know, these, this amazing with the furs and the dogs that matched the coat and the, you know, the men, the men, the men.
03:33And instead she was, you know, we had a dancing frog and we, but we were, you know, we could look at Buffy and we're across the way.
03:43So she came in, she got the gig, her other show went away and I thought, what can I do for this wonderful woman who's given me my career, my job, my show that I love so much.
03:59So I decided to saddle her with 10 pages a day, every single day for six years, learn it in the trailer. Good luck, kid. Walk in a circle in Burbank.
04:09I mean, there was a seventh year, but we don't talk about it. We call it the Scottish play. Um, I wasn't there.
04:16And I, all I want to say about Lauren is this is the worst business in the world. And if anyone's considering going into it, like don't, it's horrible.
04:27And they treat people awful and people that you think are your friends aren't, they hate you. Um, and you never know, like when somebody is going to come into your life and they are going to be important and they're going to mean something.
04:42And Lauren Graham changed my entire life. Um, I have a hat room in New York city. I live in New York city and I have a room that's just for hats.
04:57And that's because of Lauren Graham. And all I can say is I love you. I forgive the fact that you decided to become a writer. Thanks for staying in your lane.
05:07Um, really. And I, I, I owe you everything, but more than that, you are everything just to me.
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