![]() ![]() The men, she said, were more skilled than the women at exercising their ambition. "Mostly," she said, "I just want to be in my house reading and writing." Sweeney never gained the celebrity and power of some of her "SNL" colleagues. She'd thought she might get involved with Chicago theaters. It reminded her of Spokane, Wash., where she'd grown up with four younger siblings. She had a few "Where-the-hell-am-I?" moments when she got to the North Shore, but she liked being in a place with old houses and big yards that was friendly to Mulan. In December of 2008, Sweeney, her daughter and her new husband (Michael Blum, who runs a scientific instruments company) drove east from California in a minivan. Among other absurdities, the brother lived in Chicago. He told her she should marry his brother, Michael. The letter-writer had seen "Letting Go of God," her show about becoming an atheist after a lifetime of Catholicism. Sweeney was in her LA routine as a single working mother - the kind who put her daughter in the green room during her performances - when she got a strange fan letter. After the death of former cast member Phil Hartman, she said, getting together was just too sad. She had contacts, jobs and friends, though those friends didn't include her old "SNL" pals. ![]() It makes me sad." Sweeney seems pleased and a little perplexed by where and how she lives now. I'll just do the whole thing again." At one point, between takes and swigs of water, she said, "I used to do so much voiceover. It's an amateur event put on by parents and teachers for the kids, but Sweeney went down to the basement studio, clamped on headphones and, standing erect at a mike, recited as enthusiastically as she would for a professional production. That morning, Sweeney had come to a Wilmette neighbor's home to do a voiceover for the 30th annual variety show of McKenzie Elementary School, where her daughter, Mulan, is in fourth grade. "Honestly, it's my dream come true." She laughed, as if to say she meant it, mostly. "I'm finally a suburban housewife," she said last week, sitting in Wilmette. Before she gave up God, turned all those occurrences into popular monologues and, last winter, stunned everyone she knew by leaving Los Angeles. Before she adopted a baby girl from China. She created Pat before she took care of a brother dying of lymphoma. Sweeney thinks back on Pat as an artifact of who she used to be, before she got, and apparently beat, cervical cancer. But that was a long time ago, and maybe longer ago in Sweeney's mind than in real time. In the 1990s, Pat, the sexually inscrutable "Saturday Night Live" character that made Sweeney famous, was almost as big in pop culture as Santa Claus. "It's Pat!" Nobody who sees her - a 50-year-old woman with a wide, lightly freckled face and cropped platinum hair - calls that out to her, but there was a time when strangers did. How puny and impermanent we are, she thinks. Every day, even in the wind and snow, Julia Sweeney walks half an hour from her Wilmette house to Lake Michigan, and with an awe someone else might call religious, faces the sky and water. ![]()
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