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In “Ghostbusters” (2016) Columbia Pictures via YouTube

January 6, 1984– Kate McKinnon:

“As minorities, we’re on the fringe, and there’s just something so wonderful about that perspective, something so inspiring. If you’re a part of that minority, you can make fun of those people while respecting them and lifting them up.”

For me, one of the very few good things about the Trump Family Presidency is the re-energized Saturday Night Live. Who would have guessed that 42 years after its debut on NBC, that the series could still amuse and pack a political wallop? In no small part is Kate McKinnon responsible. She is always remarkably fresh and funny but especially when doing impressions of political figures: Hillary Clinton, Kellyanne Conway, Elizabeth Warren, Betsy DeVos, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and especially Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

As Jeff Session, SNL-NBC via YouTube

As Kellyanne Conway, SNL-NBC via YouTube

McKinnon picked up her second Emmy Award at the ceremony in September 2017, where she also made her first appearance with her girlfriend, Jackie Abbott. McKinnon was seated next to Abbott in the audience, and they embraced before McKinnon went on stage to accept her Statue for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.

Abbott is a NYC actor, photographer and artist based out of New York City. She graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied with Olympia Dukakis.

During her acceptance speech, McKinnon said: “… being part of this season of SNL is the most meaningful thing I will ever do.”

She also thanked Clinton “for your grace and grit”.

It was McKinnon’s fifth Emmy nomination. She was up against Vanessa Bayer (SNL), Anna Chlumsky (Veep), Kathryn Hahn (Transparent), Leslie Jones (SNL), and Judith Light (Transparent).

I had all but given up on it, after the second year back in 1977 when it stopped being funny, except for that enticing period when 19-year-old Eddie Murphy brought it back to life, so it is nice to have Saturday Night Live back on an up-swing, doing what SNL does best, biting political humor featuring great impressions from the cast of those seeking power. From Dan Aykroyd’s Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama as done by Fred Armisen, Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush, Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, the late, great Phil Hartman or Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton, and most wonderful of all, Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin word-for-word.

Although NBC’ sketch show has always been at its best when skewering American politics, Kate McKinnon’s spot-on Hillary Clinton is especially deliciously demented. Those last few months of 2017, when McKinnon’s HRC matched by Alec Baldwin as POTUS were just too funny and fearless. I’ve got to hand it to her, out and proud McKinnon has been killing it on SNL since joining the cast in 2012.

She was born Kate McKinnon Berthold and she grew up on Long Island. McKinnon is a gifted musician and musical mimic. As a kid, she played piano, guitar and cello, plus she performed in school productions. After graduating from high school, McKinnon majored in Theatre at Columbia University.

McKinnon, got her big break in television as part of the ensemble cast of Big Gay Sketch Show on the all-gay, all-day The Logo Network. She was cast after a series of grueling auditions for the show’s producer Rosie O’ Donnell. I hear O’Donnell can be tough. One of my favorites of her many memorable characters on that series was Fitzwilliam, the young English boy who wishes to be a girl.

McKinnon joined the cast of Saturday Night Live as a featured player with the departure of Kristen Wiig, who left the show to pursue a career in films. In May 2013, McKinnon played Wiig’s mother when the former cast member guest-starred on an episode of SNL.

McKinnon is one of only a two openly gay Not-Ready-For-Primetime Players in the history SNL history. Gay guy Terry Sweeney was first hired a writer on SNL in 1983 and he became part of the cast in 1985-86 season. But, Sweeney was conspicuously missing from the former cast members at the SNL 40th Reunion Special in 2015, even though his hysterical Nancy Reagan imitation was a highlight of the show during the Reagan era. He was in good company; besides Sweeney, Robert Downey, Jr., Joan Cusack, and Randy Quaid were also fired from the landmark show at the end of the eleventh season. Lesbian Danitra Vance was also fired from the cast during that year, but she was not out of the closet during her time on the show. Vance was taken by cancer in 1994. Tellingly, she was especially good as Diahann Carroll playing Dominique Deveraux on a Dynasty take-off, featuring Sweeney as Joan Collins.

Paula Pell was the second female head writer on SNL (after Tina Fey) and the first openly LGBTQ head-writer, but last year the show added a new gay writer, Chris Kelly.

McKinnon has been one of the few breakout actors on SNL in this century. She has also worked doing voice-overs, appearing in animated series like Ugly Americans (2014-15). She regularly performs sketch with the NYC edition of Upright Citizens Brigade, and in her one-person shows, including Kate McKinnon On Ice, Disenchanted, and Best Actress.

In 2009, McKinnon received Logo’s NewNowNext Award for Best Rising Star. She has been nominated for three Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Female Actor In A Comedy Series, and another for Outstanding Original Song. She won that Emmy in 2016. McKinnon also won the 2014 American Comedy Award.

I find her to be smart and hilarious, especially with her original characters, but her imitations of famous people are the work of a cracked genius imagination: Ingrid Bergman, Justin Bieber, Susan Boyle, Penélope Cruz, Robert Durst, Edie Falco, Jodie Foster, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Janet Huckabee, Kris Jenner, Billie Jean King, Lorde, Ed Sheeran, Martha Stewart, Tilda Swinton, Keith Urban and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz; they have all gotten the McKinnon treatment.

I thought it was remarkable to watch her do Ellen DeGeneres for Ellen on her show, and her Justin Bieber is uncanny, but affectionate. She can even imitate Jane Lynch, I mean, who apes Jane Lynch?

Saturday Night Live has been presenting Hillary impressions for 25 years, with versions played by Jan Hooks, Janeane Garofalo, Ana Gasteyer, and deliciously by Amy Poehler. Of HRC, her most famous creation, McKinnon says:

“A good impression is sort of a juxtaposition of disparate elements. For instance, Angela Merkel, to me, is a very emotional German. She may not be in real life, but that’s how the writers and I conceived of the character. With Hillary, it’s that she’s a staunch, passionate lady, and in our culture, unfortunately, there’s something funny about that. What I find so lovable about her is her conviction. And I feel like I have that. I just love how badly she wants to fix stuff. I would like to do that. I’m just not smart enough.”

McKinnon is the voice of Lupe in the animated film Fernando, currently in theatres. Up next: Irreplaceable You, a drama film for Netflix, and The Spy Who Dumped Me, a comedy out this summer. Note, both projects are directed by females: Stephanie Laing and Susanna Fogel.

I have watched bits and pieces of SNL since its debut in 1975 and McKinnon is as strong as any cast member of any season. Like Hartman, she is the glue that holds many of the sketches together. Like the late, great, brilliant Gilda Radner, she can turn mundane material to measured mayhem. Like Eddie Murphy, she brings lunacy and anarchy to a franchise that needed a kick in the pants.

The opening sketch on Saturday Night Live on November 12, 2016 took an unexpected and somber tone when McKinnon portrayed a defeated Hillary Clinton, simply singing Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen:

“I did my best, it wasn’t much, I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch. I told the truth, I didn’t come to fool ya. And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.”

At the end, McKinnon directly addressed the camera, and said:

“I’m not giving up, and neither should you…and live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

I’ll admit, I ordered my copy of Michael Wolff‘s Fire And Fury the first day The Guardian excerpted those jaw-dropping Steve Bannon quotes. It was released early and I have friends who not only ordered copes but also download it yesterday because they CAN’T WAIT to dive in. Well, her are some of the most salacious parts. Get some popcorn.

Ivanka told her friends about the secrets of her Dad’s mysterious hair…

She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.

Trump’s reason for eating McDonald’s is bizarre.

He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.

Trump is a “post-literate” TV junkie;

Trump has repeatedly claimed that a busy schedule and strong work ethic keeps him from watching much television. “Primarily because of documents,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One in November. “I’m reading documents. A lot. And different things. I actually read much more — I read you people much more than I watch television.”

Trump has three TVs in his White House bedroom, hardly reads and struggles to process information.

Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.

Bannon told Wolff:

“[Trump’s] a guy who really hated school … And he’s not going to start liking it now.”

Apparently, everybody in the White House was a leaker, including Trump.

The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch staff, culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by Sean Spicer—cell phones surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary issued threats of random phone checks and admonitions about the use of encrypted texting apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being a leaker.

Everybody was a leaker.

White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, kept repeating his daily mantra:

“You can’t make this shit up.”

Trump had no interest in healthcare or repealing Obamacare…

Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion.

During one particular health care discussion, Trump reportedly asked of his aides:

“Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?”

Kellyanne Conway rolled her eyes at Trump and had a convenient ON/OFF switch…

In private, in the Off position, she seemed to regard Trump as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity—or, at least, if you regarded him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her opinion of her boss with a whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On position, she metamorphosed into believer, protector, defender, and handler.

After a perceived win against Ivanka Trump over the Paris climate agreement which she was against backing out of, Bannon declared,

“Score. The bitch is dead.”

Bannon called the Trump Tower meeting with Russians “treasonous” and,

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

And the best of all, Trump’s presidency might end with impeachment, according to Bannon, if Trump were to fire Robert Mueller.

“it just brings the impeachment closer.”

There’s a “33.3 percent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent chance that Trump would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of his incapacitation), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term.

He’s not going to make it. He’s lost his stuff.”

I know, I’m shocked too. Not at the statement, but at the fact that I AGREE with Steve Bannon. It’s a weird feeling…

Below, someone uploaded the audiobook which might not be legal so it might disappear but there seems to be 11+ hours of it!