2:13 – redacted3 says:

Is all that stuff in your profile true ? :)

2:14 – awesomeyay says:

yeah — i was going to wink back except you’re an atheist – ha. this is me: mandystadtmiller.com

Match System Message >> Your personal information is worth protecting. To safeguard your privacy, the URL you provided has been converted to www.match.com for this initial contact. It will not be removed on any additional IM conversations with this user.

2:14 – awesomeyay says:

oh – it won’t let me give you my web site

2:14 – awesomeyay says:

my web site is

2:14 – awesomeyay says:

mandy

2:14 – awesomeyay says:

stadtmiller

2:14 – awesomeyay says:

.com

2:15 – awesomeyay says:

but yeah – atheists and agnostics — i’m all into spirituality and sh-t so probably not a match, or worth flying from sweden for.

2:15 – awesomeyay says:

but you seemed neat! so goodonya

2:15 – redacted3 says:

OK, that’s already a �lot more info than I usually get from these IM chats !!

2:15 – awesomeyay says:

haha yeah

2:15 – redacted3 says:

I’m struggling to keep up here …

2:15 – awesomeyay says:

wait is says you’re into spirituality. so – i guess meditation?

2:16 – awesomeyay says:

or something godless? but yeah dont worry about keeping up.

2:16 – redacted3 says:

I spend quite a bit of time in NY. That’s why I took a shot with you.

2:16 – awesomeyay says:

you seem adorable. i hope to marry a nerd like you someday.

2:16 – awesomeyay says:

cool – well at the least we can get a coffee sometime.

2:16 – awesomeyay says:

you can shoot me a line at mstadtmiller@——.com

2:17 – awesomeyay says:

WOW YOU HAVE A SERVICE DOG???

2:17 – awesomeyay says:

are you deaf?

2:17 – redacted3 says:

OK, that seems easier than trying to keep up here …

2:17 – awesomeyay says:

my dad is blind and has a guide dog.

2:17 – awesomeyay says:

or do you train service dogs?

2:17 – redacted3 says:

A what ??? What ARE you reading ?

2:17 – awesomeyay says:

oh sh-t

2:17 – awesomeyay says:

sorry different profile

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

hahahaha duh

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

hilar

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

ok — well be in touch if you like

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

you’re also not the guy into spirituality. that’s the service dog guy. hahahahaha. oh man.

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

take care — xom

2:18 – redacted3 says:

Well the Sweden part was right, so …

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

haha yes!

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

i totally got that one right.

2:18 – awesomeyay says:

hahahaha

2:18 – redacted3 says:

Right.

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

i’m seriously laughing my ass off here. oh man.

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

well have a good night, redacted3.

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

i hope it’s ok i call you redacted3.

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

not too much too soon — xom

2:19 – redacted3 says:

Call me redacted1

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

a joke!

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

you made a joke

2:19 – awesomeyay says:

that’s inspiring.

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

remember when i thought you had a service dog and were into spirituality?

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

those were good times.

2:20 – redacted3 says:

xom = ?

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

kiss, hug, m is short for mandy

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

it’s like “bye”

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

also it means I’m going to set a bunch of sh-t on fire.

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

it’s like, hey…watch out, i’m about to set some sh-t on fire.

2:20 – awesomeyay says:

so i hope your spiritual service dog is cool with that.

2:21 – awesomeyay says:

oh man, good times.

2:21 – awesomeyay says:

good night, redacted1

2:21 – redacted3 says:

Uh … ok. Nighty night.

2:22 – awesomeyay says:

wahahaha “uh…ok.” best im. EVER.

Oh, Steve Phillips, you nutty, birthmarked-on-your-crotch gigantic dummy, you.

Seriously? This is the girl you cheat with? The chubby, needy, crazy-eyed, always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride, way-beneath-your-league 22-year-old from your office?

In the immortal words of Chris Rock: “That tiger didn’t go crazy. That tiger went tiger.”

Translation: That crazy chick didn’t go crazy. That crazy chick went crazy chick.

Has Monica Lewinsky taught us nothing?

I’ve always been voted most unlikely,” Tracy Morgan says as he lies in bed a day before the release of his autobiography, “I Am the New Black.” “Now that I’m making it, everybody’s paying attention to everything I say.”

And there’s a lot he wants to get off his chest.

Along with a slew of shout-outs (to Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels, among others), a bit of score-settling (with fellow “Saturday Night Live” alums Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri) and the predictably unpredictable philosophizing and aphorizing the world has come to relish from the 40-year-old, Emmy-nominated “30 Rock” star, the book details the ultimate hard-knock life growing up in the ghettos of New York.

The child of a heroin-addicted Vietnam vet and a gambling-addicted mother, Morgan writes candidly about the anger, pain and sadness that fuel his nothing-to-lose wild-man comedy.

“Somewhere along my way, I lost my innocence,” he tells The Post, three weeks before his Carnegie Hall debut as part of the New York Comedy Festival.

Indeed, his youth reads like a social worker’s worst nightmare.

He lost his virginity at age 8 to a 14-year-old baby sitter. (She also had sex with his disabled 10-year-old brother.) In the middle of a family fight, Morgan wished his father dead, and later that day Dad told him, “You got your wish,” and proceeded to tell his son he was dying from AIDS, which he’d contracted from a dirty needle. Dropping out of high school, he became a crack dealer.

Live from New York, it’s . . . the worst childhood ever.

You’d think today’s modern woman would be happier than ever.

We’ve got it all — the right to work, the right to not work, the right to sleep with David Letterman — but, surprisingly, a comprehensive new study is pointing to one very disturbing trend.

Compared to 35 years ago, today’s modern woman is, in fact, more miserable than ever.

What’s even more troubling? According to this new meta-analysis of major data sets available on well-being research, men by contrast are actually growing more content than ever.

“We basically noticed something that hadn’t been noticed before, which is that women are becoming less happy relative to men, both in the US and in Europe,” says Justin Wolfers, who recently published these findings with his romantic and research partner, Betsey Stevenson (how’s that for a “second shift”?). “This study has very big implications for happiness researchers.”

Here’s the review of the new book “The Second City Unscripted” by Mike Thomas.

[Related: Please also consider reading "Something Wonderful Right Away." I read that book in 2003 on the plane to London, my first trip ever to Europe, and the book and the trip blend together as one beautiful, lightening-enlightening experience.]

[Also related: While reading a few of the excerpts I've pulled, I've provided a nice little YEAHYEAHYEAH soundtrack at the bottom of this post if you'd like one.]

So what follows are a few of my favorite quotes from this fascinating oral history which I found particularly inspiring and insightful. As a student there in the early 2000s, Second City was life changing for me.

It’s where I learned to

-live in the moment

-go for it, even when it doesn’t work

-see how a nurturing aesthetic can lead to more ideas than you ever dreamed possible (try it, just once, instead of saying “No, that won’t work…” say, “Yes, and what if we considered…” Seriously, just once…try it)

-listen and create from a place of joy instead of fear

-realize there is nothing to be scared of…ever

-see how in every situation, it’s YOU bringing that energy (either joy or fear, either OWNage or apologizing)

-laugh at weaknesses and love vulnerabilities

-know when to be the garnish and when to be the main course

-thrill in the joy of creation

-have fun rather than overthink

-treasure and value and advance rather than obsess about what might be better

-look at the strengths rather than the weakness in what’s being put forward

-learn and feel inspired by the power of creation rather than the invulnerable, removed, risking-nothing superiority of critical detraction

-throw out all the rules and the self-hatred and the not-being-good-enough and the mistakes and the what-if-I-could-have and the did-I-do-this-right and the maybe-someday-when-everything’s-perfect and just go for it, man.

Enjoy these excerpts for the improv/comedy/theater/performance/creative geek inside.

Note: These are all quotes that tickled or inspired and made me draw a scribbly star next to a passage, or even better, chuckle and say aloud to myself, “totally” like a crazy person.

YEAH!

…Tina Fey: “Being in that company, in some ways you lose your fear of failure. Because there are always nights in that set when you’re developing a show where everything tanks, or where you’re just bombing, and you come out the other side of it, and you survive it. And that’s such a great thing to get rid of–that fear of failure.”

…Bonnie Hunt: “It definitely humbles you, because there are times when you go out there and you fail and you’ve got to brush yourself off and start all over again. It’s kind of like being a Cubs fan. I think what I learned at Second City was that it was okay to take risks, to fall flat on my face and get back up and learn about myself. And I definitely learned to embrace the honesty of my own vulnerability.”

…Alan Arkin: “I thought I was going to get fired initially, because I wasn’t funny at all for about a month….And then, after about a month, I found a character that worked. Whatever I did in that character was funny. And I hung on to that character like a lifeline…”

…Alan Arkin: “…it gave us a place to fail. Which doesn’t exist in this civilization anymore. There is no place to fail anymore. And failing at something is crucial. You don’t learn from anything unless you fail. And we were not only allowed to fail, but almost encourage to take chances every night onstage. We knew that twenty, thirty, sometimes forty percent of what we were doing wasn’t going to work, and the audience didn’t mind. They knew that two things would fail and the next thing would be glorious.”

…Bob Dishy: “[Paul Sills] was pained, physically pained, by what he considered cheap laughs. I mean, they would drive him up the wall. He’d come backstage and yell, ‘Stop it! What are you doing?!’ Because he had these high standards, which was great. I found it so enlightening.”

…Sheldon Patinkin: “I never found it mystical. I know that some people did, and I know that Viola [Spolin] sort of felt that way about it. I think it was more that when your job is to respond rather than to initiate, which is the rule in an improv–you don’t know what your next line is until you know what just happened or what was just said–it gives you a kind of concentration that perhaps feels mystical to some people, but to me feels like human communication.”

…Valerie Harper: “It made my career. The work. I’m well over sixty and I’m using Viola’s games to get at what I need to do. If you came out of her workshops and you weren’t an actor, you weren’t a failure. Your life would be better because her games unleash something in people that connects them to other people, that makes you observe more clearly, more keenly, be aware of the other over there. She used to say my performance isn’t here in Valerie, it’s over there in the other player. Look at them. How are they reacting to what I’m saying?”

…David Steinberg: “Fred Willard and I would get into this stuff where I just couldn’t stop laughing. He was so brilliantly funny, playing these offbeat unique characters all the time, and it was just hard to do a scene with him. But he and I did a lot of scenes together. Fred was totally unique. The trick to become an audience favorite was originality. He was totally original. You never saw anything like Fred. Weird characters. And Fred himself is offbeat, even to this day.”

…Bernard Sahlins: “[Belushi] knew who he was. He was knew he was good. He was in the present, totally in the present.”

…Eugenie Ross-Leming: “[Belushi] took such pleasure in what he was doing. And you can’t be angry at someone who is not doing something to hurt you but just having a good time.”

…David Rasche: “[Del Close] had an engine that other people don’t have. One thing you learned from him was to take care of each other as actors. His basic thing was, ‘If you take care of me, I’ll take care of you. I will never let you fail. Don’t let me fail.’ And that’s the way he directed. And he really stuck to it. It was an outgrowth of the way humans should treat each other.”

…Harold Ramis: “Del’s whole crusade at Second City and after was to keep people in the moment. Del believed that the Second City games–he actually said this once–[are] just like life. Life is an improvisation. We’re constantly discovering our character, we’re constantly discovering everyone else’s character, and we’re in situations that are constantly evolving and changing. And the ultimate improv game–he called it the Game Game–is the game we’d play all the time. No one tells us what to say; we were always making up our own dialogue. So he wanted the stage to be as real as life in that sense.”

…Harold Ramis: “Del saw in John [Belushi] this force of nature. Del always wanted to revolutionize theater, and here was John, the perfect person to lead the charge. And John had amazing respect for Del. And I know Del liked and respected me, but we were different. Del loved that John was so present in the moment, and I was known to be in my head. I was always ‘writing’ onstage. And John was not a writer. He was not thinking abstractly about what’s good for the scene. He was just there following some impulse of his. And Del admired that.”

…Ann Ryerson: “What I personally loved about Betty [Thomas] is that she had such an incredible enjoyment of life and she was unashamed to show her enjoyment of life, and everybody else vicariously felt good about her and about themselves with Betty around.”

…Betty Thomas: “People say that being a director, you have to make a decision about every half a second. And it’s very simple for me. I don’t need more than half a second. And that’s a great trait to have as a director. ‘Should he wear this? Should that be there? Should that be over there? Do you want this?’ “Yes, No, Yes, Yes, Let’s go. Move that here.’ I would say that was the beginning of confidence and decisiveness.”

…Dan Aykroyd: “[Del's] influence really didn’t come to bear until we came down to Chicago in August of ‘74. That’s when we really had the day-to-day contact with Del, and we got to see how much fun it was, and how he basically removed all fear. All fear of dying. All fear of being bad. All fear of overarching a character. He just basically took all the fear away.”

…Paul Dinello: “I came from a blue-collar Chicago background, and Stephen [Colbert] had come from the South. And he got formal acting training at Northwestern, and I was just a drunk idiot. I think he thought I was a bit of a philistine, and I thought he was a bit of a dandy. His hair was in a pompadour, and he had, like, a red turtleneck on, and he held his chin in his hand. Rested his chin on top of his knuckles. And he was very dry. And I had never really followed any rules, nor did I really want to hear about the rules. I always sort of screwed around. I think Farley and I were closer, but oddly enough, Colbert and I hit it off more.”

…Stephen Colbert: “I was very actorly, because I had gone to theater school. And I was very controlled. I was all about planning. And Paul was sort of a wild, chaotic, impulsive energy comedically. Much sillier, much stupider behavior. And I’m happy to say he won that battle. He said my tie was tied a little too tight, and he was absolutely right. And he opened me up to a little bit of a wilder side, and so did Amy [Sedaris]. And then the three of us became pretty inseparable, and I was very lucky and grateful to have those two people to love and be loved by, for the next few years, because it’s not easy to be a lady-in-waiting there at Second City, while you’re on the road all the time. You get to be on the road, which is great, but waiting for your work is an exhausting experience. Even waiting for a touring company. They keep you hungry.

…Paul Dinello: “Stephen approaches things intellectually. Amy and I approach things emotionally. So when we started, he wanted to take the right road, and he wanted to hear what people had to say. And he wanted to intellectualize stuff and understand it, and sort of do things by the numbers. Amy and I were more the kind of people who would just jump in. And I remember when we first started, he had a thing: ‘I never laugh onstage.’ And we were doing this scene in the touring company and Amy put in these false icky teeth, which she wasn’t supposed to have for the scene, and smiled, and he started laughing. He just lost it, and he went backstage, and he was all upset about it.

…Stephen Colbert: “I was so mad that we finished the song and then I f-cking blew offstage and went and locked myself in the bathroom like a teenage girl, and banged my head against the wall with rage. And she and Paul, who were determined to get me to loosen up, were like, [high mocking voice] ‘Hey, are you crying?’ Just mocking me mercilessly.”

…Amy Sedaris: “He was very serious in the beginning, and it was hard. But after that, he was all ours.”

…Stephen Colbert: “They completely won. I’m forever grateful that they broke me.”

…Paul Dinello: “We improvised a scene where [Steve Carell] played a character who had never had sex. Like, an adult man who never had sex. It’s a vague memory, but we were talking about what it was like to make love to a woman, and what it felt like. And then somehow the subject became what a woman’s vagina feels like, and he said, ‘It’s like feeding a horse.’”

…Tina Fey: “When I first moved to New York, [Martin de Maat] had this awesome rent-controlled place in SoHo. I was moving here to write for SNL, and he was like, ‘Just use my place until you find one.’ It was very, very generous. He really had this sort of Zen approach to improvisation. Much more than anything to do with comedy. It was all about the rules of agreement and ‘Yes, and…’ and almost spilling over as a life philosophy. I remember being in his class and writing down a list of all the things that he said that were so meaningful on several levels. His whole thing was, ‘Do it now. Do it too. Do it again. Put your head in your partner’s bucket. The fun is on the other side of a ‘yes.’ It was all stuff that was wholly true of beginning improvisation, but also sort of true in life.”