Back in the summer of 1999, Tina Fey was two years into her tenure as a writer on Saturday Night Live and Rachel Dratch had just joined the show’s cast. It was a big moment in both women’s careers, and they celebrated their success by mounting a sketch show, Dratch & Fey, which they performed both at Chicago’s Second City and at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York. According to The Wall Street Journal, The Onion’s entire staff saw the show. And now that a grainy VHS copy of their performance has been uploaded to YouTube, you can too.
Dratch & Fey kicks off with simultaneous performances of Dratch and Fey’s one-woman shows “Edwina Garth Burnham: A Life For Our Times” and “Cunt Poems,” but once Fey belts out a musical number that starts “My mother’s afraid of her labia,” the show spins out into a fast-paced comedic free-for-all. It’s not the Chicago-area Piven-nominated Maroney & Lemon, but it’ll do.
[Via Splitsider]