"A Day Without Sunshine Is Like, You Know, Night." ~Steve Martin

I first met Jim Signorelli when my mom wore a maternity wedding dress in the backyard of our first house in Water Mill. He was the best man, and the maid of honor. (There were only five people present, including me).

I grew up hearing initially frightening Saturday Night Live tales involving my parents (at 11, do you really want to know that John Belushi once carried your mom home drunk from the Odeon?), then anecdotes now firmly included in my own personal Friedman family folklore. When my mom first invited my dad over to the apartment she shared with Gilda Radner on Bank Street, she hid any signs of messiness in Gilda’s room, a room she told my dad was “just the closet, no need to look in there…”

I don’t have an official “godfather” despite all the rampant genetic tendencies towards familial outsourcing running through my blood: my father’s Jewish side nearly suffocating me with reminders of “who I am,” and my mother’s Irish Catholic side overflowing with new cousins, brothers-in-law, third and sixth cousins, even mysterious cousins so distant I still don’t know for sure whether or not I’m actually related to, popping up every month. But Jim, the sole Italian influence in our clan, has acted as a substitute godfather since my parents' wedding when he gave both my mom and me away.

Skipping over the more sentimental attachments I have towards Giacomo Due, my most recent visit to SNL this weekend reminded me that I too have participated in my family's nostalgic history of the show thanks to Jim. I doubt I’ll be able to one day re-enact the day my dad showed up at my brother Drew’s first New York apartment on East 6^th street with Dan Akyroyd in tow, sending Drew (the brother with whom I share what my dad calls “the Smirk,” a too-cool expression Drew used whenever he somehow caught a fly ball in middle school; the apparent nickname I earned among private school admissions officers after prep school interviews) into uncharacteristic hysteria. The closest I came was at age 9 when Steve Martin called our house, asking for my dad. I skipped over to his office/cottage underneath the apple tree that would eventually collapse on top of it during Hurricane Andrew, and announced the caller. My dad had expected me to be a bit impressed, but apparently I turned on my imaginary heels and sniffed, “well it’s not like it’s Jim Carrey…”

But ever since the first time I walked past a very long line on the 9^th floor on a Saturday night around 10:30pm, glancing at the black-and-white photos guiding my way towards the dusty set of sets and endless array of lighting fixtures that crowd Studio 8H, I finally feel at home surrounded by the blinding bulbs and whizzing acrobatic directors’ chairs. One of which, for the past thirty years, has held my very non-acrobatic godfather Jim.

A look back:

April 12, 1997: Rob Lowe / The Spice Girls
At 13, I still hadn’t given up my grunge-y tomboy wardrobe, the first real sartorial aesthetic I’d fully embraced after receiving In Utero as my first CD. But the Spice Girls released “Wannabe” and it was so goddamn catchy. Plus the sporty one wore pants. I told everyone my favorite was Ginger Spice, showing early signs of rebellion (she was always creeping up towards video cameras as though she wanted to eat both them and the men behind them, wasn’t she?). So my first visit was with my mom, and I made the strange decision to wear a big white t-shirt and even bigger Adidas breakaway warm-up pants. Jim greeted us and said, “Well Molly! You’re dressed just like a Spice Girl, huh?” I went back to school adhering more properly to the preppy dress code, and gave up the grunge for good. Side note: This Rob Lowe-hosted episode is the “one where Norm MacDonald cursed,” getting him fired. I remember watching him say the f-word during Weekend Update, and my mom joining the rest of the audience in “ooooohhh…”s. I didn’t get it. I thought the Players were the only kids on TV allowed to, well, play. But apparently, they were now Ready for Prime Time.

October 4, 1997: Matthew Perry / Oasis
Later that year, I used Oasis’ upcoming appearance as an excuse to see my childhood best friend Simone again. I’d just started high school up in Connecticut with new friends and a closet full of J. Crew button-downs, and Simone was still back in Southampton going to school with all the kids we’d known since our parents used to sit us next to each other in booster seats at Bobby Van’s. Simone and I had been obsessed with Liam Gallagher since the Wonderwall video, to the point where we dragged our moms to their Jones Beach concert to sit 34 miles away from their hairy faces in beach chairs. So Jim gave us the same seats, front row and directly in front of the band’s stage. I’d since become less enamored with the grisly Gallaghers and was more of a David Duchovny fanatic. But watching Simone’s epic cheekbones nearly bust through her cheeks sitting just 34 feet away from Liam was more the point.

November 6, 1999: Dylan McDermott / The Foo Fighters
The summer after my sophomore year, I went to sailing camp for four weeks. Pretentious, for sure, but I didn’t know that. I just knew it was what the cool kids at my school did and I wasn’t cool and wanted to be. The only truly cool thing about my trip, aside from being assigned Navigator on the only day our boat would eventually wind up in the middle of the Caribbean with no land in sight, was meeting a boy named Graham from Nantucket. First he was hot, then he was my friend because thanks to the Smirk, boys in high school thought I thought was too-cool. But he actually was too cool, so we spent those four weeks being very popular kids at camp. But! As it turned out, he was transferring to my high school that fall. So then he was a big gigantic crush. The kind who plays the guitar in the band room and sings “Everlong” to you. And is tall and gorgeous and all of those typical things. Sadly, my attempt to make the crush mutual by taking him to see the Foo Fighters at SNL backfired, after we left the show and bought an enormous bottle of Captain Morgan’s. I’d never drank before, so I gulped it down like water. We were 15 and waltzing around the West Village at 1:30am, so of course we would inhale rum for the first time. Then I blacked out, somehow purchased an excellent fake ID, and do not remember this picture being taken. We remained…friends.

October 12, 2002: Sarah Michelle Gellar / Faith Hill
In college I met my first actual boyfriend. We met during Freshman Orientation and fell in that real kind of old-people-disguised-as-young people love only Diamonds commercials and Michel Gondry movies accurately portray. So we went, just because being in love in college, though great, makes college life very boring. The only memorable moment of this show has to do with watching Faith Hill sing “Cry” and finally realizing just how wildly talented SNL’s music production staffers are when they can make watching a country singer belting out a forgettable ballad feel like watching Cream at MSG.



March 6, 2010: Zach Galifainakis / Vampire Weekend
After eight years, I asked Jim for tickets days before last week’s show. As usual, he obliged. I’d stopped asking Jim for trips to SNL over the years, instead asking him for more Godfather-type favors. Career advice, boy advice, and use of his summer house in Springs (leading to a very Jim kind of email: “Whose underwear did you leave in my freezer!” I told him that’s where I assumed one puts Jay McInerney’s underwear after he hands them to you in the middle of a book party.) But Kelley was turning 26 that night, and it was time to revisit 8H and sit down in those snobby friend-of-the-director seats with nothing between us and the stage but dust and bulbs.