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MPD wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 7:19 pmDEAD

featherboa wrote: ↑Fri Mar 12, 2021 8:30 pm fine people on both sides

Few at SNL knew about the cutting. That includes Jim Downey, the legendary SNL writer who worked closely with Hammond on Al Gore. He was stunned, in a recent interview, to learn what went down the night of Oct. 7, 2000.

In Hammond’s retelling, he’s backstage in his dressing room before his debate with Will Ferrell’s bumbling George W. Bush. Just before airtime, Hammond has a panic attack and can’t remember his lines. He lays out a gauze pad, slices his arm, patches the wound and puts on his finely tailored suit.

Knowing this makes watching the performance even more stunning. Hammond delivers an expertly controlled riff that finds its way back to the one infamous word — “lockbox” — seven times. The real Gore had introduced the term in wonky position papers, promising to create a Medicare “lockbox” to keep politicians from using surplus funds for their own pet projects. Hammond turned the phrase into hypnotic symbol of Gore’s stiffness. Listen to the pause on the “b” in “benefits” or the condescending lilt every time he begins a sentence with, “In my plan . . . .” It’s no wonder that after the show Gore’s campaign forced him to watch it as an example of how not to act.

“The fact that he’s performed for four presidents,” Esrick says. “That he’s cutting in his dressing room in SNL. The parallel. The suffering that was going on behind closed doors that nobody knew, when they were watching him be brilliant on SNL.”

Hammond was 7, growing up in Florida, when he began doing impressions. He noticed that doing British actor Paul Scofield off an old “Christmas Carol” record or even Porky Pig was about the only thing that pleased his mother.

Hammond's mother, Margaret, and father, Max. (Family photos)

Margaret Hammond wasn’t just cold. She would stick her son’s fingers in electrical sockets, slam his hand in car doors, he says. One day, when he was 4 or 5, she took a steak knife to his tongue.

There was nobody to save the boy. Hammond’s father, Max, a World War II veteran suffering from the bloody scenes he had witnessed, drank Beefeater and kicked holes in the doors.

Hammond was 19 and heading to college when he cut himself for the first time, a small slice on the wrist. By the end of his SNL run, his arms were covered in scars.

FVBTVS wrote: ↑Sat Mar 20, 2021 12:51 pm