Lessons from Rosie O’Donnell’s Ten Year Big Break
July 28th, 2013 · 21 commentsO’Donnell’s Ten Year Big Break
Last month, Rosie O’Donnell appeared on Here’s The Thing, Alec Baldwin’s NPR interview show.
The episode, if heard casually, gives the impression that her break was rapid and inevitable. As a high school senior, we learn, she wrote comedy skits for a school variety show. A local comedy club owner liked the skits and invited O’Donnell to perform a set. She killed.
At this point, it was clear that she would become a comedian. Her break came later when Lorne Michaels and Brandon Tartikoff (former NBC chief) happened to hear her perform at a club where they had come to audition Dana Carvey.
Tartikoff came up to O’Donnell after the show and said simply: “Hi. I want you to call this number at NBC tomorrow. We have a job for you.”
Television, then movies, then her talk show — it all fell into place after that key moment.
This is a classic big break. But if you listen closer to the episode it becomes clear that it was not out of the blue. While telling this story, O’Donnell, as an aside, clarified the timeline of that fateful night by noting: “[Remember that at this point] I had had a decade under my belt of doing standup, right?”
O’Donnell’s big break, in other words, was ten years in the making…