Post by Patcat on Sept 11, 2006 13:54:36 GMT -5
Jim Gaffigan portrayed the unhappy crematory operator in DEAD. I thought this an interesting article.
Staying put after Sept. 11
Acting couple from Wisconsin, Indiana find life in N.Y. shadowed by attacks
By JOANNE WEINTRAUB
jweintraub@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Sept. 8, 2006
She's from Milwaukee. He grew up a few hours down the Lake Michigan shoreline in tiny Dune Acres, Ind.
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But Jeannie Noth and Jim Gaffigan met in Manhattan, fell in love there and married there. They even got the ultimate New York City wedding present: a short, snappy story about their courtship and marriage in the "Celebrations" column of The New York Times.
Why Jim and Jeannie Noth Gaffigan chose to stay on in New York after Sept. 11 is a story, too, but not a short one.
It's a tale of Manhattan family - he's 40, she's 35, and their kids are 9 months and 2 years old - surviving and, in unexpected ways, thriving.
Jeannie Noth graduated from Rufus King High School and Marquette University, performed with several Milwaukee theater troupes and did an internship with the Milwaukee Rep.
In 1995, determined to launch an acting career, she arrived in New York City. Taking drama lessons and acting with small theater companies sharpened her skills, while working as a teacher and a "cater-waiter" at parties paid the rent.
She also got a few small film roles, including a walk-on in "The First Wives Club." She tried improv comedy and found she was good at it.
In 1998, Noth began adapting and directing plays for inner-city teens.
With the help of a church group and a few small donations, her one-woman initiative, Shakespeare on the Playground, won notice for its hip-hop versions of "Romeo and Juliet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Much Ado About Nothing."
In 2000, Noth ran into Gaffigan at a Korean deli.
"He said, 'Where do I know you from?' " she remembers in a phone interview.
Annoyed, she told him he'd asked her that twice before, once when she'd met him in a comedy club and once when he'd bumped into her on the block where they both lived.
But she accepted his lunch invitation anyway and learned they shared more than comedy and Lake Michigan. "We're both from these huge Catholic families - he's one of six kids and I'm one of nine."
Gaffigan, a Georgetown University graduate who'd come to New York in 1990, was gaining a following at the comedy clubs.
He'd gotten a dozen small TV and film roles, a Comedy Central special and had even grabbed the comedian's gold ring, an appearance on David Letterman's show.
In fact, Gaffigan impressed his fellow Hoosier so much that the older comic signed the younger to the starring role in a Letterman-produced sitcom, "Welcome to New York." It revolved around an Indiana weatherman who came to New York for a TV job, a fish-out-of-water story in which the fish got the best lines.
The show was canceled after the 2000-'01 season, but Gaffigan's slyly witty performance got him a part on another sitcom, Ellen DeGeneres' 2001-'02 "The Ellen Show."
Noth, meanwhile, was excited about Shakespeare on the Playground. Two years after starting the project, she'd incorporated it as a non-profit company. In 2001, she paid a professional grant writer to seek funding.
"We'd gotten some TV coverage and some very positive stories," including a glowing feature in the New York Daily News.
By this time, Noth and Gaffigan were a couple, romantically and professionally. He directed her in a play; she worked on jokes with him. Because she was classically trained and he wasn't, he even hired her as an acting coach.
When Gaffigan needed to, he'd go to Los Angeles to work on the DeGeneres show. Weekends and during the show's production hiatus, he flew home to Noth's apartment.
Noth and Gaffigan slept late the morning of Sept. 11 she recalls, because they'd been up most of the night working.
When the phone rang, they went up to the roof of their Manhattan apartment, 20 blocks from the World Trade Center.
One tower had already fallen. They watched in disbelief as the second one collapsed.
"I remember the hordes of people walking by, covered with ash," Noth says. "And I remember thinking nothing would ever be the same."
Gaffigan was as stunned as Noth.
Soon after that morning, he found out just how close the tragedy had hit: One of his agents lost a brother, another a best friend.
It was only about a week after Sept. 11 that he went out to a club to do a comedy show.
"It felt very weird," he says, "but it also felt like I had to do it. And it felt like people welcomed the distraction."
Steady work and dead ends
Gaffigan's comic style is distinctive and highly personal. He tends to avoid sex and politics.
Instead, he weaves cockeyed fantasies about sleep, Hot Pockets and his own defiantly unhip self - pasty skin, thinning hair and all.
By the end of 2002, "The Ellen Show" was history, but Gaffigan was a late-night favorite.
He got recurring roles on "Ed" and "That '70s Show," more movie parts and a series of lucrative soft-drink commercials for Sierra Mist.
Noth, on the other hand, felt she was at a dead end.
For financial backing for Shakespeare on the Playground, her timing couldn't have been worse: Of the dozens of solicitations sent out in 2001, not one came back.
After Sept. 11, with everyone digging deep for the Red Cross, it felt awkward even to mention a hip-hop "Hamlet."
Even the catering dried up.
"People weren't having parties," Noth says. "The city was depressed."
She was depressed, too: Not just about the friends of friends who'd died or the nearby shops forced out of business, but about her future.
She recalls: "Jim's career is taking off in all these amazing ways, he's going back and forth to L.A., and people are asking me, 'What about you? What are you doing creatively?' "
It took Noth until Christmas of '02 to get her bearings. She knew then she wanted to stay with Gaffigan and keep writing with him.
She also knew that, like him, she wanted to live in New York.
"That was a given," she says. "For most people, if you're making a living as an actor, you're working in Los Angeles at least a few months a year. But New York is home."
Noth and Gaffigan married in 2003 at their neighborhood church, known as St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. Built in 1815 in Lower Manhattan, it's far less grand than the newer, more famous St. Patrick's in midtown.
Partners and collaborators
The old church is just a few blocks from the apartment where Gaffigan and Noth, who now goes by the name Jeannie Noth Gaffigan, still live with daughter Marre, born in 2004, and son Jack, born in 2005.
About two years ago, Fox bought a pilot for an animated comedy series Noth and Gaffigan wrote. Noth was an executive producer on Gaffigan's recent Comedy Central special, "Beyond the Pale."
"It's such a cliché when people talk about their 'better half' or their 'life partner,' but Jeannie brings an incredible amount" to their joint projects, he says.
"The concept for the Fox pilot was hers. An enormous number of the lines in 'Beyond the Pale' are hers. I'll be working on something on Catholicism and she'll say, 'Do Moses and the burning bush!' "
The couple also collaborate on "Pale Force," a series of cartoon shorts created by one of Noth's brothers, Paul, with music by another brother, Patrick. Jeannie writes for the series and Jim voices it.
A recurring feature on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," the series also has a Web life of its own on www.jimgaffigan.com.
Gaffigan will be a regular on "My Boys," a sitcom scheduled to debut on cable's TBS later this year. It tapes in L.A., where all four Gaffigans are now living in a rented apartment for a few months.
On Oct. 14, Gaffigan will bring his stand-up act home to New York's Town Hall.
The show will play Madison's Barrymore Theater on Oct. 25, Milwaukee's Pabst Theater on Oct. 26 and Appleton's Fox Cities Performing Arts Center on Oct. 27.
Tragedy never completely fades
As they do for all Americans, especially New Yorkers, the events of Sept. 11 continue to shadow Noth and Gaffigan's lives in unpredictable ways.
After the incident in August in which British police stopped an alleged plot to smuggle liquid explosives disguised as beverages onto planes, one of Gaffigan's TV commercials was pulled. It involved an airliner, an eccentric passenger and a bottle of Sierra Mist.
Last year, Gaffigan starred with Green Bay's Tony Shalhoub and Maggie Gyllenhaal in "The Great New Wonderful," a movie in which he plays a man grieving over an unspecified accident that killed several co-workers.
The film, set in Manhattan in September 2002 but otherwise oblique in its references to the World Trade Center disaster, opened in limited release in June to mixed reviews.
"I really love the movie," Gaffigan says, "but some people don't know what to make of the 9-11 angle."
Noth is collaborating on a screenplay with Gaffigan. And two very small children, she says, keep her very busy.
But when Marre and Jack are in school, she wants to start working again with older kids on another drama project.
"It's in my blood," Noth says.
Like New York.
From the Sept. 10, 2006 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Staying put after Sept. 11
Acting couple from Wisconsin, Indiana find life in N.Y. shadowed by attacks
By JOANNE WEINTRAUB
jweintraub@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Sept. 8, 2006
She's from Milwaukee. He grew up a few hours down the Lake Michigan shoreline in tiny Dune Acres, Ind.
Advertisement
But Jeannie Noth and Jim Gaffigan met in Manhattan, fell in love there and married there. They even got the ultimate New York City wedding present: a short, snappy story about their courtship and marriage in the "Celebrations" column of The New York Times.
Why Jim and Jeannie Noth Gaffigan chose to stay on in New York after Sept. 11 is a story, too, but not a short one.
It's a tale of Manhattan family - he's 40, she's 35, and their kids are 9 months and 2 years old - surviving and, in unexpected ways, thriving.
Jeannie Noth graduated from Rufus King High School and Marquette University, performed with several Milwaukee theater troupes and did an internship with the Milwaukee Rep.
In 1995, determined to launch an acting career, she arrived in New York City. Taking drama lessons and acting with small theater companies sharpened her skills, while working as a teacher and a "cater-waiter" at parties paid the rent.
She also got a few small film roles, including a walk-on in "The First Wives Club." She tried improv comedy and found she was good at it.
In 1998, Noth began adapting and directing plays for inner-city teens.
With the help of a church group and a few small donations, her one-woman initiative, Shakespeare on the Playground, won notice for its hip-hop versions of "Romeo and Juliet," "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Much Ado About Nothing."
In 2000, Noth ran into Gaffigan at a Korean deli.
"He said, 'Where do I know you from?' " she remembers in a phone interview.
Annoyed, she told him he'd asked her that twice before, once when she'd met him in a comedy club and once when he'd bumped into her on the block where they both lived.
But she accepted his lunch invitation anyway and learned they shared more than comedy and Lake Michigan. "We're both from these huge Catholic families - he's one of six kids and I'm one of nine."
Gaffigan, a Georgetown University graduate who'd come to New York in 1990, was gaining a following at the comedy clubs.
He'd gotten a dozen small TV and film roles, a Comedy Central special and had even grabbed the comedian's gold ring, an appearance on David Letterman's show.
In fact, Gaffigan impressed his fellow Hoosier so much that the older comic signed the younger to the starring role in a Letterman-produced sitcom, "Welcome to New York." It revolved around an Indiana weatherman who came to New York for a TV job, a fish-out-of-water story in which the fish got the best lines.
The show was canceled after the 2000-'01 season, but Gaffigan's slyly witty performance got him a part on another sitcom, Ellen DeGeneres' 2001-'02 "The Ellen Show."
Noth, meanwhile, was excited about Shakespeare on the Playground. Two years after starting the project, she'd incorporated it as a non-profit company. In 2001, she paid a professional grant writer to seek funding.
"We'd gotten some TV coverage and some very positive stories," including a glowing feature in the New York Daily News.
By this time, Noth and Gaffigan were a couple, romantically and professionally. He directed her in a play; she worked on jokes with him. Because she was classically trained and he wasn't, he even hired her as an acting coach.
When Gaffigan needed to, he'd go to Los Angeles to work on the DeGeneres show. Weekends and during the show's production hiatus, he flew home to Noth's apartment.
Noth and Gaffigan slept late the morning of Sept. 11 she recalls, because they'd been up most of the night working.
When the phone rang, they went up to the roof of their Manhattan apartment, 20 blocks from the World Trade Center.
One tower had already fallen. They watched in disbelief as the second one collapsed.
"I remember the hordes of people walking by, covered with ash," Noth says. "And I remember thinking nothing would ever be the same."
Gaffigan was as stunned as Noth.
Soon after that morning, he found out just how close the tragedy had hit: One of his agents lost a brother, another a best friend.
It was only about a week after Sept. 11 that he went out to a club to do a comedy show.
"It felt very weird," he says, "but it also felt like I had to do it. And it felt like people welcomed the distraction."
Steady work and dead ends
Gaffigan's comic style is distinctive and highly personal. He tends to avoid sex and politics.
Instead, he weaves cockeyed fantasies about sleep, Hot Pockets and his own defiantly unhip self - pasty skin, thinning hair and all.
By the end of 2002, "The Ellen Show" was history, but Gaffigan was a late-night favorite.
He got recurring roles on "Ed" and "That '70s Show," more movie parts and a series of lucrative soft-drink commercials for Sierra Mist.
Noth, on the other hand, felt she was at a dead end.
For financial backing for Shakespeare on the Playground, her timing couldn't have been worse: Of the dozens of solicitations sent out in 2001, not one came back.
After Sept. 11, with everyone digging deep for the Red Cross, it felt awkward even to mention a hip-hop "Hamlet."
Even the catering dried up.
"People weren't having parties," Noth says. "The city was depressed."
She was depressed, too: Not just about the friends of friends who'd died or the nearby shops forced out of business, but about her future.
She recalls: "Jim's career is taking off in all these amazing ways, he's going back and forth to L.A., and people are asking me, 'What about you? What are you doing creatively?' "
It took Noth until Christmas of '02 to get her bearings. She knew then she wanted to stay with Gaffigan and keep writing with him.
She also knew that, like him, she wanted to live in New York.
"That was a given," she says. "For most people, if you're making a living as an actor, you're working in Los Angeles at least a few months a year. But New York is home."
Noth and Gaffigan married in 2003 at their neighborhood church, known as St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. Built in 1815 in Lower Manhattan, it's far less grand than the newer, more famous St. Patrick's in midtown.
Partners and collaborators
The old church is just a few blocks from the apartment where Gaffigan and Noth, who now goes by the name Jeannie Noth Gaffigan, still live with daughter Marre, born in 2004, and son Jack, born in 2005.
About two years ago, Fox bought a pilot for an animated comedy series Noth and Gaffigan wrote. Noth was an executive producer on Gaffigan's recent Comedy Central special, "Beyond the Pale."
"It's such a cliché when people talk about their 'better half' or their 'life partner,' but Jeannie brings an incredible amount" to their joint projects, he says.
"The concept for the Fox pilot was hers. An enormous number of the lines in 'Beyond the Pale' are hers. I'll be working on something on Catholicism and she'll say, 'Do Moses and the burning bush!' "
The couple also collaborate on "Pale Force," a series of cartoon shorts created by one of Noth's brothers, Paul, with music by another brother, Patrick. Jeannie writes for the series and Jim voices it.
A recurring feature on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," the series also has a Web life of its own on www.jimgaffigan.com.
Gaffigan will be a regular on "My Boys," a sitcom scheduled to debut on cable's TBS later this year. It tapes in L.A., where all four Gaffigans are now living in a rented apartment for a few months.
On Oct. 14, Gaffigan will bring his stand-up act home to New York's Town Hall.
The show will play Madison's Barrymore Theater on Oct. 25, Milwaukee's Pabst Theater on Oct. 26 and Appleton's Fox Cities Performing Arts Center on Oct. 27.
Tragedy never completely fades
As they do for all Americans, especially New Yorkers, the events of Sept. 11 continue to shadow Noth and Gaffigan's lives in unpredictable ways.
After the incident in August in which British police stopped an alleged plot to smuggle liquid explosives disguised as beverages onto planes, one of Gaffigan's TV commercials was pulled. It involved an airliner, an eccentric passenger and a bottle of Sierra Mist.
Last year, Gaffigan starred with Green Bay's Tony Shalhoub and Maggie Gyllenhaal in "The Great New Wonderful," a movie in which he plays a man grieving over an unspecified accident that killed several co-workers.
The film, set in Manhattan in September 2002 but otherwise oblique in its references to the World Trade Center disaster, opened in limited release in June to mixed reviews.
"I really love the movie," Gaffigan says, "but some people don't know what to make of the 9-11 angle."
Noth is collaborating on a screenplay with Gaffigan. And two very small children, she says, keep her very busy.
But when Marre and Jack are in school, she wants to start working again with older kids on another drama project.
"It's in my blood," Noth says.
Like New York.
From the Sept. 10, 2006 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Patrick Roy, 2006 inductee into the Hockey Hall of Fame
