in 1982 because she envisioned the city as a movie Mecca. Sweeney, a self-described film geek, left her home in Washington for L.A. It came from when you work at the office, and there’s this one person who’s just so fucking weird.” “I observed men and women who had weird qualities, and then when I put them together, I couldn’t decide whether it should be a man or a woman, so I just made it someone you didn’t know. “I didn’t observe people who were androgynous and then make an androgynous character,” says Sweeney. Weirdly enough, that aspect of Pat was an accident, says Sweeney, who invented the character while performing comedy sketches at the Groundling Theater, in Los Angeles, and then made Pat famous during four seasons on Saturday Night Live. The padded bodysuit has erased the last of her femininity, lending her the puzzling androgyny that is Pat’s central appeal. Almost as if she cannot help herself, she starts gurgling and wheezing - Pat noises - and of Sweeney herself there is nothing left. She is suddenly the real thing: a misfit, an outcast, a social pariah. Once in costume, Sweeney scrunches her neck down into her shoulders to give herself a double chin, arranges her face in that familiar smirk and places her hands awkwardly at the tops of her thighs. It gives her a humped back and a shapeless torso. Sweeney pulls on a matted wig and changes into the bodysuit, a big, lumpy affair that leaks stuffing like an old couch. Billy takes her chin in his hand, stares intently at her face and paints a shadow of a mustache above her upper lip. You would never have imagined that the actress who plays Pat would have such nice legs. “Now, we have the little mustache thing,” says Sweeney, who is wearing a black baby-doll dress with red, yellow and purple flowers printed on it. The result is formidable, in Donald Trump’s league. He experiments with a brown mascara wand on Sweeney’s eyebrows to make them puffy. Suddenly, Billy forgets his old obligations. that she employed monster-makeup artists when making the movie It’s Pat because they were not inhibited by a sense of obligation to make her beautiful. Julia Sweeney, who is second-generation Irish American and talks constantly to everybody, blithely informs Billy B. “Poor Pat,” she says, examining the results thus far. Billy B., who usually glamorizes models for Cosmopolitan, protests a little at first but gradually surrenders to Sweeney’s charm. Now, she directs him to spread the blush around the corners of her nose to make it seem like she has a cold or just plain bad skin. Sweeney, and has just told him to smear skin-colored foundation on her lips, making them all but disappear. It also involves a lot of makeup, which is why Julia Sweeney is sitting patiently on a tall stool in front of a large mirror ringed by light bulbs, the workplace of a horrified makeup artist named Billy B. Becoming Pat requires two hours, a padded bodysuit and a $10 wig.
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