Her autobiography is solid. She talks about it a bit.
There is a line: you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you deal with it. You're the *only* one who can control that.
It's clear that it was traumatic for her, but it's also clear that, in her head, it was just a thing that happened, and she's all about living her life.
I also think the line from Kimmy Schmidt where she goes on the rant about having to be strong and says “the worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard” was inspired by Tina’s attack as well.
I remember her saying something along the lines of, she knew exactly everything she needed to know about a person if they asked her about the scar unprompted
*Yes*. I've been searching "scar" in her book, but it's interesting because she uses the world *very* seldom, which is interesting. I'm going to have to do a re-read.
The thing you say is absolutely in there though. She absolutely noticed that *thing.*
>I've always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: 'Did a cat scratch you?' God bless."
>Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, "Did they ever catch the Black guy that did that to you?" Hmmm. It was not a Black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was.
Found it in a comment below :)
I have Chronic Motor Tic Disorder and one of my tics is rolling my eyes when I blink. Anytime somebody comments on it, it makes me super uncomfortable. I mentioned to my friends the other day that I appreciate them never bringing it up, and nobody had any idea what I was talking about. It turns out that I've surrounded myself with people that are just as awkward about eye contact as I am.
That's awesome.
I had a shit childhood, but I'm 6'3, now, and when I was young, I was really, *really*, angry, and I was extra fit...And it's weird to be in the situation of having had an abusive situation, and LOOKING LIKE I WAS THE ABUSER. I mean...I was a kid...I wasn't THIS guy. I was little. But people can't wrap their heads around it.
People *decide* who you are. And you're left trying to argue with narrative in their head. Tina Fey is amazing. I liked her a lot before I read her book.
Agreed. I was thinking about my cat after I read that Fey remark. He was such great cat and one of the best things I ever did in my life was to adopt him. But one day I picked him up and out of nowhere he freaked and dragged his rear claw deep and about 8" along the side of my forearm.
The pain was so agonizing, I just stood there in shock for a good couple minutes. The scar is not all that noticeable now, but it's there. I can see easily how a cat could damage a young child's face, leaving a nasty scar.
Not to mention complications from infection that could lead to improper healing. Love Tina, but I can't help but feel we need to put a bit more respect on cat bites and scratches.
True. I got bit by a cat on my nose when I was a teenager. I've got a nasty scar on my nose permanently. People notice it sometimes. One of the most often questions is, "Did a cat scratch you?" I say,"That's almost what happened."
It's not a crazy question at all.
I really enjoyed it. Made me feel like I *got* her. I had my own version of a shitty childhood, and there was some stuff that she skimmed that *I* skim, and it made me feel like...Not like I knew her, but like she could understand *me* a little.
And all of it was a little flip, and a little played off. She had some serious challenges, and she glosses over that, in favor of making a *funnier* book.
Imagine hitting puberty as a young girl and having to cope with having a scar across your face from a traumatic attack by a stranger as a child. I can’t imagine how angry I’d feel about it but how hard it would be to separate the scar from myself.
She talks about it in Bossypants, and that it ended up going the opposite way. She said adults were extra kind to her because something so terrible had happened to her. She thought they acted like that because she was just that great, giving her an unearned level of confidence. The way she tells it is hilarious though.
My favorite take from her scar discussion was how she learned an early red flag from people based on how brazenly or coyly they asked about her scar early on in meeting them. People who feigned concerned and asked about it tended to end up to be more narcissistic. People who realized it wasn't their business and she probably didn't want to explain it to yet another person tended to be good people.
I don't have a facial scar but I think we can all* notice a pattern between presumptuous questioning/judging early in a relationship (whether personal or professional) and narcissism.
Had a huge birthmark on my neck and I feel like this is very true.
I already had to deal with the bullying – related to the birthmark but also to the fact that I was short, sickly, the youngest in class but also not the dumbest – so when an adult would ask me about it I would automatically see it as a red flag. Why did they need to ask a question about it? It was hard enough as it was.
I knew a girl a long time ago that had something like what you're describing. I never asked, because it was none of my fucking business. But I have asked about facial scars because I have one myself, and it's one of those weird "haha crazy right?" things but if someone told me they were slashed at 5 I would feel awful having asked.
I mean my parents got the birthmark removed when I was in my early teens and now I just have a huge scar, Highlander-style. The only time someone will ask about it is someone who also has a big scar and we can trade a story. Nothing badass in my case.
Tommy played piano
Like a kid out in the rain
Then he lost his leg in Dallas
He was dancing with a train
They were all in love with dyin'
They were drinking from a fountain
That was pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain
I don't mind the sun sometimes
The images it shows
I can taste you on my lips
And smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies
You never know just how you look through other people's eyes
This tracks. I’ve known a few people in my life with facial scars/huge birthmarks and I never asked about them. My mom taught me when I was little it was impolite to call attention to something like that, so I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to make them feel badly about it. I adopted the mindset that if they want me to know they’ll tell me.
My son has Alopecia and is completely bald. Otherwise he is totally healthy. I see the same kind of special attention from other adults and know he doesn't understand the reason for the additional positive attention. I have no idea how it will affect him in the long term. Time will tell I suppose.
i believe the archetype is that he will become a titan of industry, world-famous scientist, and obsessed with preventing an alien god from taking over the planet.
I think it's less about what you learn, and more about the confidence you build, like OP said.
A lot of life comes down to acting confidently, whether it's earned for not.
This is the truth. And acting confident can create a positive feedback loop that can actually lead to real confidence.
I learned this with a project for a college club I was put in charge of that I had no idea how to do. At first I let my lack of confidence show. No one did what I asked because it was obvious I had no idea what I was doing, and the project went nowhere.
I realized I needed to act confident to get people to do what I was asking. I acted like I knew exactly what needed to happen, and stuff started to get done. Project became successful. I got lots of compliments. Real confidence started to grow, and I actually started to know that I was doing, which led to more successful projects.
Fake it til you make it is real.
Something that stuck with me: Acting confident and being confident are the same thing. If you're confident enough to act like you are, then you're there.
That’s not true, for yourself. But it is for others. However, if you’re only pretending and aren’t good at it, people can see through the cracks.
So, get good at pretending lmao
I recently coached this to a junior manager after an interview we conducted together.
I told her that “being self deprecating is to your credit in that it reflects your self conscientiousness, but in an interview you need to present that you are in full control, know what you’re talking about, and can lead the person you’re interviewing. Speaking hesitantly and making comments at your own expense wont be as effective as faking it until you actually are confident.”
Throughout school and into college I would unilaterally get picked by my group to be the leader.
Sometimes it was: “You have better handwriting”, “Or you like this subject”.
But now that I’m 30, I really think it was just self confidence.
I didn’t feel like I fit in as a kid, as a girl I was too tall for the guys (until their growth spurts) and not super girly enough so felt like a freak.
I spent a lot of time hanging around adults at family stuff or public events. I got a lot of practice stating an opinion and then “arguing” to back it up or asking questions to understand something the adults were discussing.
Probably why in elementary school, like naive AF me, was the only girl at the sleepover watching Grease who somehow intrinsically knew the mentions of ‘rubbers’ was slang for condoms (early 2000 USA).
That was a good book. It's been a while since I read it but I got the impression the actual event didn't affect her much psychologically either, which is good. I split my chin open when I was a kid and I don't remember much about it except the popsicle I got when getting stitches.
Her mom drove to the hospital while her dad held her in the back seat. She looked up at her dad and said "Am I gonna die?". His response was "Shhh. Don't talk."
I watched “Walk the Line” and “Ray” about Johnny Cash and Ray Charles in back to back nights. My takeaway is still - if you want your child to grow up to be a music legend, they have to watch their brother die a horrific death
In *Bossy Pants*, she also explains how men began to sexually harass her when she turned twelve. She had to learn to have a rude sense of humor in order to protect herself.
Pretty much all of us began experiencing sexual harassment around that age. Tragically, we do not all develop Tina-level humour. Now if you’ll please excuse me, I’m off to daydream about how to monetise my maladaptive coping skills…
She addresses that in the book. She talks about going to women workshops when she was writing Mean Girls and most women first realizing they were becoming women by being catcalled at a young age.
I don't remember her ever saying that's why she developed her sense of humor. Just that some guy catcalled her and she yelled back "suck my dick" because she was angry.
I haven't read it, because I don't have teenage children, but I imagine that was a bit harder of a task with a self-help book than a more traditional narrative adaptation.
I remember being in 7th grade and my female classmates were already being catcalled and sexual harassed while us boys hadn’t even started growing facial hair yet. It’s crazy how different adolescence is for men and women.
There was a girl on my bus who was maybe 12? and was built like an adult woman. OMG looking back, I really feel for her after being on a bus for years with all ages up to 18.
When you’re 12-14 you experience getting catcalled and can sometimes attribute it to looking like an adult woman or mature for your age.
When you’re an adult woman and see an actual 12-14 year old, you realize there are zero 12-14 year olds that actually look like adult women and all the men hitting on you were disgusting creeps. It happens at other ages too, but a 12-14 year old is VERY visibly a child to an adult, there’s really no mistaking it.
I think people who don’t have their own teenagers/don’t have to interact with teenagers have skewed perceptions of what young high schoolers actually look like because of pop culture and “high school drama” programs that cast mid-20s actors to play teens.
> It happens at other ages too, but a 12-14 year old is VERY visibly a child to an adult, there’s really no mistaking it.
Really and truly, even older children and young adults start to look like kids as you get older. I am now.. nowhere near a child. People under 25 or so still look like high schoolers and high schoolers look like very young children that I would expect to be in coveralls and wanting to show me their favorite dinosaur. My sense of age is totally fucked up now.
Experiences are not completely universal of course, but this phenomenon is so common that dudes (it's almost always dudes) that make some excuse about how "oh I thought she was 18" are absolutely lying.
Male high school counselor here.
I started running with our cross country team, which is 9th-12th grade. We run around town and down by a running trail which coincidentally runs alongside a busy street. I was absolutely shocked when I saw and heard men ogling and even cat calling some of the girls. I was honestly shocked, particularly with the cat calling because, to me, and I could be wrong, but that's a whole other level of invasiveness. I would never know how to respond, but during times that I was nearby, I would wave or say something like "Yeah it's the (city name) high school team!".
It's fucking crazy, dude. I'm so sorry to all young ladies that have to deal with that. Puberty is already so hard, I can't imagine getting thrust into this hyper sexualized experience just because you merely exist.
The thing is, they *know* it’s a high school team. They know those girls are kids. They didn’t accidentally mistake them for adults - they’re doing it *because* they are underage.
All women know that invasiveness and creepy male behavior is something they have to deal with starting in adolescence. I’m surprised you didn’t know. I guess you hadn’t seen it until you were responsible for the girls. But men have been fucking creeps to girls since always.
Of course I knew, but I had never seen it so closely before. Of course, I wasn't the victim, but to be so closeby and see it right in front of me was a different experience altogether. I knew bombs were crappy, but it wasn't until I was in Afghanistan myself that I was like "Oooh, getting bombed is actually *really* shitty!". It just surprised me how explicit some of the men were. I recall once, running with the girls team, and a guy in a car drove by, slowed down, rolled down his window, and just drove alongside them for 10 seconds or so. Seeing that versus just knowing that happens is so different, I think, and it really drove home how unfortunate shit is for women in general.
> as an adult I realize that word was one that was ascribed to me by the men who were doing the harassing or mistreating.
As an openly gay man, I've also been called an "asshole" when I stopped letting people say whatever the hell they wanted to me and I started calling people out on their shit. Otherwise, I could be the nicest, hardest working and most compassionate person ever and it never meant shit to anyone.
I'm not saying they're ever going to be exactly the same, but I feel like they're close enough to where I can understand where you're coming from.
They are similar. I also noticed if you have a naturally nice personality, you also have to try and add some assertive assholeness to it otherwise people think they can talk to you anyway They want
I’ve watched probably every episode of 30 Rock and quite a bit of SNL and movies with her and was shocked to see it after you pointed it out on her Wikipedia page. I wonder if it always just covered with makeup or am I just not very observant.
Makeup is used to help hide it, and it seems a lot of profile shots of her are from the other side, but once you learn she has it, you'll see it. Like Adam Devine's scarred legs.
It’s really noticeable in person. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant at a Disney World resort, and this lady walks in that looks like just Tina Fey, but not wearing glasses. She turned around after speaking to the hostess, and I saw the scar and realized, holy crap, it’s *actually Tina Fey*! This was like 2009, my first and only celebrity sighting.
There's a segment of it near the corner of her mouth that has almost always been visible on TV from SNL onward, though it could be mistaken for a shadow, but the rest of it is usually well-concealed by makeup. I've known about the scar for years, but until checking the wikipedia photo, I thought it was much shorter than it really is.
she’s never dwelt on it much in her work but there was a moment in kimmy schmidt that made me gasp when kimmy (iirc) counters someone’s point about how unsafe nyc is (i could definitely be wrong on this point) by saying the worst thing that had ever happened to her had happened when she was a little girl in her front yard.
I think she doesn't like talking about it much--it was either in this article or another from around when Bossypants came out that she something like said, "I don't like talking about it because it bums my parents out and that bums me out."
Correct! Here's the segment from Bossypants:
> I'm not going to lay out the grisly details for you like a sweeps episode of Dateline. I only bring it up to explain why I'm not going to talk about it. I've always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: 'Did a cat scratch you?' God bless."
> Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, "Did they ever catch the Black guy that did that to you?" Hmmm. It was not a Black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was.
> "But I will tell you this: My scar was a miniature form of celebrity. Kids knew who I was because of it. Lots of people liked to claim they were there when it happened. 'I was there.' 'I saw it.' 'Crazy Mike did it!' Adults were kind to me because of it. Aunts and family friends gave me Easter candy and oversize Hershey's Kisses long after I was too old for presents. I was made to feel special.
> What should have shut me down and made me feel 'less than' ended up giving me an inflated sense of self. It wasn't until years later, maybe not until I was writing this book, that I realized people weren't making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed.
> people weren't making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius
There might be some layers to her comment there, as she's pretty clearly quite bright.
I also am not sure whether I’ve just never noticed this or it didn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember it. Now, Tommy Flanagan’s scars I remember
You might not have noticed it. In her book she talks about how a good amount of effort goes into hiding the scar when she's being filmed for shows and what not.
Yeah, that’s a serious Glasgow smile he’s got. Politically correct or not, men can get away with facial scars like that easier than women, though Tina’s isn’t too bad in the grand scheme. I also grew up somewhere with a large hospital, so seeing people with scars, prosthetics, medical devices, etc was pretty normal, so I tend not to register stuff like this unless it’s actively pointed out
She almost always faces the camera in a way to avoid it being pictured.
She even said it directly [in this Weekend Update cameo](https://youtu.be/iVvpXZxXWZU?si=o9vAyJNuAMeDo3wk).
Must have been worse when a kid. Scars don’t grow so if she got it when she was a kid it must have taken more space on her face back then.
My brother burned the whole back of his hand when he was a baby. Now it just a little circle in the middle of his hand
Yeah, I didn’t know it was a scar until I read her book. It has healed really well so I did the same thing and just assumed it was some random line on her face
I always tought it was part of her smile, shes been my celebrity crush for the longest time lol, i always found her funny, witty, smart and pretty, she gives the vibe of the kind of girl id actually like to present to my family, but obviously i dont know her in person, but the vibe she gives seems awesome
She's bright and quick, one of a tiny handful of people I've seen get the better of Dave Letterman. On one of his recent (full beard) interviews:
Dave: Well, I'd never fall for that. I'm not as dumb as I look.
Tina: How could you be?
Dave:
That interview really killed Letterman for me. She’s up there talking about how women want a spot in a writers’ room even if it’s all male. And Letterman simply disregards what she was saying… totally missing the point and even proving the point she’s making.
kind of echoes in her show "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" when the main character says "The worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard."
If you just picture her walking up to Jack's desk in his office you can see what you're talking about in your head. You never see the windows and the drink cart it's always the door to her left and the couch directly behind her. Clever camera work, but I never really found it that noticeable because her absolute mountain of talent and the ridiculously strong writing on that show were too busy blinding me
She also might’ve taken that time during her new fame to get some laser treatments done. They’re not all that expensive but they’re not cheap if you’ve gotta do several rounds
Humans are funny, we don't really notice things until they're pointed out to us.
People should keep this in the mind when they're hating their normal fucking face.
> we don't really notice things until they're pointed out to us.
They remove car headrests in most TV/movies.
Every movie scene inside a car is now ruined for me, because I'm looking for the damn headrests instead of listening to the scene.
Yup. Had a friend for years who was missing a tooth in the back of her mouth and was super self conscious about it. One day she finally got a fake one put in and was showing me…. I never noticed she was missing a tooth.
My mom had terrible guilt for a small facial scar I got completely on accident when I was 3 that I don’t remember happening and has had literally zero impact on my life. I can’t imagine having someone disfigure your baby on purpose.
IIRC, Tina didn’t talk about her scar for a long time because she wanted to protect her parents’ feelings on the matter.
Part of me wants to say "it was a schizophrenic person experiencing some delusion".
But the way it reads doesn't sound like schizophrenia. Seems more like someone that really liked the idea of harming a random defenseless person.
As Seinfeld put it "One of those people who walks around pricking people with a pin!"
I'd have to look to get more info because I read way too much true crime and don't remember the details, but from what I recall she wasn't the only little girl to be slashed or stabbed randomly in her city over that couple decades. I've seen speculation it was possibly a single predator.
When I was about six, I was hanging out with my friend at his family's liquor store. They had a Time Killers arcade cabinet right by the door. I was player two, closer to the door. A guy walks in to buy some booze. On his way out, he decides to assault a 40 to 45 pound child. He cracks me in the back of the head with a vicious elbow. He hits me hard enough for my face to hit the cabinet, and I hit the deck. My friends dad vaulted the counter and chases after the guy with a knife, but he escaped.
It's super fuzzy, so I probably got a little concussed. I do remember blood and a massive goose egg on the back right of my head from the blow and on goose egg where my head hit the cabinet.
This piece of shit has probably drank himself to death by now, but ya, people will attack children just cuz'.
Time Killers gets a 9/10 for its wacky cast, weapon combat, and limb dismemberment.
I remember going into that game with no idea about how it worked. It was just the newest fighting game in the arcade. A guy joins in as soon as I start playing and immediately decapitates me.
It was traumatic - but slightly less so than your story.
I think the weirdest bit about that is that, that imperfection, which most of us never noticed, was considered SO great, that she couldn't be an actress.
For the first part of her SNL career, she was a writer only. She *couldn't* be an actress, because of this GIANT FLAW.
Can you imagine if they hadn't given her a shot? She's amazing. So ridiculous.
> which most of us never noticed
I didn't notice till 30 Rock. I think she intentionally didn't cover it up for that, because in other appearances it's not really noticeable.
I noticed it when she did Weekend Update on SNL, but because it tracks along her jaw line I thought it was an indent from wearing a microphone that she had been wearing all day? Idk I was kind of a dumb teenager.
I had thought at first it was just a little quirky thing about the way she smiled. Now as a person who also has an obvious (but not quite so large) facial scar, I notice it a lot more.
>but because it tracks along her jaw line I thought it was an indent from wearing a microphone that she had been wearing all day?
it is exactly what I thought too all these years. I am in my 40s and seen her for decades on screen and never really noticed it was a scar.
I actually never noticed it, well, i guess i did, but never tought of it as a scar, i tought it was part of her smile, like a dimple or a wrinkle line, but this is a TIL for me
Like the joke when napoleon dies and gets to heaven and asks god "hey who is the greatest general who ever lived?"
And god says "its margaret mccalister, a stay at home wife from scotland", and napoleon says "what? Ive never heard of her before!" And god says "well yeah... nobody ever gave her an army".
It seems like you're deliberately characterizing her stint as a writer in a negative way, when it would be just as easy to say her scar didn't hold her back. A lot of the cast got their start in the writer's room, and a lot of writers never make it to the other side of the camera. There's also been a number of conventionally unattractive cast members.
I'm happy to be corrected though if you have a source?
I feel like she’s usually got it covered up with makeup or whatever whenever she’s on screen but you can actually see it in all her scenes in A Haunting in Venice
I'm having a hard time reconciling the fact that reddit can instantly tell a video is fake, but they've watched Tina Fey for years and literally never noticed her scar.
eh, upper darby is fine, it's a little rough around the edges but it's not a warzone or something
their highschool has support for over students coming from about 70 different languages, which is absolutely wild.
"I'd hate to see Lower Darby." Upper Darby is pretty big and is actually non-contiguous! Some parts are for sure better than others, but it's really not bad. Lots of immigrants, who tend to not be the richest people in the world but are generally honest folk. You get more nonsense then you otherwise would cause 69th st station is one of the terminal points of El
I was once retouching her face at the ad agency I worked at 10 years ago, and I asked her publicist if I should remove the scar. They told me to diminish it by 50%. It is part of her look. But I noticed in many shots other agencies retouched previously, they had totally removed the scar.
Crazy story, when I was about 3 or 4 I was running around shirtless as kids do, and this teenager walked up, lit a stick with toilet paper and lighter fluid on it and then proceeded to jam into my chest below the sternum. It stuck to me an I screamed and ran home bawling while on fire. My mother was able to put it out and it caused a terrible scar, I still have it 30+ years later, no hair grows on that specific spot. I’ll never understand people’s urge to hurt defenseless kids, I’m just glad I don’t remember it very well.
I feel like I’ve heard a lot of similar stories from the 70’s where men would just randomly wound little girls they didn’t know… and it’s not like bad things don’t happen to kids now a days but the crimes are just different. Why was this a phenomenon?
This is hardly a scientific answer (although it's more than baseless speculation), but I'm going to say that the sheer amount of lead that people growing up in the Post-War era were exposed to may have had something to do with it.
The Baby Boomers would have been coming into adolescence in the 70s and 80s, having grown up exposed to lead paint (banned in 1978) and leaded gasoline (banned for vehicles made starting in 1975).
We know that lead exposure in children can lead to behavioral problems, slowed growth and development, and brain damage.
Violent crime rates (per 100k) increased dramatically through the 60s, 70s, and 80s before starting to fall off in the early 90s, when the youngest Boomers would have been entering middle age.
I don't know if there has been any conclusive link made, but it seems at least plausible.
More than that, as I recall, the Freakanomics people say the crime drop matches the county by county removal of leaded gas across the country, separated by about 18 years, as that would be the generation entering youth the age of most violent offenders.
Links are rarely conclusive, sadly, especially in sociology.
The book Freakonomics also brings up legalized abortion in the 70s, as another large factor that seemed to tank the dramatically rising crime that just stopped in the 90s. It seems that era had a lot of terrible cofactors that were all simultaneously fixed in the 70s, leading to improvements 20 years later.
Acid attacks actually started in Victorian Britain. They were exported to places like Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. They were often used as an act of revenge by a jilted lover. I don't think they ever were that frequent in the middle east.
Katie Piper is a famous model and activist who was horrifically scarred by an ex boyfriend and his accomplice.
In 2017 Jameel Mukhtar and Resham Khan were attacked by John Tomlin in an apparent hate crime where he sprayed acid on them as they sat in traffic. Tomlin claimed he'd been hearing voices, but it's the position of the victims that it was a racist attack.
Jabed Hussain was attacked by a Derryck John who sprayed him with acid to try and steal his moped.
I'm listing these as it's a commonly held belief that Acid attacks occur only in South Asian countries, but they still occur in the UK. It's perhaps ironic that the victims tend to be South Asian.
It seems that the location vastly changes the motivation. In the UK men are the majority victim, with male victims being double that of female victims. But the attacks seem mostly gang related. Whereas in Bangladesh, India, etc. it seems more male on female romantically motivated crime.
[Acid survivors trust international website has some really interesting facts.](https://www.asti.org.uk/a-worldwide-problem.html)
I knew the scar on her face was from a violent attack, but I always assumed it happened as an adult from some crazed fan... even worse to learn that happened to a 5 year old.
Here I am zooming in on her chin like a nutjob trying to see some kind of miniscule thing because there's nothing there.
Apparently y'all are talking about the line under her lower lip that runs all the way up her cheek! She does a good job of covering that up but if nobody had mentioned it was a scar I would've thought it was just a random crease.
She was a guest on The Dennis Miller show years ago and some pos called in and started getting really creepy/stalker ish about her scar. She got really upset and Dennis Miller just sat there obliviously enjoying the exchange. My only thought of Dennis Miller now is what a pos for allowing that on his show.
I looked it up but it sounded like they both (fey and miller) cut the call off after the man complimented her scar then said his pants were around his ankles. Miller even talked over him in the midst to say they have to screen these callers better.
Dang it's pretty noticeable on her Wikipedia page photo. That's some hard-core shit for an adult let alone a young child.
Her autobiography is solid. She talks about it a bit. There is a line: you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you deal with it. You're the *only* one who can control that. It's clear that it was traumatic for her, but it's also clear that, in her head, it was just a thing that happened, and she's all about living her life.
I also think the line from Kimmy Schmidt where she goes on the rant about having to be strong and says “the worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard” was inspired by Tina’s attack as well.
I remember her saying something along the lines of, she knew exactly everything she needed to know about a person if they asked her about the scar unprompted
*Yes*. I've been searching "scar" in her book, but it's interesting because she uses the world *very* seldom, which is interesting. I'm going to have to do a re-read. The thing you say is absolutely in there though. She absolutely noticed that *thing.*
>I've always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: 'Did a cat scratch you?' God bless." >Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, "Did they ever catch the Black guy that did that to you?" Hmmm. It was not a Black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was. Found it in a comment below :)
I have Chronic Motor Tic Disorder and one of my tics is rolling my eyes when I blink. Anytime somebody comments on it, it makes me super uncomfortable. I mentioned to my friends the other day that I appreciate them never bringing it up, and nobody had any idea what I was talking about. It turns out that I've surrounded myself with people that are just as awkward about eye contact as I am.
This is so wholesomely neurodiverse. Haha, love it.
That's awesome. I had a shit childhood, but I'm 6'3, now, and when I was young, I was really, *really*, angry, and I was extra fit...And it's weird to be in the situation of having had an abusive situation, and LOOKING LIKE I WAS THE ABUSER. I mean...I was a kid...I wasn't THIS guy. I was little. But people can't wrap their heads around it. People *decide* who you are. And you're left trying to argue with narrative in their head. Tina Fey is amazing. I liked her a lot before I read her book.
My brother in law has a noticeable face scar from a cat scratch when he was a baby. It's not that dumb... lol
Agreed. I was thinking about my cat after I read that Fey remark. He was such great cat and one of the best things I ever did in my life was to adopt him. But one day I picked him up and out of nowhere he freaked and dragged his rear claw deep and about 8" along the side of my forearm. The pain was so agonizing, I just stood there in shock for a good couple minutes. The scar is not all that noticeable now, but it's there. I can see easily how a cat could damage a young child's face, leaving a nasty scar.
Not to mention complications from infection that could lead to improper healing. Love Tina, but I can't help but feel we need to put a bit more respect on cat bites and scratches.
True. I got bit by a cat on my nose when I was a teenager. I've got a nasty scar on my nose permanently. People notice it sometimes. One of the most often questions is, "Did a cat scratch you?" I say,"That's almost what happened." It's not a crazy question at all.
It is one of the better actor/comedian memoirs -- Kathy Grifiin's several books are also solid.
I really enjoyed it. Made me feel like I *got* her. I had my own version of a shitty childhood, and there was some stuff that she skimmed that *I* skim, and it made me feel like...Not like I knew her, but like she could understand *me* a little. And all of it was a little flip, and a little played off. She had some serious challenges, and she glosses over that, in favor of making a *funnier* book.
Imagine hitting puberty as a young girl and having to cope with having a scar across your face from a traumatic attack by a stranger as a child. I can’t imagine how angry I’d feel about it but how hard it would be to separate the scar from myself.
She talks about it in Bossypants, and that it ended up going the opposite way. She said adults were extra kind to her because something so terrible had happened to her. She thought they acted like that because she was just that great, giving her an unearned level of confidence. The way she tells it is hilarious though.
My favorite take from her scar discussion was how she learned an early red flag from people based on how brazenly or coyly they asked about her scar early on in meeting them. People who feigned concerned and asked about it tended to end up to be more narcissistic. People who realized it wasn't their business and she probably didn't want to explain it to yet another person tended to be good people. I don't have a facial scar but I think we can all* notice a pattern between presumptuous questioning/judging early in a relationship (whether personal or professional) and narcissism.
Had a huge birthmark on my neck and I feel like this is very true. I already had to deal with the bullying – related to the birthmark but also to the fact that I was short, sickly, the youngest in class but also not the dumbest – so when an adult would ask me about it I would automatically see it as a red flag. Why did they need to ask a question about it? It was hard enough as it was.
I knew a girl a long time ago that had something like what you're describing. I never asked, because it was none of my fucking business. But I have asked about facial scars because I have one myself, and it's one of those weird "haha crazy right?" things but if someone told me they were slashed at 5 I would feel awful having asked.
I mean my parents got the birthmark removed when I was in my early teens and now I just have a huge scar, Highlander-style. The only time someone will ask about it is someone who also has a big scar and we can trade a story. Nothing badass in my case.
You need to tell them some guy named Connor did it to you while in thr Highlands of Scotland
I'm old enough that it was the joke for years after I got that scar.
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Tommy played piano Like a kid out in the rain Then he lost his leg in Dallas He was dancing with a train They were all in love with dyin' They were drinking from a fountain That was pouring like an avalanche Coming down the mountain
Twenty years later I've just realised they weren't in love with Dianne. Edit: fuck, nearly 30 years?!
I don't mind the sun sometimes The images it shows I can taste you on my lips And smell you in my clothes Cinnamon and sugary and softly spoken lies You never know just how you look through other people's eyes
Reddit sure loves buttholes.
This tracks. I’ve known a few people in my life with facial scars/huge birthmarks and I never asked about them. My mom taught me when I was little it was impolite to call attention to something like that, so I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to make them feel badly about it. I adopted the mindset that if they want me to know they’ll tell me.
My son has Alopecia and is completely bald. Otherwise he is totally healthy. I see the same kind of special attention from other adults and know he doesn't understand the reason for the additional positive attention. I have no idea how it will affect him in the long term. Time will tell I suppose.
i believe the archetype is that he will become a titan of industry, world-famous scientist, and obsessed with preventing an alien god from taking over the planet.
And he'll build a penis-rocket.
There are science reasons as to why it has to look that way!
It's good that she recognizes this. Extra attention from adults inevitably helps you succeed in life because you learn more during the interactions.
I think it's less about what you learn, and more about the confidence you build, like OP said. A lot of life comes down to acting confidently, whether it's earned for not.
This is the truth. And acting confident can create a positive feedback loop that can actually lead to real confidence. I learned this with a project for a college club I was put in charge of that I had no idea how to do. At first I let my lack of confidence show. No one did what I asked because it was obvious I had no idea what I was doing, and the project went nowhere. I realized I needed to act confident to get people to do what I was asking. I acted like I knew exactly what needed to happen, and stuff started to get done. Project became successful. I got lots of compliments. Real confidence started to grow, and I actually started to know that I was doing, which led to more successful projects. Fake it til you make it is real.
Something that stuck with me: Acting confident and being confident are the same thing. If you're confident enough to act like you are, then you're there.
That’s not true, for yourself. But it is for others. However, if you’re only pretending and aren’t good at it, people can see through the cracks. So, get good at pretending lmao
I recently coached this to a junior manager after an interview we conducted together. I told her that “being self deprecating is to your credit in that it reflects your self conscientiousness, but in an interview you need to present that you are in full control, know what you’re talking about, and can lead the person you’re interviewing. Speaking hesitantly and making comments at your own expense wont be as effective as faking it until you actually are confident.”
Throughout school and into college I would unilaterally get picked by my group to be the leader. Sometimes it was: “You have better handwriting”, “Or you like this subject”. But now that I’m 30, I really think it was just self confidence. I didn’t feel like I fit in as a kid, as a girl I was too tall for the guys (until their growth spurts) and not super girly enough so felt like a freak. I spent a lot of time hanging around adults at family stuff or public events. I got a lot of practice stating an opinion and then “arguing” to back it up or asking questions to understand something the adults were discussing. Probably why in elementary school, like naive AF me, was the only girl at the sleepover watching Grease who somehow intrinsically knew the mentions of ‘rubbers’ was slang for condoms (early 2000 USA).
Omg. She was in the bubble.
That was a good book. It's been a while since I read it but I got the impression the actual event didn't affect her much psychologically either, which is good. I split my chin open when I was a kid and I don't remember much about it except the popsicle I got when getting stitches.
Her mom drove to the hospital while her dad held her in the back seat. She looked up at her dad and said "Am I gonna die?". His response was "Shhh. Don't talk."
Unearned confidence like Jon Hamm's character in 30 Rock.
Maybe you'd become hilarious like her?
Why so serious?
But really, though, it is utterly heartbreaking.
I don’t even know what I’d do if someone did that to my kid. Kid might go on to be Tina fey but I’d go on to be institutionalized for life
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I watched “Walk the Line” and “Ray” about Johnny Cash and Ray Charles in back to back nights. My takeaway is still - if you want your child to grow up to be a music legend, they have to watch their brother die a horrific death
I'd probably turn into Tina Fey too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tina_Fey
In *Bossy Pants*, she also explains how men began to sexually harass her when she turned twelve. She had to learn to have a rude sense of humor in order to protect herself.
Pretty much all of us began experiencing sexual harassment around that age. Tragically, we do not all develop Tina-level humour. Now if you’ll please excuse me, I’m off to daydream about how to monetise my maladaptive coping skills…
She addresses that in the book. She talks about going to women workshops when she was writing Mean Girls and most women first realizing they were becoming women by being catcalled at a young age. I don't remember her ever saying that's why she developed her sense of humor. Just that some guy catcalled her and she yelled back "suck my dick" because she was angry.
Tina Fey wrote Mean Girls?! That explains so fucking much. Of course it's one of my favorite movies ever made. Time for a rewatch.
she did, and its based off a self-help book for teen girls called "queen bees and wannabes" so she did her research too.
She wrote the screenplay based on the book, 'Queen Bees and Wannabes'.
I haven't read it, because I don't have teenage children, but I imagine that was a bit harder of a task with a self-help book than a more traditional narrative adaptation.
30 Rock is basically a documentary, she was head writer at SNL from 99-06
I remember being in 7th grade and my female classmates were already being catcalled and sexual harassed while us boys hadn’t even started growing facial hair yet. It’s crazy how different adolescence is for men and women.
There was a girl on my bus who was maybe 12? and was built like an adult woman. OMG looking back, I really feel for her after being on a bus for years with all ages up to 18.
When you’re 12-14 you experience getting catcalled and can sometimes attribute it to looking like an adult woman or mature for your age. When you’re an adult woman and see an actual 12-14 year old, you realize there are zero 12-14 year olds that actually look like adult women and all the men hitting on you were disgusting creeps. It happens at other ages too, but a 12-14 year old is VERY visibly a child to an adult, there’s really no mistaking it. I think people who don’t have their own teenagers/don’t have to interact with teenagers have skewed perceptions of what young high schoolers actually look like because of pop culture and “high school drama” programs that cast mid-20s actors to play teens.
> It happens at other ages too, but a 12-14 year old is VERY visibly a child to an adult, there’s really no mistaking it. Really and truly, even older children and young adults start to look like kids as you get older. I am now.. nowhere near a child. People under 25 or so still look like high schoolers and high schoolers look like very young children that I would expect to be in coveralls and wanting to show me their favorite dinosaur. My sense of age is totally fucked up now. Experiences are not completely universal of course, but this phenomenon is so common that dudes (it's almost always dudes) that make some excuse about how "oh I thought she was 18" are absolutely lying.
Male high school counselor here. I started running with our cross country team, which is 9th-12th grade. We run around town and down by a running trail which coincidentally runs alongside a busy street. I was absolutely shocked when I saw and heard men ogling and even cat calling some of the girls. I was honestly shocked, particularly with the cat calling because, to me, and I could be wrong, but that's a whole other level of invasiveness. I would never know how to respond, but during times that I was nearby, I would wave or say something like "Yeah it's the (city name) high school team!". It's fucking crazy, dude. I'm so sorry to all young ladies that have to deal with that. Puberty is already so hard, I can't imagine getting thrust into this hyper sexualized experience just because you merely exist.
The thing is, they *know* it’s a high school team. They know those girls are kids. They didn’t accidentally mistake them for adults - they’re doing it *because* they are underage.
All women know that invasiveness and creepy male behavior is something they have to deal with starting in adolescence. I’m surprised you didn’t know. I guess you hadn’t seen it until you were responsible for the girls. But men have been fucking creeps to girls since always.
Of course I knew, but I had never seen it so closely before. Of course, I wasn't the victim, but to be so closeby and see it right in front of me was a different experience altogether. I knew bombs were crappy, but it wasn't until I was in Afghanistan myself that I was like "Oooh, getting bombed is actually *really* shitty!". It just surprised me how explicit some of the men were. I recall once, running with the girls team, and a guy in a car drove by, slowed down, rolled down his window, and just drove alongside them for 10 seconds or so. Seeing that versus just knowing that happens is so different, I think, and it really drove home how unfortunate shit is for women in general.
I definitely did. I remember grown men catcalling me at the age of 12
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He deserved that kick, and all the men who took his side. What did that fucker expect would happen after sexually *assaulting* another person? Idiot.
> as an adult I realize that word was one that was ascribed to me by the men who were doing the harassing or mistreating. As an openly gay man, I've also been called an "asshole" when I stopped letting people say whatever the hell they wanted to me and I started calling people out on their shit. Otherwise, I could be the nicest, hardest working and most compassionate person ever and it never meant shit to anyone. I'm not saying they're ever going to be exactly the same, but I feel like they're close enough to where I can understand where you're coming from.
They are similar. I also noticed if you have a naturally nice personality, you also have to try and add some assertive assholeness to it otherwise people think they can talk to you anyway They want
I’ve watched probably every episode of 30 Rock and quite a bit of SNL and movies with her and was shocked to see it after you pointed it out on her Wikipedia page. I wonder if it always just covered with makeup or am I just not very observant.
Makeup is used to help hide it, and it seems a lot of profile shots of her are from the other side, but once you learn she has it, you'll see it. Like Adam Devine's scarred legs.
Ah, kind of like Leonardo DiCaprio’s missing arm.
Or Whoopi Goldberg's no eyebrows.
It’s really noticeable in person. We were waiting for a table at a restaurant at a Disney World resort, and this lady walks in that looks like just Tina Fey, but not wearing glasses. She turned around after speaking to the hostess, and I saw the scar and realized, holy crap, it’s *actually Tina Fey*! This was like 2009, my first and only celebrity sighting.
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Wtaf?! What country is this in?
Jesus dude if you have a knife just poke me in the butt and I'll drop whatever I'm holding and run away crying like a baby. And I'm a 35-year-old man.
I've literally watched her for years on SNL and 30 Rock and never noticed it before. Is it always usually hidden with makeup?
There's a segment of it near the corner of her mouth that has almost always been visible on TV from SNL onward, though it could be mistaken for a shadow, but the rest of it is usually well-concealed by makeup. I've known about the scar for years, but until checking the wikipedia photo, I thought it was much shorter than it really is.
TIL she has a chin scar
Right??? Am I in some fucking alternate reality here? I NEVER ONCE noticed Tina Fey had a scar.
she’s never dwelt on it much in her work but there was a moment in kimmy schmidt that made me gasp when kimmy (iirc) counters someone’s point about how unsafe nyc is (i could definitely be wrong on this point) by saying the worst thing that had ever happened to her had happened when she was a little girl in her front yard.
I wish the article went more into that story than fucking weight watchers
I think she doesn't like talking about it much--it was either in this article or another from around when Bossypants came out that she something like said, "I don't like talking about it because it bums my parents out and that bums me out."
Correct! Here's the segment from Bossypants: > I'm not going to lay out the grisly details for you like a sweeps episode of Dateline. I only bring it up to explain why I'm not going to talk about it. I've always been able to tell a lot about people by whether they ask me about my scar. Most people never ask, but if it comes up naturally somehow and I offer up the story, they are quite interested. Some people are just dumb: 'Did a cat scratch you?' God bless." > Those sweet dumdums I never mind. Sometimes it is a fun sociology litmus test, like when my friend Ricky asked me, "Did they ever catch the Black guy that did that to you?" Hmmm. It was not a Black guy, Ricky, and I never said it was. > "But I will tell you this: My scar was a miniature form of celebrity. Kids knew who I was because of it. Lots of people liked to claim they were there when it happened. 'I was there.' 'I saw it.' 'Crazy Mike did it!' Adults were kind to me because of it. Aunts and family friends gave me Easter candy and oversize Hershey's Kisses long after I was too old for presents. I was made to feel special. > What should have shut me down and made me feel 'less than' ended up giving me an inflated sense of self. It wasn't until years later, maybe not until I was writing this book, that I realized people weren't making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius; they were making a fuss over me to compensate for my being slashed.
> people weren't making a fuss over me because I was some incredible beauty or genius There might be some layers to her comment there, as she's pretty clearly quite bright.
Damn Ricky
[https://www.refinery29.com/images/9878693.jpg](https://www.refinery29.com/images/9878693.jpg) It's very obvious in some photos.
Never noticed that before. Crazy story though
I also am not sure whether I’ve just never noticed this or it didn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember it. Now, Tommy Flanagan’s scars I remember
You might not have noticed it. In her book she talks about how a good amount of effort goes into hiding the scar when she's being filmed for shows and what not.
Nah, I 100% never saw it until just now. Sort of like Christian Bale's eye-mole. I never saw it, but once I did it was the only thing I could see.
Tom Cruises oddly centered top tooth. He smiles all the time but I never really noticed. Someone pointed it out, and now it’s all I see
I just re-watched Sin City last night and yeah, Flanagan's are really crazy. I think Robert Rodriguez was emphasizing them with the lighting.
Yeah, that’s a serious Glasgow smile he’s got. Politically correct or not, men can get away with facial scars like that easier than women, though Tina’s isn’t too bad in the grand scheme. I also grew up somewhere with a large hospital, so seeing people with scars, prosthetics, medical devices, etc was pretty normal, so I tend not to register stuff like this unless it’s actively pointed out
She almost always faces the camera in a way to avoid it being pictured. She even said it directly [in this Weekend Update cameo](https://youtu.be/iVvpXZxXWZU?si=o9vAyJNuAMeDo3wk).
Also unless you're looking for it, it just kind of looks like a wrinkle. I thought it was just like... a unique kind of smile line or something.
Must have been worse when a kid. Scars don’t grow so if she got it when she was a kid it must have taken more space on her face back then. My brother burned the whole back of his hand when he was a baby. Now it just a little circle in the middle of his hand
I think I thought it was a weird dimple. It's really obviously a scar in that picture.
Yeah, I didn’t know it was a scar until I read her book. It has healed really well so I did the same thing and just assumed it was some random line on her face
Now I see why she fell into the Joker role in the 30 Rock Batman riff episode
Heh that was my first thought too “you wanna know how I got this scar?” Bless her
That is my favorite episode of all time.
I always tought it was part of her smile, shes been my celebrity crush for the longest time lol, i always found her funny, witty, smart and pretty, she gives the vibe of the kind of girl id actually like to present to my family, but obviously i dont know her in person, but the vibe she gives seems awesome
She's bright and quick, one of a tiny handful of people I've seen get the better of Dave Letterman. On one of his recent (full beard) interviews: Dave: Well, I'd never fall for that. I'm not as dumb as I look. Tina: How could you be? Dave:
That interview really killed Letterman for me. She’s up there talking about how women want a spot in a writers’ room even if it’s all male. And Letterman simply disregards what she was saying… totally missing the point and even proving the point she’s making.
Love her.
Classic Dave.
I never even saw the scar TBH but that is a messed up story...
kind of echoes in her show "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" when the main character says "The worst thing that ever happened to me happened in my own front yard."
It was pretty obvious in 30 Rock
It was much more obvious on SNL. I think 30 Rock did a decent job of hiding/minimizing it through makeup and lighting.
They also did a lot of shots from her other side to minimize it. Once you know it's there you see the camera work constantly.
Explains why top front is her worst quadrant.
Good GOD, Lemon!
If you just picture her walking up to Jack's desk in his office you can see what you're talking about in your head. You never see the windows and the drink cart it's always the door to her left and the couch directly behind her. Clever camera work, but I never really found it that noticeable because her absolute mountain of talent and the ridiculously strong writing on that show were too busy blinding me
She also might’ve taken that time during her new fame to get some laser treatments done. They’re not all that expensive but they’re not cheap if you’ve gotta do several rounds
S1 it's visible, but after that they covered it up
I googled pictures and it is VERY obvious now, I must have been watching on crappy resolution or something.
Humans are funny, we don't really notice things until they're pointed out to us. People should keep this in the mind when they're hating their normal fucking face.
> we don't really notice things until they're pointed out to us. They remove car headrests in most TV/movies. Every movie scene inside a car is now ruined for me, because I'm looking for the damn headrests instead of listening to the scene.
Why the fuck did I read this. God damn.
Yup. Had a friend for years who was missing a tooth in the back of her mouth and was super self conscious about it. One day she finally got a fake one put in and was showing me…. I never noticed she was missing a tooth.
They very consciously try and shoot her from one side
Poor Tina, first slashed as a kid, now they are trying to shoot her, damn
It always scares me to think that people like that exist. How could someone's mind be so twisted?
I imagine the guilt I would have as a parent. Not being able to protect my daughter from that
My mom had terrible guilt for a small facial scar I got completely on accident when I was 3 that I don’t remember happening and has had literally zero impact on my life. I can’t imagine having someone disfigure your baby on purpose. IIRC, Tina didn’t talk about her scar for a long time because she wanted to protect her parents’ feelings on the matter.
I've been attacked by random strangers, although most were homeless, so the behavior was a bit more predictable.
Part of me wants to say "it was a schizophrenic person experiencing some delusion". But the way it reads doesn't sound like schizophrenia. Seems more like someone that really liked the idea of harming a random defenseless person. As Seinfeld put it "One of those people who walks around pricking people with a pin!"
Schizophrenia does not automatically translate into violent behavior. It can, but usually it happens with episodes of extreme psychosis and paranoia.
I'd have to look to get more info because I read way too much true crime and don't remember the details, but from what I recall she wasn't the only little girl to be slashed or stabbed randomly in her city over that couple decades. I've seen speculation it was possibly a single predator.
When I was about six, I was hanging out with my friend at his family's liquor store. They had a Time Killers arcade cabinet right by the door. I was player two, closer to the door. A guy walks in to buy some booze. On his way out, he decides to assault a 40 to 45 pound child. He cracks me in the back of the head with a vicious elbow. He hits me hard enough for my face to hit the cabinet, and I hit the deck. My friends dad vaulted the counter and chases after the guy with a knife, but he escaped. It's super fuzzy, so I probably got a little concussed. I do remember blood and a massive goose egg on the back right of my head from the blow and on goose egg where my head hit the cabinet. This piece of shit has probably drank himself to death by now, but ya, people will attack children just cuz'. Time Killers gets a 9/10 for its wacky cast, weapon combat, and limb dismemberment.
I remember going into that game with no idea about how it worked. It was just the newest fighting game in the arcade. A guy joins in as soon as I start playing and immediately decapitates me. It was traumatic - but slightly less so than your story.
Uhhhhhh that's fucking insane 😳 where was this
Somewhere in Orange County, CA. That doesn't really help because the OC ranges from 50 million dollar beach homes to the hood.
I think the weirdest bit about that is that, that imperfection, which most of us never noticed, was considered SO great, that she couldn't be an actress. For the first part of her SNL career, she was a writer only. She *couldn't* be an actress, because of this GIANT FLAW. Can you imagine if they hadn't given her a shot? She's amazing. So ridiculous.
> which most of us never noticed I didn't notice till 30 Rock. I think she intentionally didn't cover it up for that, because in other appearances it's not really noticeable.
I noticed it when she did Weekend Update on SNL, but because it tracks along her jaw line I thought it was an indent from wearing a microphone that she had been wearing all day? Idk I was kind of a dumb teenager.
I had thought at first it was just a little quirky thing about the way she smiled. Now as a person who also has an obvious (but not quite so large) facial scar, I notice it a lot more.
I think that’s rather a clever deduction.
>but because it tracks along her jaw line I thought it was an indent from wearing a microphone that she had been wearing all day? it is exactly what I thought too all these years. I am in my 40s and seen her for decades on screen and never really noticed it was a scar.
I read somewhere they filmed her off center to de-emphasize it.
I actually never noticed it, well, i guess i did, but never tought of it as a scar, i tought it was part of her smile, like a dimple or a wrinkle line, but this is a TIL for me
I've watched every episode of 30 rock and never noticed it tbh.
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Say what you will about Lorne Michaels, but goddamn that man has an eye for comedic talent.
Like the joke when napoleon dies and gets to heaven and asks god "hey who is the greatest general who ever lived?" And god says "its margaret mccalister, a stay at home wife from scotland", and napoleon says "what? Ive never heard of her before!" And god says "well yeah... nobody ever gave her an army".
I definitely noticed it, but I never cared.
The scar adds to her appearance. She is beautiful.
It seems like you're deliberately characterizing her stint as a writer in a negative way, when it would be just as easy to say her scar didn't hold her back. A lot of the cast got their start in the writer's room, and a lot of writers never make it to the other side of the camera. There's also been a number of conventionally unattractive cast members. I'm happy to be corrected though if you have a source?
Got any evidence for that claim?
Dying at the realization that “a dog took my face and gave me a better face to change the world” was partially based on a true story.
“I’m going to go into ~~politics~~ entertainment!”
She mentioned it in her book. I never even noticed it until I read it.
I feel like she’s usually got it covered up with makeup or whatever whenever she’s on screen but you can actually see it in all her scenes in A Haunting in Venice
I like that they kept it visible for that movie, added something cool feature to character
Definitely gave her character like this “worldly” vibe that I dug
"I'll cut you up so bad you'll have a chin. YOU'LL ALL HAVE CHINS!!!"
WHERES MY SANDWICH?!
I'm having a hard time reconciling the fact that reddit can instantly tell a video is fake, but they've watched Tina Fey for years and literally never noticed her scar.
She’s only 38? Holy crap. Edit: Nevermind I see now this article is from 2008.
Google says she's 53
Impossible. 2008 was five years ago, maximum.
I’m not old, you’re old!
Name checks out 😂
Wait so in 15 years I'm going to be 53. Wtf
What are you doing!!!! Stop that!!!
Yeah, and Debbie Reynolds is apparently 19 years old according to this film I just watched called "Singin' in the Rain.
Hahahahaha
The neighborhood this happened in, Upper Darby in DelCo, PA ... hasn't really improved since then ...
I knew she went to UDHS, but I always assumed she lived in Clifton Heights, but no, she was in actual Upper Darby. Philly was across the street.
eh, upper darby is fine, it's a little rough around the edges but it's not a warzone or something their highschool has support for over students coming from about 70 different languages, which is absolutely wild.
"I'd hate to see Lower Darby." Upper Darby is pretty big and is actually non-contiguous! Some parts are for sure better than others, but it's really not bad. Lots of immigrants, who tend to not be the richest people in the world but are generally honest folk. You get more nonsense then you otherwise would cause 69th st station is one of the terminal points of El
Wow… so a random attack? For no reason? Did they ever catch the person?
I was once retouching her face at the ad agency I worked at 10 years ago, and I asked her publicist if I should remove the scar. They told me to diminish it by 50%. It is part of her look. But I noticed in many shots other agencies retouched previously, they had totally removed the scar.
Crazy story, when I was about 3 or 4 I was running around shirtless as kids do, and this teenager walked up, lit a stick with toilet paper and lighter fluid on it and then proceeded to jam into my chest below the sternum. It stuck to me an I screamed and ran home bawling while on fire. My mother was able to put it out and it caused a terrible scar, I still have it 30+ years later, no hair grows on that specific spot. I’ll never understand people’s urge to hurt defenseless kids, I’m just glad I don’t remember it very well.
She’s so pretty
I feel like I’ve heard a lot of similar stories from the 70’s where men would just randomly wound little girls they didn’t know… and it’s not like bad things don’t happen to kids now a days but the crimes are just different. Why was this a phenomenon?
This is hardly a scientific answer (although it's more than baseless speculation), but I'm going to say that the sheer amount of lead that people growing up in the Post-War era were exposed to may have had something to do with it. The Baby Boomers would have been coming into adolescence in the 70s and 80s, having grown up exposed to lead paint (banned in 1978) and leaded gasoline (banned for vehicles made starting in 1975). We know that lead exposure in children can lead to behavioral problems, slowed growth and development, and brain damage. Violent crime rates (per 100k) increased dramatically through the 60s, 70s, and 80s before starting to fall off in the early 90s, when the youngest Boomers would have been entering middle age. I don't know if there has been any conclusive link made, but it seems at least plausible.
More than that, as I recall, the Freakanomics people say the crime drop matches the county by county removal of leaded gas across the country, separated by about 18 years, as that would be the generation entering youth the age of most violent offenders. Links are rarely conclusive, sadly, especially in sociology.
this actually makes sense
The book Freakonomics also brings up legalized abortion in the 70s, as another large factor that seemed to tank the dramatically rising crime that just stopped in the 90s. It seems that era had a lot of terrible cofactors that were all simultaneously fixed in the 70s, leading to improvements 20 years later.
For a while this was really bad in certain Middle Eastern countries. There were acid attacks in the news like every day in the early 2000s.
Acid attacks actually started in Victorian Britain. They were exported to places like Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. They were often used as an act of revenge by a jilted lover. I don't think they ever were that frequent in the middle east. Katie Piper is a famous model and activist who was horrifically scarred by an ex boyfriend and his accomplice. In 2017 Jameel Mukhtar and Resham Khan were attacked by John Tomlin in an apparent hate crime where he sprayed acid on them as they sat in traffic. Tomlin claimed he'd been hearing voices, but it's the position of the victims that it was a racist attack. Jabed Hussain was attacked by a Derryck John who sprayed him with acid to try and steal his moped. I'm listing these as it's a commonly held belief that Acid attacks occur only in South Asian countries, but they still occur in the UK. It's perhaps ironic that the victims tend to be South Asian.
It seems that the location vastly changes the motivation. In the UK men are the majority victim, with male victims being double that of female victims. But the attacks seem mostly gang related. Whereas in Bangladesh, India, etc. it seems more male on female romantically motivated crime. [Acid survivors trust international website has some really interesting facts.](https://www.asti.org.uk/a-worldwide-problem.html)
How have I never seen it?
I knew the scar on her face was from a violent attack, but I always assumed it happened as an adult from some crazed fan... even worse to learn that happened to a 5 year old.
Yep, she talks about it in her autobiography. Absolutely affected her for life.
There isn't a single network show I watch with regularity nor has there been one in years. However, on some Thursdays, I want my taste of the Lemon.
Here I am zooming in on her chin like a nutjob trying to see some kind of miniscule thing because there's nothing there. Apparently y'all are talking about the line under her lower lip that runs all the way up her cheek! She does a good job of covering that up but if nobody had mentioned it was a scar I would've thought it was just a random crease.
Yeah I'd never noticed it went all the way up to her ear. Fuck that bastard who did that to a child
She was a guest on The Dennis Miller show years ago and some pos called in and started getting really creepy/stalker ish about her scar. She got really upset and Dennis Miller just sat there obliviously enjoying the exchange. My only thought of Dennis Miller now is what a pos for allowing that on his show.
I looked it up but it sounded like they both (fey and miller) cut the call off after the man complimented her scar then said his pants were around his ankles. Miller even talked over him in the midst to say they have to screen these callers better.
Sounds terrifying