Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Part 15

Write a letter of support to Jennifer Aniston

Write a mean anonymous letter to Lance Armstrong re: Sheryl Crow

Use a voodoo doll

Create an online persona to cyberbully a girl into being anorexic

Blackmail a boyfriend into taking her out to dinner

Things Kelly and I Would Both Do

Ch.o.r.eograph and star in a music video

Fake our own deaths to catch a serial killer

Cry at work occasionally

Memorize our credit card numbers to shop online with ease

Drive with our parking brake on

Go to goop.com every day

Spend hours following a difficult recipe, hate the way it tastes, and throw it out to go to McDonald's

Get upset if we're not invited to a party

Go on trendy and slightly dangerous diets

Hold a royal wedding viewing party

Some of the world's best comedians successfully play versions of themselves, like Woody Allen, Tina Fey, Ray Romano, and Larry David, but I am not doing that with Kelly. You'll all get to see me ingeniously playing a version of myself when I do my own show, Mindy Kaling: Escaped War Criminal Hunter. Flying to Bolivia to extradite or execute n.a.z.is? That is so quintessentially me.

I have the opportunity to write for Kelly, but more often than not, I am not really able to. When you write an episode of The Office, you are required to be on set supervising the shooting of your episode. If I'm acting as Kelly, that means I can't be supervising the set as a producer, because I'm too busy acting in a scene, and so I have less control over the overall quality of the episode. Believe me, I'd love for Kelly to be in the show more, slowly encroaching on the leads' air time until the show is renamed My Name is Kelly or A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-KELLY! But given how many characters we have, the tertiary characters like Kelly tend to have one or two great lines per episode. Wait, what's the thing that comes after tertiary? That's Kelly.

LONG PAUSES WITH GREG DANIELS, GETTING HIRED, AND THE FIRST SEASON

People ask me all the time how I got hired onto The Office. Another common question is how do I manage to stay so down-to-earth in the face of such incredible success? This I can't explain. It probably has something to do with innate goodness or something. A third frequently asked question is: "Girl, where you from? Trinidad? Guyana? Dominican Republic? You married? You got kids?" This is mostly asked by guys on the sidewalk selling I LOVE NEW YORK paraphernalia in New York City.

John Krasinski and I, professional actors, unable to complete a scene without laughing.

My career in Hollywood is owed to a man named Greg Daniels. He and his wife, Susanne, saw Matt & Ben, and soon after, I got a call from my agent, Marc, who told me that Greg wanted to meet me for a general.

General is short for "general meeting," which is one of the most vague and dreaded Hollywood inventions. It essentially means "I am curious about you, but I don't want to have a meal with you, and I want there to be little expectation of any tangible outcome from our meeting." Most of the time with generals, neither person knows exactly why they are meeting the other person, and so you talk about L.A. traffic patterns and which celebrities are looking too thin these days. The meetings are fun if you like chatting, which I do, but frustrating if you like moving forward with your life, which I also do. But usually you get a free bottle of water.

I was incredibly nervous meeting Greg, because his reputation preceded him. Even my dad knew who he was, because of the opening credits in King of the Hill, one of the only animated shows he didn't think was destroying the minds of American youth. Greg had been on the staff of The Harvard Lampoon, a writer for Sat.u.r.day Night Live (where he was writing partners with Conan O'Brien), The Simpsons, and Seinfeld, and created King of the Hill. If he'd died after just doing that, people still would have been sad to read his obituary. When I met him, he had just turned forty.

I got to the meeting early. It was held at the King of the Hill offices in Century City. Century City is a commercial business area with lots of gleaming high-rises. To help you visualize it, this is the area where Alan Rickman held all those people hostage in Die Hard. A bored twentysomething guy greeted me at Reception. Actually, he did not greet me. It took him a full minute or so before he looked away from his computer game to acknowledge me standing nervously in front of his desk. When people show a lack of excitement to see me, I compensate by complimenting the h.e.l.l out of them. It always exacerbates the problem, but I cannot stop. I focused on his tidy work area.

ME: What a clean desk. If it were mine it'd be a disaster, ha ha.

RECEPTIONIST GUY: This isn't my desk. They moved me here when the season ended. I literally have nothing to do with this desk.

We stared at each other for a few moments, until he told me to sit down next to a full-size cutout of Peggy Hill.

Marc had warned me that Greg was "a little quiet and pensive," but no one could have warned me just how quiet and pensive. Greg is the frequent perpetrator of crazy-long pauses in conversation. Like, minutes long. My meeting with him was about two and a half hours, but if you transcribed it, it would have had the content of a fifteen-minute conversation. Greg would reference all kinds of books and articles, and instead of paraphrasing them, like any normal lazy person, he'd insist on going online and finding the exact line or quote from the secondary source, adding another five-minute silent section to the meeting, during which he wordlessly surfed online. Later I would realize this is Greg's signature style. He likes to take in people past the point where they can be putting on a show to impress him. Or, this is my interpretation. He might just have been zoning out and forgot I was there.

Greg's a very low-key guy, with the bearing of a gentle, athletic scientist. We talked about New Hamps.h.i.+re, our dads, books, and elaborate Indian weddings. It was fun, and I unexpectedly learned a lot. I remember leaving the meeting with a few printouts; one was MapQuest directions to a diner Greg loved eating at, called John O'Groats, and the other was an article about the history of the architecturally interesting library where Greg went to high school.

Now, I should give some context of that year in television. NBC had high hopes for three comedies that year: Committed, a show about eccentric friends living together in New York City; an animated show, Father of the Pride; and Joey, the spin-off of Friends. I could not get meetings with any of these hot shows. Like, not even close. Marc hustled and got me a meeting with only one other show, Nevermind Nirvana, a pilot about an interracial married couple. I drove to Burbank to meet with the executives. While I was sitting in the waiting area, the producer got a call: the show had not gotten picked up. The receptionist informed me of the news, and immediately started packing her stuff up in a box. I validated my parking and left. I literally didn't even make it into the room. So, technically, meeting Greg was my first and only staffing meeting in my career.

A week or so later, Marc called and told me Greg wanted to hire me as a staff writer for season one of The Office. Before I could get too excited, he let me know I had been hired for six episodes for a show that was premiering mid-season. This was the smallest amount of contracted work you could do and still qualify for Writers Guild members.h.i.+p. I didn't care. I was a television writer! With health insurance!

Friendless, I celebrated the best way I could. I went straight to Canter's Deli, sat in a booth, and ordered a huge frosty c.o.ke and a sandwich called the Brooklyn Ave. (a less healthy version of a Reuben, if that is possible), and gabbed with my best friends and mom on the phone for two hours. An elderly man who was eating with his wife at a nearby table came over to my booth. "You're being very loud and rude," he said. "Your voice is so high-pitched and piercing."

I started work in July. At that time, I lived alone in a small, damp apartment I found on Fairfax Avenue and Fountain Boulevard, which I did not know was the nexus of all of transvest.i.te social life in West Hollywood. I did not even have the basic L.A. savvy to ask my landlord for a parking s.p.a.ce, so I parked blocks away from my house and enjoyed late-night interactions with strangely tall, flat-chested women named Felice or Vivica, who always wanted rides to the Valley. If my life at the time had been a sitcom, an inebriated tranny gurgling "Heeeeey, giiiirrrrrll!" would have been my "Norm!"

A giant billboard for a gay s.e.x chat line was twenty feet from my apartment door. You have to understand, this was before I became the international and fabulous gay icon that I am today, so it made me uncomfortable. (Now I'm basically Lady Gaga and Gavin Newsom times a million.) When my parents came to visit me, I would try to distract them from seeing it by pointing across the street to a Russian produce market, which I was 70 percent sure was a front for a crime consortium. "Isn't that cool, Mom and Dad? I can get my produce locally."

My parents visited a lot. It was a lonely time. I started to look forward to my encounters with Felice and Vivica. "Heeeyyy, Curry Spice! Heeey, Giiiirrrrll!"

But mostly, I just wanted to start work.

Being a staff writer was very stressful. I knew I was a funny person, but I was so inexperienced in this atmosphere. Joking around with Brenda and writing plays on the floor of our living room in Brooklyn was intimate and safe, and entwined in our friends.h.i.+p. But I wasn't friends with these guys. I was the only staff writer on the show (the others outranked me) and had never been in a writers' room. Most of the stress came, honestly, because the other writers were so experienced and funny and I was worried I couldn't keep up. I was scared Greg would notice this inequity of talent and that he'd fire me in a two-hour, pause-laden meeting. I dreaded the pauses more than the firing.

The full-time writers for season one were Greg, Paul Lieberstein, Mike Schur, B. J. Novak, and me. Larry Wilmore and Lester Lewis were consultants, which meant they wrote three of the five days of the week. For some reason I thought Greg, B.J., and Mike were all best friends, because they had all gone to Harvard and been on The Harvard Lampoon (even though their times at Harvard didn't even overlap). I'll never forget one day at lunch, when Mike asked B.J. to go to a Red SoxDodgers game, while I stewed angrily on the other side of the room, feeling left out.

"I'll get you, you clique-y sons of b.i.t.c.hes," I thought.

You know what? I never did get them. I'm just realizing now. I should totally still get them.

But as is the case with most people you are stuck with for many hours, they slowly became my good friends. The job of comedy writer is essentially to sit and have funny conversations about hypothetical situations, and you are rewarded for originality of detail. It is exhilarating, and I didn't want it to stop. I soon started dreading the weekends, because weekends meant saying good-bye to this creative, cheerful atmosphere.

I will always remember Chappelle's Show very fondly because besides being one of the funniest shows ever, it served as my good friend at the time. I'd watch every episode, and then watch them again later that day to hear the jokes again. Sometimes on a Sat.u.r.day night I would fall asleep watching it on my sofa, like Dave Chappelle and I were best friends chatting until we fell asleep. I was twenty-four.