From UWGB to 'Friends' to 'Colbert,' actress/comedian Mary Gallagher comes full circle with Distinguished Alumni Award
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Before Mary Gallagher made it big with a role on “Friends” and a stand-up gig on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she first had to make it through a Saturday night opening for Sam Kinison in Green Bay.
As The Flying Napkins, she and friend Amy (Ketchum) Holterman — both 1990 graduates of the University Wisconsin-Green Bay — did comedy sketches at clubs around town back then. They made their debut at the former Embassy Suites (now Hyatt Regency), where Gallagher worked at the time, and often played gay bars, including Za’s in Green Bay and the Pivot Club in Appleton.
“It was Green Bay’s hottest, biggest all-female comedy duo,” she said. “It was the only comedy duo in Green Bay.”
They landed a gig opening for Kinison and Pauly Shore in September 1990 at downtown's City Centre Theater. It was a great get, so great it never occurred to them or anyone else that two 23-year-old women opening for Kinison, whose comedy was often loud and vulgar, wasn’t perhaps an ideal match.
“It was just horrific. It was just men yelling, ‘Show your (breasts) or get off the stage.’ It was terrible. It was a nightmare,” Gallagher said, recalling how the boos from the crowd drowned out nearly every word they said. “I just thought, ‘Oh, if I can survive that, Los Angeles will be easy, and it really has. Nothing has been as hard as opening up for Sam Kinison in my comedy duo.”
She and her fellow Flying Napkin still laugh about it.
Gallagher grew up in Elm Grove with parents who both served in the U.S. Marines, but the thick skin that would serve her so well in an industry that comes with endless auditions and inevitable rejections, may have formed onstage that night on Walnut Street.
Since moving to Los Angeles 30 years ago, Gallagher has acted in a long list of well-known TV shows, including “How I Met Your Mother,” “The West Wing,” “Mad About You,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “NCIS” and, most famously, “Friends” in 1996 (more about that later). She tends to get cast as the girl-next-door type.
She’s done stand-up at all kinds of venues, including The Comedy Store and The Laugh Factory. She stepped away from comedy for 10 years to raise her daughter, Mia, and then put an exclamation mark on her return in 2018 when she was invited to perform on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Gallagher has now lived in California longer than she did in Wisconsin. She's rubbed shoulders with all kinds of Hollywood celebrities on sets and stages, but she's still surprised by the opportunities that come her way and seldom discouraged by the ones that get away.
“I feel like I’m brand new out here all the time. Every year I almost kind of feel like I just moved to town. I think that’s probably a good thing for me. It’s probably what keeps me going,” she said. “I’ve never gotten to that point where I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m done with this place. Another heartbreak? Oh, come on.’ I’m like, ‘Oh OK, wow, that really hurt. Let’s keep going.’”
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Finding her talents, a mentor at UWGB
It was at UWGB that she first discovered her love of performing. She enrolled, not with dreams of becoming an actress one day, but because she was intrigued by a program called Communications and the Arts. She took a beginning acting class as an elective only because a friend recommended it.
“I had no idea what I was in for,” she said.
One of the requirements of the class was to audition for the main stage play, which was “King Lear” that year.
“I had never done anything like that before, and I just remember everyone going, ‘Wow, you’re really good.’ I’m like, ‘I am?’” Gallagher said, laughing.
Musicals were the primary focus back then, but Gallagher never considered herself a singer or a dancer, so instead she would go off and write, direct and star in a little theater piece of her own. She enjoyed the experimental nature and creative freedom that came with doing “alternate theater.” It’s how she and comedy first met.
“I think that I was funny and no one knew it, especially myself," Gallagher said. "Me and my roommate at UWGB, we would just kind of lock ourselves in the dorm room and do all these little comedy routines together. We didn’t really share that with anyone. I think everyone thought we were kind of weird.”
She found a mentor in theater professor Jeff Entwistle, who was always supportive of her independent projects. His encouragement helped her figure out how to share her humor. It eventually took her to the famed Chicago improv institution The Second City, where she studied after graduation from UWGB.
Gallagher and Entwistle have stayed in touch in the decades since her days on campus. He invited her back several times to do acting and improv workshops for students. She was set to return in 2020 for his retirement from UWGB after 36 years, but COVID-19 postponed not only that celebration but another milestone as well: her 2021 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Last year’s honorees will be recognized with this year’s winners during a ceremony on April 21. Gallagher will be there to accept her award.
To make the most of her first trip to Green Bay in 10 years, she booked a stand-up date at The Tarlton Theatre on April 22 that will include the return of The Flying Napkins. She’ll also have a chance to catch up with Entwistle and get a look around the city. (She's already prepared herself for a Green Bay that no longer includes one of her favorite downtown spots, Caffe Espresso, which closed in 2015.)
Sixteen-year-old Mia is coming along and has signed up for a formal tour of the same campus her mom once attended. They might squeeze in a visit to St. Norbert College in De Pere, too, and then it’s off to Evanston, Illinois, for a tour of Northwestern University.
It’s a full itinerary.
“Check with me at the end of the visit and see if that was a good idea,” she said. “I’m a little over-scheduled but we’ll figure it all out.”
She was Eddie's ex, Tilly, on 'Friends'
It will be the latest mom-daughter adventure for the two. After Gallagher taped her first late-night talk show appearance on “Colbert” four years ago, she and Mia went back to their New York City hotel room and joyfully jumped on the bed together like a couple of kids.
When she was younger, Mia understandably wasn't aware of much of her mother’s career. It wasn't like Gallagher was sitting her down and showing her demo reels as a child.
Mia wasn't even born when Gallagher played Tilly, the ex-girlfriend (see earlier girl-next-door reference) of Chandler’s irrational roommate Eddie in Season 2 of "Friends" in 1996. Her character shows up at their apartment to return Eddie’s fish tank, minus the fish, in “The One Where Dr. Ramoray Dies."
While Mia knew that her mom had appeared on some show called "Friends," she didn't know what a pop culture badge of honor it was until she got to middle school. That was around the same time a new generation of fans were discovering the sitcom on Netflix. So when the topic of "Friends" came up on her first day of math class, she casually dropped that her mom was on that show.
The reaction in the room was a collective “What?!” It was a bit of a revelation.
“My daughter came home that day and said, ‘Mom! You were on 'FRIENDS!' I said, ‘Yeahhh ...’ Gallagher said. "It was just neat that there suddenly was this different level of awareness, because the boy next to her knew it and the teacher knew it.
“I was instantly cool. I think it lasted for about 4 minutes.”
Her Wisconsin accent comes in handy
These days, Gallagher does more writing than she does acting. She made the transition about four years ago, wanting to focus more on creating something than being dependent on waiting to be cast in something. She made it into Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions to pitch a movie that was well received and was moving forward but, as happens in Hollywood, ultimately stalled out.
Nevertheless, the opportunity was a valuable launching pad to keep her writing TV pilots and screenplays both solo and with a writing partner.
“Our scripts that we’ve been writing together and I’ve been writing by myself are really moving forward in a way that I’m all in,” Gallagher said. “I actually think of myself now as a writer, even before an actor, because it’s more of what I do day to day.”
She’s still open to those acting jobs that find her. She plays the girlfriend of Eric Benet in a TV pilot he has been shopping around. It’s set in Green Bay, but they flew to Philadelphia to shoot it.
“Isn’t that so funny?” she says.
They discovered while working together that they share a Wisconsin connection. Benet, the Grammy-nominated R&B singer/songwriter and actor, has strong ties to Ashwaubenon, Gallagher said.
Their characters in the pilot both have thick northern Wisconsin accents. It wasn’t exactly a stretch for her to summon hers back, even after all this time in California.
“I don’t know that it ever goes away. When I tell people that I’m from Wisconsin they go, ‘Yeah, I can hear it. Yeah, I knew that. I had a feeling you were,’” she said. “I used to kind of think I need to change, like I need to go get some voice lessons and I need to make that go away and then I realized, well, why don’t I just be who I am and just lean into that?"
After all, that's what she did when she arrived at UWGB more than 30 years ago and look how that turned out.
Catch her stand-up act
Who: Mary Gallagher, with guest performances by Green Bay humor writer Jennie Young and comedy duo The Flying Napkins. Scott A. Schmidt hosts.
When: Doors at 6:30 p.m., show at 7:30 p.m. April 22
Where: The Tarlton Theatre, 405-409 W. Walnut St., Green Bay
Tickets: $15; thetarlton.com andfacebook.com/thetarlton
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Contact Kendra Meinert at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @KendraMeinert.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: For Mary Gallagher, her UWGB years paved way to 'Friends,' 'Colbert'
