I (Still) Heart Tina Fey

Alec Baldwin was honored by the Museum of the Moving Image, and Tina Fey gave a speech on his behalf. I love the story she told about how they got Alec Baldwin to do 30 Rock:

The part of Jack Donaghy was written for Alec Baldwin. Unfortunately, I did not have the courage to introduce myself to him and tell him that at the time, so for several months I met with some of the best actors in New York, and also some that are only okay. And with each meeting I had in an attempt to cast Jack Donaghy, it just became clearer and clearer that this part was for no one except Alec Baldwin. And so I knew what I had to do: I got pregnant and I stalled for a year. And then when I came back from my maternity leave at SNL, Alec was hosting the show, and he was having fun with it that week and the sketches were not terrible, thankfully, and so Lorne and I said to each other, "Should we ask him? Maybe we should just ask him." And so, I hid and Lorne asked him, and here we are five years and almost a hundred dollars later.

In addition, Tina Fey wrote a great article called "Confessions of a Juggler" for The New Yorker about the challenges of being a working mother -- and how other people perceive working mothers. It was a very funny and emotionally honest piece.  As Tina said, "It is less dangerous to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam -- which, let me make it very clear, I have not done -- than it is to speak honestly about this topic."

Tina said the rudest question you can ask a woman is "How do you juggle it all? (she said that when people ask that, their accusatory eyes say, 'You're screwing it all up, aren't you?'). The second is "Are you going to have more kids?" She explains, "Especially to a woman like me, who is in her 'last five minutes.' By that I mean my last five minutes of being famous is timing out to be simultaneous with my last five minutes of being able to have a baby. Science shows that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for women after forty."

She continues:

Shouldn't I seize the opportunity to make a few more movies in the next few years? Think of the movies I could make!
"Magazine Lady": The story of an overworked woman looking for love, whose less attractive friend's mean boss is played by me...when Bebe Neuwirth turns the part down.
"The Wedding Creeper": An overworked woman looking for love sneaks into weddings and wishes strangers well on their wedding video, only to fall in love with a handsome videographer (Gerard Butler or a coatrack with a leather jacket on it)...
Next, a strategically chosen small part in a respectable indie dramedysemble called "Disregarding Joy," in which I play a lesbian therapist who unexpectedly cries during her partner's nephew's bris. Roger Ebert will praise my performance, saying I was "brave" to grow that little mustache.
...How could I pass up those opportunities? Do I even have the right to deprive moviegoers of those experiences? These are the baby-versus-work life questions that keep me up at night. There's another great movie idea! "Baby Versus Work": A hardworking baby looking for love (Kate Hudson) falls for a handsome pile of papers (Hugh Grant). I would play the ghost of a Victorian poetess who anachronistically tells Kate to "go for it."

I also love what she had to say about women in Hollywood/comedy:

I have observed that women, at least in comedy, are labelled "crazy" after a certain age...I know older men in comedy who can barely feed and clean themselves, and they still work. The women, though, they're all "crazy." I have a suspicion -- and hear me out, because this is a rough one -- that the definition of "crazy" in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. The only person I can think of who has escaped the "crazy" moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her. [My emphasis added]
This is the infuriating thing that dawns on you one day: even if you would never sleep with or even flirt with anyone to get ahead, you are being sexually adjudicated. Network executives really do say things like "I don't know. I don't want to fuck anybody on this show." (To any exec who has ever said that about me, I would hope that you would at least have the self-awareness to know that the feeling is extremely mutual.)
It seems to me the fastest remedy for this "women are crazy" situation is for more women to become producers and hire diverse women of various ages. That is why I feel obligated to stay in the business and try hard to get to a place where I can create opportunities for others, and that's why I can't possibly take time off for a second baby, unless I do, in which case that is nobody's business and I'll never regret it for a moment until it ruins my life.

Finally, some stray quotes I liked:

Now, I'm not really one for status symbols. I went to public school. I have all my original teeth and face parts. Left to my own devices, I dress like I'm here to service your aquarium.

Having worked at such a toy store, I found this description hilarious:

...local toy store that sells the kind of beautiful wooden educational toys that kids love (if there are absolutely no other toys around and they have never seen television).