Chapter Eleven: Ginuwine Isn’t Really My Cousin
1. When you sign with a big agency, you have no idea who your agent is because they switch you around from agent to agent without telling you. At one point, I didn’t know the name of my agent or what he or she looked like. Once, I was at a birthday party at the Formosa Cafe, when a girl came up to me: “Retta? You’re so funny, do you have representation?” I was about to talk so much shit about my current agent, then I thought, Oh my God, this might be my agent. And she doesn’t even fucking realize she reps me!
2. There are T-shirts for sale in our campus bookstore that say “Harvard—the Duke of the North.”
3. Blocking is when the director and actors go over where the actors will stand and move to in the scene. The floor is marked with colored tape on every spot where the actors stop so that the cameras know where they will be and the director of photography can light each location properly.
4. Shawna Malwae-Tweep was a Pawnee journalist and we used to substitute her name in for the lyrics of songs we knew. Most popular was singing Shawna Malwae-Tweep to the tune of the Jackson 5’s “ABC.”
5. Did y’all know Aziz won an Emmy along with Alan Yang for Best Writing in a Comedy? Woot woot! Go Zizi!! Go Yang!!