Where do I begin? I remember watching you on Weekend Update and thinking, somehow you were like me, but I didn’t know how. Maybe it was the fact that you wore glasses so I cast you as an intellectual. It’s weird. That was so long ago. Back when I wanted to be a banker and (literally) own my hometown. I never obsessively kept up with you like Trent Reznor, but whenever you made an appearance in the world around me, you always felt relevant and real. I loved “Mean Girls” before I even knew you wrote it. And the premiere of 30 Rock bonded so many people in my office. I don’t know what we would have had to talk about it without it.

I never even thought I’d qualify for the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor…I mean maybe the Nathaniel Hawthorne award for judgmental behavior or the Judy Bloom award for awkward puberty or Harper Lee prize for small bodies of work…and yet, I hope, that like Mark Twain, in 100 years people will look at my work and think, “wow that is actually pretty racist.”

What I’m trying to say is I think you’re awesome. And if you ever need a stunt double in a movie, I think I have the hair and hips for the part.

Tonight was incredible. My front row seat in the loge section at the Orpheum Theatre couldn’t have been much better, especially considering this show had sold out and I only got a ticket because they changed venues, opening up a few more tickets. The evening opened with a series of clips spanning her career from Second City to 30 Rock. And, like Bill Cosby, I cried a little when she walked on stage as the screen disappeared out of sight. Watching the highlight reel of all the things she’d done to make me laugh right before seeing her in person just pushed me over an emotional edge, I guess. I was skeptical on how the interview would be run, but Steven Winn did a wonderful job. He kept it moving but covered a lot of ground. She talked a lot about what attracted her to comedy and acting and topics that I’m sure are all covered in her book. I was mostly interested in seeing her mannerisms in a candid setting and noticing how much Liz Lemon comes out. It started from the beginning when she sat in the wrong chair on stage and when Winn asked if she’d like to trade, she just said, “no, no, I’m fine here.” She kept trying to subtly tug up her top, finally asking, “Can you all see my boobs? I’m not used to having them.”

She talked about the season 2 finale of 30 Rock which ended with Liz wanting to adopt a baby. The way they originally wanted to end it was having a sort of flash forward for the whole cast, so Kenneth would be in a hotel room in China with a woman and a gun (at the Olympics) and due to Liz’s liberalism, she would have returned from eastern Europe, not with an adopted baby, but with an old woman and some herculean child that she was a little afraid of. The next season would have opened with her talking about the trials of this living situation with Jack. That would have been soooo hilarious.

Something else I hadn’t realized was that 30 Rock is shot on one camera, like Arrested Development, not multi-cam, like Seinfeld & Cheers, so it takes them a week to shoot an episode vs an afternoon like the other shows. And as an editor, her story about Alec Baldwin’s advice on how to “force a cut” was pretty funny. He told her that if there’s a line you really want to stay on camera for then just take your coat off halfway through delivery. They can’t cut back to you with your coat off. Awesome. A tip he got from Jack Nicholson allegedly.

In speaking about her Second City experience and explaining the rule of “yes” in improv, she mentioned something her mentor, Martin de Maat had always said:

The fun is on the other side of a ‘yes’.

It was something that she tried to apply to life, and I think it’s a great perspective.

She was asked how frightening it was to do improv, while knowing that the “yes” wouldn’t always lead somewhere funny. She said it usually didn’t but that you were always on stage with someone else so you’d go down together. And that the really scary thing is stand-up which she’d never done on anything more than an amateur level. “In stand-up, the highs are higher but the lows are lower.”, she said, “With improv, your comedy may have been killed but you are still physically alive (haha, the way she said it was great).” It made me feel better about the emotional traumas I’d endured as part of stand-up. Her description felt dead-on. It also put me back in regret-mode for not sticking with an open mic.

But really, I felt closest to Tina Fey when she read an excerpt in her book. It described how she felt Mexican in her college, because she wasn’t as white as everyone else (blonde hair/blue eyes). Her recount of an exchange with an attractive guy who approached her while she was with a group of friends and how she opened by insulting him, when it turned out he was coming over to ask her to his frat’s formal, spoke to me. But not quite as much as this…

During my First Year, I had a crush on a brainy, raven-haired boy from my dorm. ... He would ask me at least once a day if I had ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket. I would remind him that I had not. He would then describe parts of it to me. After several weeks of mistaking this for flirtation, I tried to kiss him one night by the Monroe Hill dorms and he literally ran away. Not figuratively. Literally.

It didn’t take much effort for me to be sitting her in shoes for this story. No wonder I’ve always felt some connection to her. We are the same person. I felt like the only person that found herself in situations like that. And the more I felt related to Tina Fey, the more I hated myself for not doing more with my life, because it seemed we were cut from the same cloth. I mean, I don’t want her life, as cool as it may be, but I do want what she wants, what we all want, to do something people will remember. And to make people laugh.

She said in school, she wasn’t labeled as the “funny one” by any means, but she would get to know people by seeing what made them laugh. And she would judge their intelligence by it, too.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s natural to try to pick up on relations to people you admire, but seriously, I didn’t even have to try. Strip out circumstances of being at all these cool places and knowing famous people and I could be swapped into any of these scenarios with ease.

I don’t even know what to do with this newfound realization that I have all this potential not being channeled into anything productive. I left the show feeling so energized but the more that thought sunk in, the more it morphed to self-loathing. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, but I bought her book. I’ll probably read it and realize it’s the exact kind of book I would have written so there’s no point in trying. I think I have my autobiography title ready though: “No One Special”. It’s going to be a best-seller…in the dream sequence I play out in my brain where I actually write it…

Regardless of what this inspires, I feel so damn great having gotten the opportunity to see her in person. These sort of opportunities make it hard to have any second-thoughts about living where I do. So many opportunities.