Sona O'Brien

What am I, Shirley Temple?

Puff, puff, I'm smoking a cigar.

No, we were just talking earlier and you guys said, hey, bring that up on the podcast.

It's one of those early memories of young Conan out in the world.

I think I was a writer on Saturday Night Live.

This would have been the, I don't know, sometime between 1988 and 1991.

I think we were in a hiatus.

I wasn't doing much.

I was bumming around.

And someone, because I did sketches on the show, occasionally I would appear in the background of some SNL sketches.

And someone said, hey, Conan, they could use you over at, I don't know if it was the MTV Video Awards or VMAs or something.

It was some early version of one of those types of shows.

And it was shooting at the Armory in New York.

I remember this.

And they said at rehearsals, they need people to pretend to be the winners.

So you sit in the audience and they say, and the winner is Phil Collins.

And then a black woman stands up and she walks up on the stage and she says, I want to thank the other members of Genesis.

And she basically just so they can get the lighting right and the blocking right, because you're certainly not going to get that person there.

They never read the real winner because that can never be revealed before the show.

So they always say at the beginning of rehearsal, this is for rehearsal purposes only.