Tina Fey Is My Hero

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Good news alert! As of March 25, 2009, Tina Fey was voted best current comedy star in a sea full of male actors. Well deserved!

A couple of years ago, I hopped on the Tina Fey bandwagon and now I can never look back. Not only has she taken America by storm, but she's reached me on a personal level - she's taken my vocabulary and speech back to my pre-adolescent stage.

Thanks to her, I now incorporate her 30 Rock lines into my daily speech pattern, such as, "Blerg!" and "I want to go to there!"

Nowadays, if you ask me who's queen of the tube I'll tell you Tina over Oprah hands down, although I do love me some "Borpo."

What I appreciate most about Tina is her ability to hang with the best of them; she was named Saturday Night Live's first female head writer, pulled the suffering "Weekend Update" sketch out of the slums and created a television series that glorifies "supernerds" and baby-stealing blackouts.

Aside from the one-liners and the A-list cast mates whose hilarious characters she's created, her writing really stands out from modern day comedy. From every SNL sketch to the movie Mean Girls to her brainchild television show 30 Rock, her writing always carries an underlying message with intelligent laughs. (If only there was a great moral lesson in each of my ToastedRav stories - ha!)

Plus, she took the real-life hard-to-like hothead Alec Baldwin and made him a lovable hotheaded character on 30 Rock. (Quite a feat after the butt-chewing voicemail he left his daughter a couple years back.)

As my tribute to Tina, I've included some facts you may not know about her:

• Tina was born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey and hails from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. (A "wowza" is in order the middle name.)
• She studied drama at the University of Virginia and graduated in 1992.
• Tina was discovered by SNL producers at Chicago's famed Second City comedy troupe, where she was a writer-performer.
• She is an alumna of the Famous Improv Olympic, along with actors Vince Vaughn, the late Chris Farley, Ossie Beck, Mike Myers, Amy Poehler, and Adam McKay.
• Regarding the scar on Fey's left cheek, in an interview in Vanity Fair, husband Jeff Richmond says a stranger slashed Fey's face when she was five years old. He says the incident occurred in her front yard.
• In her high school yearbook, Tina Fey predicted that ten years down the road she would be “very, very fat.” She was never very, very fat, although she was once heavier than she is now; she took off 30 pounds in the year before she debuted as a “Weekend Update” anchor.
• When she was first starting out as an improv comic in the Chicago area, Tina Fey made ends meet by working the early-morning shift at the front desk of a YMCA.
• Tina Fey is known in entertainment circles for her ability to restrain herself from overindulgence when it comes to drinking and other sometimes risky behaviors, which sets her apart from many famed SNL cohorts both past and present.
• Tina is often referred to as “the thinking man’s sex symbol."

Now that you know a little bit more about Tina, let's celebrate her awesomeness by clicking the ToastedRav video tab for some of Tina's best comedic moments (Sarah Palin impression definitely included.) Enjoy!

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