I remember when Jane Lynch was Mrs. Brady

When Jane Lynch started talking about her theater experiences at Outfest last weekend, a little light bulb went off in my head: “OMG! I saw her perform in The Real Live Brady Bunch!”

It was way back in the summer of 1992 and I was a young reporter working for the Los Angeles Times. Me and one of the paper’s new interns Jodi Wilgoren (she’s now Jodi Rudoren and an editor at the New York Times) headed to Westwood to see this show everyone was raving about.

The show was an episode of The Brady Bunch (the one when Greg got caught smoking) with exactly the same lines but done as a parody. I remember laughing so hard I cried. It truly was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen and one of the reasons was the lady who played Carol Brady: Jane Lynch!

Jane talked about the show during an event at the DGA last Saturday: “It was an amazing thing where we did actual episodes of The Brady Bunch on stage and people lined up around the block. It was so much fun. Our tongue was firmly planted in our cheeks. But we also shared this deep, dirty secret with everybody in our audience that the show really comforted us. It was this family that worked. … It was also extremely savvy and of the era. We wore funky 70s clothes and we of course put sexual tension between the siblings so that it was incestuous.”

So how did it all come to be?

Jane and a few Second City [the famed theater troop in Chicago] pals were given Wednesday nights to try and bring some money in and decided to do episodes of The Brady Bunch. The script writing consisted of watching episodes on VHS, pausing, typing.

But as the show grew in popularity, there was some potential trouble concerning copyright.

“We got a cease and desist letter from the man himself [Brady Bunch creator] Sherwood Schwartz who decided to check out the show himself,” Jane recalled. “He made an unannounced visit  to the theater and we were doing the Johnny Bravo episode. He walked into the theater with as couple of people – his lawyers – someone said, ‘Sherwood Schwartz is here!’ and everyone turned around and started screaming and bowing to him and he started crying. We brought him up on stage at curtain call and everyone was chanting ‘Sherwood! Sherwood!” And he said, ‘You kids can do this show for the rest of your lives!”

The little lovefest did not have a happy ending, however: “He went off to make The Brady Bunch movies after that and he didn’t cast any of us! We didn’t make a penny off of it. I remember I auditioned for it to play a mother at the airport.”

She didn’t get the role.

Well, the very best was yet to come.