When Amy Sedaris first encountered the green, muscle-bound alien, they were both a little hesitant. She’d been exploring his planet wearing a shiny-silver astronaut party dress (clearly a non-regulation uniform) while the antennaed bodybuilder snuck around, ducking behind space-trees, evading her glances. Until he pounced. Outside of Sedaris’s spacecraft, the pair circled each other suspiciously. The mood remained tense, each unsure of the other’s intentions, until Sedaris reached into her space traveler’s pack and pulled out — what’s this? Oh, yes. A grapefruit-sized cheese ball with googly eyes. After she offered the alien a slice, which he accepted trustingly, they both danced, and danced, and danced.
Someone called “cut,” and the crew burst into laughter. Just offstage, Mark Ibold and Hannah Clark, the food stylists tasked with creating the gross, weird, and oddly beautiful food offerings for Sedaris’s hospitality show At Home With Amy Sedaris — which premieres tonight on TruTV — hastily prepped a googly-eyed cheese ball for the scene’s next take. They patted the ball into the correct shape and affixed the eyes in the correct googly formation. They kept their fingers crossed that they’d made enough.
This alien-calming ball is not just any cheese ball plucked from the bountiful shelves of your local cheese ball purveyor, though, it’s Amy Sedaris’s famous cheese ball. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it. (Please nod, indicating that you have.) For a time, she sold the gouda-based balls — a staple of the North Carolina childhood often documented by her brother, the humorist David Sedaris — out of her apartment for $20 each, including crackers. “And then it got expensive! You had to buy the gouda, you had to buy the butter,” she told me. “It wasn’t cheap. And then I started getting a mouse problem. And I’m like, of course I am. I’m selling friggin’ cheese balls that are the size of the moon!” She’ll still make them upon request, which is a good tip for any mice reading this piece.
Hospitality shows — cooking, crafting, party-hosting, Martha Stewart-type programs — were also a childhood staple. “I was inspired by local hospitality shows I would watch growing up,” Sedaris said. “I remember pointing to those and saying, ‘I’m going to do my own hospitality show one day.’ I always wanted to do that. Because I like playing house, I like cooking, I like talking to a camera, talking to people that would come on the show. I always played ‘hospitality show’ growing up.”
Sedaris, the co-creator and star of the beloved Strangers With Candy and the voice of Princess Carolyn on the Netflix show BoJack Horseman, has had an at once wildly varied and wholly singular career. She does essentially whatever she wants — sketch comedy, guest spots on TV shows, cookbooks, late night talk show crafting segments — and she does it the way Amy Sedaris would do it: joyfully and grotesquely. She is a ceaseless font of weirdness, and a bright spot of light. (As for what she wants to do next, she says she wants to put together “a book on wigs and fake teeth,” because she loves wigs and fake teeth.)
Her new show, created by Strangers With Candy collaborator Paul Dinello, is a fucked-up, loving, vibrant, insane take on the hospitality show of her youth. Each episode has a theme, like entertaining on a budget, and employs a stable of regulars — a hobo named Horace Borman; Ruth, the lady who lives in the woods — to help solve problems like how to cook for businessmen, how to entertain Greek diner owners, and how to pretend you love a gift that you hate. Sedaris often ends up having sex with her guests.
The colorful set decoration, reminiscent of a more craft-heavy and less puppet-driven Pee-wee’s Playhouse, is partly inspired by Sedaris’s own apartment, and heavy on wall decorations with slightly warped motivational sayings (“ALONE BY CHOICE”). The crafts and food, and combinations between, like those found in her homemaking books I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence and Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People, are ridiculous: popsicle-stick people, packing tape placemats, and Potato Ships, which are baked potatoes topped with a construction paper, cheese, and mushroom-cap sail. They must be made wearing taped-on fake fingernails. (“A great party favor.”)
The concept of the show has grown and changed throughout Sedaris’s life, from “a PBS version where it’s kind of boring,” to a version she described in a 2004 interview with The Believer, which had her as a Southern character getting dinner on the table by 8 o’clock even though she had extra-long legs, or a tumor. “That idea was more about wanting a challenge,” she explained. “Let’s say I have a tumor in my head and I wanted to cook something, or really long legs, or really long fingernails, just to give it a challenge.” The show is not that, particularly, in its current iteration. “The idea just kept changing and changing, but I always knew I wanted it to look really good, and I wanted everything to look like a project, and to trigger ideas, and to take some kind of skill. That’s where Mark and Hannah came in.”
Sedaris was particularly impressed with their tableau work, showcased mainly in the table settings revealed at the end of most episodes. The works are saturated, oddly beautiful, and organized to tell a story. In the businessmen episode, the table is sea-themed, and centered around a large tower of shrimp and olives. In an episode during which Sedaris has to make a budget meal for her rich uncle, the table is decorated with “cherry blossoms,” sticks that have nail polish-painted popcorn glued to them.
Sedaris has done tableaux in her books and greatly appreciates the art of getting props, food, tablecloths, candles, and backdrops together in exactly the right artistic formation. On At Home, she would sometimes bring in props from her apartment, but would mostly leave the styling to Ibold and Clark. “I don’t think people really realize how hard it is to do a tableau as a still. It’s such an art,” she said. “And I didn’t want the computer to mess with it, I wanted it to be the real deal, in both the book and the show. And so that’s why it’s my favorite thing. You see two people who are really good at what they do make it all happen.”
Ibold and Clark are well-suited for the task of styling the food on At Home, which can range from items like the charming cheese ball we talked about earlier to disgusting displays of various types of dead fish. Ibold did the photography for I Like You, and he was the bassist in Pavement, and he was also in Sonic Youth. Ibold’s music career isn’t particularly relevant to his work on At Home, but I do think it’s worth mentioning in order to give you a sense of how he was the bassist in Pavement, and how he was also in Sonic Youth. He and Clark, a jewelry designer and food stylist, were part of the photography team behind the iconically odd and radically beautiful Lucky Peach, co-founded by Clark's husband, Peter Meehan. They styled, for example, the collection of penis- and vagina-like food items for the magazine’s issue on gender, the forlorn gingerbread men of the holiday issue, and the cover of the cookbook Lucky Peach Presents 101 Easy Asian Recipes. “I think Lucky Peach was really influenced by Amy,” Clark told me in whispers between cheese ball takes. “When we were doing the cookbooks, we definitely appreciated her sense of humor and aspired to be as irreverent.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of the same aesthetic,” Ibold said, “but a different type of work. A really different type of work.”
Ibold and Clark’s main issue on At Home is working within the often-erratic timetable of TV shooting, which is not something they were used to battling in print food styling and photography. “We have to know when they’re ready to shoot,” Ibold explained, “and have the food ready, and make multiples of everything.” When I visited, they were making a beautiful baked Alaska, piled high with wet meringue, that Clark promptly dropped on the floor while attempting to transport it. (It’s fine, it’s fine.) (It worked out fine.)
They also had to figure out how to maintain the food through long days of shoots, reshoots, and delays. “And all food degrades to a certain degree after it’s made, so we’re battling that,” Ibold said. Sedaris was effusive in her praise for this particular skill — the ability to keep food looking non-disgusting and seemingly edible throughout long shoots. “Like, let’s say we were going to shoot this fish scene at 8 a.m., and then you don’t shoot it until 6 p.m.,” she said. “Their challenge is to keep it looking fresh, to figure out what to spray on it, and all that stuff. It always made my day, to see them do that.”
The fish, ranging from normal-disgusting arctic char to the very disgusting monkfish, make their debut in the show’s premiere episode, “TGIF (Thank God It’s Fishday).” They are, indeed, just as shiny and gross as fish pulled fresh from the ocean, or at least fresh from a seafood case display.
The food only had to be actually edible about 50 percent of the time — otherwise it was paper-stuffed cakes and paella tossed together with anything that might possibly look like the right ingredients — and Sedaris would typically end up destroying whatever it was, anyway: burning it, throwing it in the garbage, tearing it apart with her lover. She had to take a torch to the baked Alaska, to brown the meringue. “All I had to do was take a heating light and just get the peaks on the baked Alaska toasty, and I murdered that cake,” she said. “The stuff just melted all over it. It looked horrible. But I would still sell it, like, ‘Look at these gorgeous peaks!’”
A tense quantity-and-timing moment came when they were shooting a scene with Paul Giamatti, one of the show’s many, many guest stars (along with Justin Theroux, Jane Krakowski, Michael Shannon, Christopher Meloni, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Dratch, etc., etc., etc.). Giamatti played one of a group of horny, meat-loving businessmen who dined on lamb chops, really eating them, going through take after take of lamb chop eating. (These had to be edible.) Someone on set eventually asked Ibold and Clark how many lamb chops they had left, and the answer was: not enough. “And this is while we were shooting,” Ibold said. “So I had to get on a Citi Bike and race to Whole Foods and get another two racks.”
“And then,” Clark said, interrupting to share in the joy of retelling the Paul Giamatti lamb chop story, “he had to go down to the church and make them all, while I was up here resetting these things. And he comes up with these beautiful, steaming lamb chops. I think that’s why Paul Giamatti was eating so many of them.”
“Everything they made kept topping everything else,” Sedaris would say later. “Like, even Mark’s lamb chops were glistening.”
Having Ibold and Clark around eased Sedaris’s stress on set, but she says At Home was still one of the most stressful projects she’s undertaken so far. This is well-hidden under the playfully deranged and desperately necessary Amy Sedarisness of it: the dancing and singing, the fake nails and glue. But getting everything right, meeting deadlines, and making sure the fake snakes looked fake-snakey enough took its toll. “And I haven’t even begun to think about how people are going to watch the show yet,” she said. “So that’s going to be another stress level.”
I asked how she combatted stress, something I assume it is safe to say that most are experiencing lately, even if they are not the eponymous Amy Sedaris of At Home With Amy Sedaris. Her main tip is to get a 10-pound sandbag, lie on the floor, and put it on your stomach. (“It forces you to breathe a different way from your diaphragm, and you can feel your shoulders melt into the floor.”) Beyond the sandbag, she recommends hospitality. “You get good friends together, you cook, you drink something, you smoke something. You do whatever you want to do. And you feel all right for a little while.”
At Home with Amy Sedaris airs on Tuesdays at 10:30PM on TruTV starting October 24, and will be available for streaming on trutv.com.
Kelly Conaboy is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.
Scout Tufankjian is a photographer based in Brooklyn.
Copy edited by Rachel P. Kreiter, who does not live in Brooklyn
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