Scrubs: My Musical
Once again, Andrew Gans interviewed me about this amazing experience for his “Diva Talk” column:
photo by Chris Haston/NBC
It was the summer of 2006, and I was insanely jealous of someone whose name wasn’t announced yet.
I had just read a press release on Playbill.com that announced that Scrubs was going to do a musical episode where the plot involved a guest star whose mysterious medical condition made her hear everything in song. Holy crap, I thought. That’s going to be amazing. And I suddenly got a nasty case of the envies, instantly hating whomever that lucky guest star was going to be.
I couldn’t have known then how deep my self-loathing was, because through a bizarre series of events, that lucky girl wound up being me. Against all odds.
You must understand, for all the hundreds of hours of television I have under my belt, they’ve all been with a puppet on my arm or spent in a voiceover booth. I’ve never even been on Law & Order. Any of them. I did audition for it... once. Sigh. So let’s just say that I knew I had no chance in hell of even being seen for this episode. Yes, I did know that Jeff Marx and Bobby Lopez, our AVENUE Q creators, were writing songs for it, but that made no matter. I was still me, a New York Z-lister.
I loved Scrubs. It especially got me through the waning weeks of I LOVE YOU BECAUSE. We had Wednesday nights off, and in the spring of 2006, Scrubs was airing back to back episodes on Tuesday nights. So, at the end of our long week, I’d call my husband as I trudged to the subway, sadly relaying the details of our dying show, and he’d never fail to lift my spirits by saying “There’s Scrubs in the DVR.”
And one day, it happened. I found out that Debra Fordham, who wrote the musical episode, was thinking of me for it after having seen I LOVE YOU BECAUSE. And somehow, some way, she managed to convince the powers that be to let me actually do it. Yes, I knew Jeff and Bobby. And yes, Zach Braff is also a Northwestern alum, though he came in right after I left and we’d never met. And yes, I even went to high school and shared a stage (him in the front, me in the back) with Brett Benner, one of the casting directors at Scrubs. But it was Deb, a total stranger with no connection to me whatsoever, who got me in the door of Sacred Heart.
I absolutely loved everyone there, both in front of and behind and holding the cameras, and spent two fantastic weeks rehearsing and shooting under the helm of Will Mackenzie, a legendary character actor and director. It was such an incredible thing to be a part of, and thankfully, my presence in such an ambitious and heavily-promoted episode did not prove me to be a Cousin Oliver or a Great Gazoo. To this day, it means so much to me when a die-hard Scrubs fan praises the episode.
Even if I never land another guest shot in a prime time series, and the way things are going that is very possible, I was so happy to have had this experience. Even if it started out with me hating me for it.
Self-portrait on my first day of school, right outside my dressing room.
Being a naughty girl around Dr. Kelso’s portrait, pretending to pick his nose. I am so mature.
I would never have done this to Ken Jenkins, the dearest man.
Of course, he’s just as mischievous as me.
I didn’t mean to have an affair and betray In-N-Out, but when the Burbank Big Boy beckons, you heed his clarion call. He kind of looks like my husband, only with hair. And plastic.
This bald cap took nearly four hours from start to finish.
Beautiful work.
Look closely and you’ll see how it pulled up my eyebrows at the outer corners.
I felt so strange in this cap, wearing only base makeup, in the scene right before my character undergoes surgery.
Sort of naked and sad and vulnerable.
Craig came out to take behind-the-scenes footage for Quickstop Entertainment.
And I got to wear a great DVF dress. Deb and the wonderful wardrobe goddesses sent it my way afterwards.
