Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (24 page)

Dress code:
chic devastated.

None of my exes are allowed to attend. Distracting. Weird. (Okay, the only way I would even consider an ex attending is if he were completely, horrifically devastated. Like, when he heard I died, it made him take a good hard look at his life and his choices, and he turned Buddhist or something.)

No current wives or girlfriends of my exes are allowed to attend. This part is really, for real, non-negotiable. They’ll just use the opportunity to look all hot in black.

No one can use my funeral as the inciting incident for their own romantic comedy.

My a cappella group from college will try to perform. I forgive them for trying, but this is not allowed to happen. I don’t just mean the group currently singing at my college. No assembly of past members or anything is allowed to sing. You must be vigilant about this. With a blink of an eye, I can see a group of tearful women starting a caterwauling rendition of Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.” Be really mindful of this; they will find loopholes.

No one may use this occasion to debut original music they wrote. I hate original music.

There should be food at my funeral. I hate getting invited to something and there’s no food. Something tasteful and light. No pasta. I’m serious. I will climb out of my coffin if anyone brings a baked ziti. Actually, no hot food at all. Small savory finger sandwiches, scones, coffee. Basically an English tea, but I don’t want anything stacked on a tiered platter. That’s pretentious.

People can text, but no phone calls. That’s rude. And when I say you can text, I mean, hard-core furtive texting, like using one hand and with your BlackBerry hidden in your purse.

If people speak, they need to follow guidelines or this will become a free-for-all. I have a lot of comedy writer friends. Don’t let them turn this into a roast for me. You know how I feel about roasts. I want no moments of mirth at all at this thing. No edgily remembering something stupid I did to show that we can all have a big, cathartic laugh.

Actually, no catharsis.

No irony at all. I mean it. I spent my entire professional career dealing in irony. I want an almost cringe-inducingly earnest ceremony.

Please, no religious stuff. I kind of insist no one mention God or anything at my funeral. I’m not making some big atheist statement, but I want this to be solemn because people are so upset I’m dead, and I don’t want to share the spotlight with God.

No candles. I hate candles. This isn’t a sex scene from
Grey’s Anatomy.

If Steve Carell doesn’t show up, I want my children and my children’s children to make note of it.

There should be a gift bag for people when they leave. Inside of it should include: (1) a photo of me when I was my most beautiful, put through an old-timey photo process and displayed in a heart-shaped pewter frame. It should look like the kind of photo a soldier carried around with him during the Civil War; (2) an energy bar or a trendy body spray from whichever company is sponsoring the funeral; (3) a copy of a drawing I did when I was little of what I wanted to be when I grew up, which was an astronaut. Under the drawing should be written, in cursive, “She finally found her wings” or “…   and we have lift-off”; and (4) a letter from the president talking about my impact on the creative community. If the president happens to be a woman that year, she can slant things that way, how I inspired her to believe in her own dreams and stuff.

Do all of this and you will know that I will rest in eternal peace. If that’s important to you.

*
Thrown-Together Disaster Funeral
is my new HGTV show. It’s a makeover funeral show where three flamboyant gay guys and a judgmental sassy broad (think Wanda Sykes) crash a tacky funeral and fix it. Wanda’s catchphrase is “Nuh-huh. Everyone out of this church. This funeral is a
disaster.
”

A Eulogy for Mindy Kaling, by Michael Schur

My friend, former
Office
writer and now creator of
Parks and Recreation,
Mike Schur supplied me with a eulogy in advance of my death.

F
RIENDS, MEMBERS
of Mindy’s Family, Representatives of Major Department Stores, good afternoon.

My name is Michael Schur, and I worked with Mindy Kaling for several years on the TV program
The Office.
The American version—not the Chinese version that has been running for the past forty-one years.

Mindy’s sudden death last week shocked me, as I’m sure it also shocked the four women she was fighting over those shoes with during the Dubai Bloomingdale’s Midnight Madness Sale. Though the stabbing has been labeled “accidental,” those of us who knew Mindy knew it was only a matter of time before a luxury-goods-based brawl would do her in. And if there’s a silver lining to all of this, it’s that I had “Impaled by Heel of Christian Louboutin Jem Suede Peep-Toe Slingback” in the “How Will Mindy Kaling Die?” pool that Rainn Wilson has been running since 2006, so I won $200.

I’ll never forget the Mindy Kaling that I met on our first day of work: bright-eyed, green, a complete novice in the world of television writing … and yet somehow far more confident than everyone else. She was
supremely
confident. Braggy, maybe. Cocky? What’s the right word … let’s go with talggy, which is a word I just made up that means “talkative and braggy.”

Her work ethic was second to none. And by that I mean: if you made a list of all the levels of work ethics, hers would be just above “none.” One day she came into work so late it was the next morning. And for that morning, she was also late. And hung-over. But we forgave her, because when we tried to bring it up, she just started talking about how hot some actor was, and then how much she loved Italian ice, and then how Beyoncé should release a country album, and then a bunch of other stuff, and we got tired and just forgot about the whole thing.

Mindy wore a lot of hats. Ivy League graduate, actor, comedian, playwright, inveterate gossip, weirdly pro-gun Republican, outspoken advocate of conspicuous consumption, and of course—as we learned upon the posthumous release of her puffy-sticker-covered diaries—hard-core perv. But despite all of these foibles and flaws, and the literally thousands of others I jotted down in my psychotherapist-mandated “Mindy Workbook” in order to maintain a sense of professionalism while we worked together, I loved Mindy Kaling. No one wrote like Mindy. No one was funnier than Mindy. No one else, in short,
was
Mindy. This will not be true for long, I understand, as her will dictates that her DNA be replicated one million times, news that recently sent the NYSE Retail Shopping Index skyrocketing.

This is Mike and me at the Writers Guild of America annual awards. We lost every category and got drunk in the hotel lobby.

I can’t believe she’s gone. I console myself by thinking,
Well, I guess the angels just wanted her to shut up.
I will miss her dearly, and I hope that she is up in heaven right now watching us and smiling, even though deep down I know that if there is an afterlife, she’s a pretty much open-and-shut case for hell.

R.I.P.

Good-bye

W
HEN I WAS
six and I saw
The Sound of Music
for the first time, my favorite part, hands down, was when the Von Trapp children bid farewell to partygoers with their song “So Long, Farewell” from the stairway of their Austrian manor. As an adult, I now see what a terrible example this is for children. It teaches them that adults will be charmed by long, protracted musical good-byes. In fact, all of
The Sound of Music
inspired a childhood’s worth of my misguided behavior, where I believed people would always be excited to hear me sing.

I memorized the song off our record player. Then, at bedtime, I called my parents to the landing of the stairs in our house so that I could perform it in its entirety. Just me singing all seven kids’ parts, accompanied by no music. Once I finished one child’s part, I disappeared into my bedroom only to reemerge and run down the stairs to pick up the next one’s part. My parents listened patiently until we got to the second kid’s exit.

“Okay, enough of this,” my dad said, and headed up the stairs to shuffle me off to bed.

“We’re only on Friedrich! There are five more Von Trapp children!” I said. This fell on deaf ears. My parents were supportive of my creativity but did not have a lot of patience for whimsy with zero production value. They had stuff to do.

The point is I learned nothing from this experience. Yes, if I’m at a party where I’m not enjoying myself, I will put some cookies in my jacket pocket and leave without saying good-bye. But when I’m having a great time? I like ’em nice and drawn out, Von Trapp–style. I could say good-bye all day. Like a guy putting on his shoes.

Before I leave, I thought I’d answer any remaining questions you might have.

So, you never won any childhood spelling bees? I was under the impression this was a memoir of a spelling bee champ.

It is confusing, I know. Based on my ethnicity, the number of friends I had as a kid, my build, my eyesight, and my desire to please my parents, I should have been the reigning spelling bee champion from ages seven to fourteen. My best guess at an explanation is that my parents were worried I would be just too good a speller and a potential kidnap prospect for anyone watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee on CSPAN-3 in the middle of the afternoon.

Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not?

I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tacit approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t. It would be the same as addressing the issue of “Should dogs and cats be able to care for our children? They’re in the house anyway.” I try not to make it a habit to seriously discuss nonsensical hot-button issues.

What will your next book be about?

I hope my next book will be about my husband, my kids, my cool movie career, and sharing all the things I learned about since I wrote this book. Like, I’d love to know where my natural lip line is. I still have no clue. Maybe by then I’ll have figured that out.

Anything else?

Not really. I just, I don’t want to say good-bye.

See you guys soon.

Love, 
Mindy

Acknowledgments

I
’D LIKE TO THANK
my sweet and funny friends who helped me with this. They are: Jeremy Bronson, Danny Chun, Alexis Deane, Lena Dunham, Brent Forrester, Dan Goor, Charlie Grandy, Steve Hely, Carrie Kemper, Ellie Kemper, Paul Lieberstein, Danielle Moffett, Sophia Rossi, Deb Schoeneman, Mike Schur, and Deborah Tarica. Quick-witted Ava Tramer was an all-star of organization with the demeanor of a doe. B. J. Novak was a terrific friend and editor, giving me sound notes like “Hey, Mindy, I think you sound kind of racist here. I would be really careful about not sounding racist in your book.” Greg Daniels has been key to just about everything I’ve done these past eight years. He’s the best.

Thanks to my dearest: Christina Hoe, Jocelyn Leavitt, Brenda Withers, David Harris, and my brother, Vijay, for letting me tell stories and share photos of them, which I suppose they kind of had to do out of love, anyway.

I am grateful to Maya Mavjee, Tina Constable, Tammy Blake, Meredith McGinnis, and Anna Thompson for their support, hard work, and excitement about this book.

Melissa Stone and Alex Crotin were sweethearts and badasses, which is very difficult to pull off.

Without Howard Klein I would never have written this. Richard Abate guided me through this entire process with patience and love. I have both of their cell phone numbers, a privilege which I abuse.

I love NBC, even though I have never gotten a GE discount.

Suzanne O’Neill is a brilliant editor with whom I’ve had almost daily contact. Long ago, I blurred the line of professionalism with her, and there is no going back. She is my friend. Sorry, Suzanne.

And finally, I want to thank Avu and Swati Chokalingam. I know I dedicated this book to them, but I guess I’m just one of those weird kids who likes their parents too much.