“I really stepped in a pile of doggie doo-doo when Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger cohosted.Someone had written a sketch about the game show ‘Family Feud’. In the sketch, the Baldwins were one family, and Kevin Nealon, Julia Sweeney, Sarah Silverman and I were the other. (Alec’s brothers Stephen and Billy had both agreed to be in the sketch.)
As the ‘Family Feud’ sketch was executed line by line during rewrites, I noticed that every time Kim Bassinger spoke, she had only one syllable at a time. Alec, Billy and Stephen spoke in complete sentences, but when it was Kim’s turn to speak, she was relegated to saying things like 'yes' and 'no'. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. Sarah Silverman broke up the infighting by asking, ‘How come all of Kim’s lines are only one word?’
Before anyone could answer, I blurted out, ‘Because she’s dumb!’
A hush fell over the room as everyone stopped talking. No one would make eye contact with me. Everyone was reacting as if she was in the room when I said it– and she was. Alec and Kim had made their way into the room, and were sitting on a couch directly across from me, staring straight at me.
Alec Baldwin is a bear of a man, and I wondered how long it would take him to walk over to the table and cave in my skull with his fists. I realized it was time to do some quick thinking, and practically cried out: ‘You guys have made her look dumb! We can do better than this! She’s our guest, for Christ’s sake!’
Alec didn’t cave my skull in, and, not realizing my attempts to save the sketch were merely to keep him from kicking my ass, he and Kim gravitated toward me that week. I would be walking back from the restroom and pass Alec in the hallway and he would throw a fake punch at me and say something like ‘How’s it going?’
Man, I soaked it up.”
