| Talk Show Appearances - 2005 | ||
|
Tonight
Show, May 6 Clicking on the thumbnail images will cause larger versions of the images to open in a separate window.
As the sequence begins, Jay Leno has just finished interviewing Hayden Christensen, who was promoting the third Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith. He introduces Tracey, who comes out and gives Jay a hug, then greets Hayden. As she sits down, Jay says that he owes her an apology for walking into her dressing room while she was just wearing a bra [we're just talking about above the waistline here -- RR]. She takes presumably mock umbrage at him for doing so; "he's such an old pervert!" But she does present him with a tie that she knitted herself; it looks like a miniature Doctor Who scarf. Yes, she's started to knit, she says, and it's frightening; you get older, you start to knit. When he says it's quite nice, she gets a little upset with him for saying that it's only quite nice. Being made from heavy wool, it won't flow back while riding a motorcycle on the freeway. But if Jay's going to be that way about it, then she'll give it to Hayden, and then she puts it around his neck. It looks better on him anyway, she says, for it better matches his colors. How long did it take to make it, asks Jay. About a week, she replies. Then she plugs the forthcoming book on knitting she's writing with friend Mel Clark. Perhaps the next time she comes back, she'll bring knitted socks or boxer shorts. While Jay contemplates the comfort, or lack thereof, of woolen boxer shorts, Hayden promises to give Jay the tie after the show. Tracey asks Jay if the fact that she now knits frightens him. No, he says, it's just that he doesn't see her as the knitting type -- "too hyper." Nonetheless, she likes it very much. Tracey points out that she hasn't been on the show recently. She didn't really want to go on talk shows last year when A Dirty Shame came out because of the pervasive sexual content of the film. It's like a soft porn film, she says, so she thought Jay might have been scared by it. It was all about her (or her character, to be precise) having a runaway vagina, and Johnny Knoxville performs oral sex on her. "Good night, everybody!" goes Jay, "we are now officially off the air." But they aren't. And what's wrong with saying "vagina" on the air, asks Tracey. Nothing, replies Jay. But oddly enough, it was on the set of that movie that she started to knit. She also said the movie wasn't really soft porn; she didn't do any nudity. She's through with being a sex symbol at her age. Turning to Hayden, she says that he's just starting out and should do the sex symbol stuff, but that she and Jay don't do that any more. She points out son Johnny, who's offstage (the camera never shows him, though) and is saying about Hayden, "He's just a kid." She tells Johnny to pull his trousers up, causing Jay to comment that he'll be in therapy for the rest of his life. "We don't do therapy in our family," responds Tracey. However, in her new show, where she recreates her childhood and her whole life so far, that was like therapy for her. Was she a ham as a child, asks Jay. Well, she would stand on the window sill in her mother's bedroom and put on a show every night. She would pretend to be Liza Minelli or Edith Piaf and sing in pretend French, giving us an example. It was absolute rubbish, she says, but her mother would say something like "My goodness, she's singing in French!" Then this all stopped at age 9 when her mother remarried. Only 9 years old and she'd been cancelled! Stepfather didn't want to see the show [he had no taste -- RR]. When Jay asks when she started with the characters, Tracey says that she just used to imitate everybody, that that was her thing. Other kids could play football or play the piano; she imitated people, such as the woman next door who wore Wellington boots and a woolen hat and had a cat -- a woman whose fiance died in the First World War and who would remain a virgin for life. Imitating people like her teachers, other kids, Eva Gabor and Julie Andrews -- that was what she liked to do. Jay says he heard that she'd started as a dancer. This is true, Tracey responds; at 16, she went to Berlin for a production of Gigi in German, and then she sings a bit of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" in German. "Such a beautiful language", responds Jay rather sarcastically. She points out a problem she had when dancing: her left leg kicks were much better than her right leg kicks, although when she demonstrates, they appear about the same to the untrained eye. When Jay asks why she stopped dancing, she tells the story about forgetting to put on her panties before a show in Blackpool. She'd just come in from the beach and was pulling everything on very quickly -- well, almost everything, for she forgot to put on her panties. There she was on stage, fully aware of her predicament, trying to alert the man who was to twirl her in the air, singing "don't twirl me in the air, I've got no panties on, and I'm a brunette." There is a delayed laugh from the audience as they ponder the full implications of that last remark. It was the beginning of the runaway vagina situation, so it's all come full circle ("see how I can link things?") Jay asks if what he heard was true, that Tracey was planning to become a US citizen. Yes, it's true, she says to the cheers of the audience. It's been 21 years, and it's time. She then remembers coming on the show in the Carson era with the multicolored rainbow curtains and the makeup artists applying orange makeup to you. Jay asks if she's taken the citizenship test yet; it doesn't seem like she has, for she's watching the History Channel a lot in preparation for it. At this point, they have to go to a commercial, so they work in a quick promo for the new special.
Matt Lauer introduces Tracey by mentioning some of the dozens of memorable roles she's portrayed in her career, and we see three of them via clips from Tracey Takes On... (TTO): Chic, Ruby and Sheneesha. Now, with her new HBO special Live and Exposed, she is playing perhaps her most memorable role: herself. We then see a clip from the show. Here, a young Tracey is talking to her mother, who's in bed. She performs a few impressions to cheer her up: Eva Gabor from Green Acres, Anna Magnani, and Julie Andrews ("But Captain, they're just children"). The clip ends, and we see Matt and Tracey together on the set. He notes that we're used to seeing her in all sorts of incredible getups -- the costumes, makeup, wigs, prosthetics, etc. But this time, he says to her, you're not using any of that. She recalls mentioning that it took four hours to get prepared as Chic -- having chest hair made out of yak hair applied at 5 in the morning. "That wasn't your own chest hair?" he asks jokingly. It's the same stuff that Matt used to get his hair back, she responds, noting that he's follicly gifted again! He gives her permission to touch it, and she does -- "it's luxuriant again," she says. Getting back to the new special, Matt observes that Tracey is speaking of some very personal things in it, and she agrees. It's hard, she says, 'cause she's English and hasn't had any therapy -- so she thought she'd do it on HBO. Was talking about such topics as the death of her father, marriage and the birth of her children cathartic? Yes it was, she says. She explains the story behind the clip: she would put on a show for her mother every night, standing on the windowsill, drawing back the curtains, and doing her impressions, because everyone was so said and she wanted to cheer them up ("Isn't she adorable?" she says, in an aside). She would be Edith Piaf and sing in pretend French, proceeding to demonstrate. It was rubbish, but it was entertaining; it cheered everyone up. Perhaps that was her therapy, observes Matt, for as she said in her show, there was no therapy, no grief counseling for children in 1960's England. Nobody spoke about it, responds Tracey. She wanted to cheer her mother up, and it did work. So that was the first Tracey Ullman Show (TTUS), says Matt. Actually, says Tracey, she was a spinoff from her sister Patty's show. After Patty had seen the show, she had said to Tracey, "That was my show! You were a guest on my show!" Matt tells Tracey that in her show, it seems that she spends as much time talking about the struggles as the successes, and then he asks if that's because the failures are funnier. She doesn't directly answer the question, but she does mention having to go out and look for work at age 16 -- she had so much fun back then. She describes the action as we see another clip from the new special: here she is, dancing around, going to a stage school in London -- the oddest place, really. The neighborhood was such that you might get shot from the housing blocks nearby; the residents didn't care for the stage kids. Then she describes the curls in her hair in the clip as looking like Hasidic payess. Matt's next question deals with the inspiration for the characters. When you're walking down the street, he asks Tracey, and you see someone like the airport security guard or the cabbie, do you instantly know there's a character there? She never actually answers the question, preferring instead to riff for a bit as Sheneesha ("Body search!") and comments on how the real guards have acted when she's gone through airport security, and she's thought, "I can't wait to dress up as you!". So the implied answer appears to be "yes." When Matt asks Tracey about her favorite character over the years, she doesn't answer immediately, preferring to observe that all of her characters have problems but are endearing [I would make an exception for Birdie Godsen, who was never that endearing to me -- RR]. But she did love being black. She asks husband Allan, who's just off the set, if he remembered the time she came home in the Sheneesha outfit and makeup and would not go to bed. She was staying in character, and he was getting tired of and a bit perturbed with it: "Take the makeup off!" He doesn't particularly like her dressing up as a man, either, for it freaks him out (perfectly understandable, says Matt) [and I quite agree -- RR]. Then she finally answers the question: she likes all of them. Matt then brings up the bit in the show where she knows it's time to go back to work: when she starts talking to her wigs. She keeps them in a chest at home, Tracey says, and brings them out. She demonstrates talking to the Kay wig and the Chic wig (his wigs says something like "Hey lady, let me out of the box!"). When she talks to the wigs, the children say it's time to go back to work. She's a happy schizophrenic. Matt encourages her to come out of her shell more in years to come. Then she remembers when he paid a visit to the set of her TTO New York special in 1993 -- he brought his own makeup compact along and sat there and applied orange makeup -- and look at him now! As the segment ends, Matt introduces an upcoming segment featuring the cast of the new Broadway musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, while Tracey comes over for a final feel of his hair, temporarily blocking him from the camera ("Don't block me, this is my moment now.")
Jon Stewart introduces Tracey by means of a clip from her Live and Exposed special. Here, she's auditioning for a dancing role, and she gets it! And it's in ... Berlin! The clip ends there as she comes out on stage. Jon notes that this show is very different from any she's done before, that it's very autobiographical. Tracey agrees, saying that it's the first time she's really been herself on stage for any length of time rather than playing a character, and it was a bit scary. She then mentions having come from Times Square and seeing a big poster promoting her HBO special ("it was so exciting!"). However, on Wednesday morning (the day before this show aired), she saw that it was being taken down and replaced with a Six Feet Under poster. This was not supposed to happen until next week, so there was much disappointment ("awww" goes the audience). But there is a happy ending: the poster's back up! She got Nancy Geller at HBO to yell at the right people, and lo and behold, it went back up. She mentions having her picture taken with the poster by "the stupidest man in Times Square." Now this poster is big; it's where Marky Mark used to be with his third nipple [not being super familiar with Times Square, I don't know where that was -- RR]. Jon mentions a potential reason for the poster going back up: she's an American now. Two or three years ago, he says, if you complained, do you know what would have happened? Tracey finishes his thought: Guantanamo Bay all the way. Then she clarifies that she's not yet been sworn in. Jon is a bit surprised to learn this. Then Tracey fakes a swoon and lies across the couch. As he asks if the citizenship status needs to be kept secret, she drowns out his question with her remembrance of the last time she was on the show, where she did an impression of Kim Cattrall's character Samantha having sex (a "sexual flashback"). She does a few humps and moans to remind us of that. Jon notes that they replaced the couch after that, and now it looks like they'll have to replace the couch again. Tracey asks Jon about his baby, and he responds by saying he should call to find out, which cracks her up. He's still in the Fisher Price years, she observes, then proceeds to check Jon's coat for dried spit-up. "This is my show suit!" he exclaims; you'd expect that the crew would wipe it dry. Now he asks Tracey about her kids. Son Johnny's 13; she talks about both children in the show, but she doesn't show their births -- although she could have, perhaps rewinding the video so we would see them going in, completely freaking the kids out. Mabel's 19 and at Leeds University in England, studying politics. It seems she wants to be a politician. Whenever she comes to America, the only things she can tolerate are Jon and Ariana Huffington, who sounds very much like Eva Gabor, as Tracey demonstrates. Back to Mabel at Leeds: the political lecturers there are so anti-American, they do lectures on how America faked the moon landings [oh, give me a break -- RR]. She asks Jon if he things the moon landings were faked; he says no, we Americans are good people. She thinks that if it were true, some sound guy would have let the secret slip, or some prop guy from Universal would have said something like "The moon buggy? I built that -- oops!" "We can't keep anything secret!" says Jon. So that's it; she'll tell the lecturers to stop saying that. Americans are usually nice people, says Jon; it's just that every now than then, we'll bomb a place (this comment cracks Tracey up). We're just blowing off steam; we mean no disrespect. Back to Mabel, who campaigned for Labour in the recent British elections: Tracey is not certain if she wants her to be involved with politics, for it is a dirty business. She's like a Communist these days, albeit one with a Marc Jacobs handbag [seems somewhat contradictory to me -- RR]. Everyone's a Communist at 19, she says. And yes, she's proud of her kids. And she reminds Jon that he still has the drunk-midget years to look forward to with his son. There's a quick reminder to catch the special Saturday night, 9:30 Eastern time on HBO as the interview ends. V Graham Norton, September 20 -- see 2003 page Prepared
by Roger
Reini |
