Tina Fey: From Upper Darby To Comedy Icon

Growing up in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, Tina Fey knew by middle school that she wanted to be a comedian. “We’re all comedy fans in my family,” Fey, who says she watched “a lot of TV” as a kid, once explained to The A.V. Club. “My parents mainly wouldn’t let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn’t let us watch The Flintstones if he was home because he said it was a rip-off of The Honeymooners. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old Honeymooners.”

With an early admiration for such icons as Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Norman Lear, she went on to study with Chicago’s Second City improv comedy troupe before eventually becoming the first female head writer for Saturday Night Live. Nine Emmy Awards later, Fey is now a household name both for her writing and acting, but here are 10 things you might not know about the comedian:

She Named '30 Rock’s' Liz Lemon After Herself

Although she’s now known to the world as Tina Fey, the actor was born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey in May 1970. The Pennsylvania native later used her birth name as inspiration for her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon. According to Vogue, she even included an Easter egg by ending a riff with her own name during the NBC comedy’s fifth season. Close friend Amy Poehler also calls Fey by the nickname Betty, which is short for Elizabeth.

She Still Has a Scar From a Childhood Attack

Fey revealed in a 2009 Vanity Fair profile that the thin scar on the left side of her face resulted from a random slashing incident outside her family home in Upper Darby when she was 5 years old. Her husband, Jeff Richmond, explained that she thought a stranger had entered her front yard and marked her face with a pen at the time.

“It’s impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it,” she told the magazine, noting she often shoots scenes from her right side. “I proceeded unaware of it. I was a very confident little kid. It’s really almost like I’m kind of able to forget about it until I was on-camera.”

She Began Studying Comedy in Middle School

While attending Beverly Hills Middle School, Fey chose to do an independent-study project on comedy after finishing all of her regular course material early. The only book she says she could find in the school library was Joe Franklin's Encyclopedia Of Comedians, which only went up until the 1950s, so she focused on comedians such as Joe E. Brown. Around the same time, her eighth-grade teacher reportedly suggested she become a writer.

“I think everyone’s intentions are to become a performer at first. But by the time I was in high school and college, I discovered that I liked writing and that I was probably a little better at it,” she explained to The A.V. Club in 2006. “And then when I went to Chicago, and I got to be an improviser and do Second City, that was the best blending of the two, because I was creating my own material and then performing it.”

She Wrote for Her High School Newspaper

Long before she became Saturday Night Live’s head writer, the Upper Darby High School honor student served as an editor of her school paper, The Acorn, and also wrote a column under the pseudonym “the Colonel” (an acorn pun). Fey explained to The New Yorker in 2003 that the column was about school policy and teachers. “I remember I got busted because I was trying to say that something would ‘go down in the annals of history,’ but it was a double-entendre with ‘anal’ and I didn’t get away with it,” she recalled.

She’s a Musical Theater Nerd

Before going on to study drama at the University of Virginia, the self-described musical theater nerd was a member of her high school’s choir, played the role of Frenchy in their production of Grease, and sang in several Summer Stage productions. She memorized cast albums including everything from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Annie to The Baker’s Wife while growing up, eventually playing the role of Sally Bowles in UVA’s Cabaret production.

“That was a mistake but I tried,” she joked to Vogue in 2018. “Kind of like the way a lot of people love sports but can’t actually play the sport they’re a fan of — that’s always been me with musical theater.” Fey eventually became a 2018 Tony nominee for her Broadway musical, Mean Girls.

She (Partly) Based Mean Girls on Her High School Experiences

When adapting Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 bestselling self-help book for the 2004 classic teen film Mean Girls, Fey drew inspiration from her own experiences at Upper Darby High School. “I revisited high school behaviors of my own — futile, poisonous, bitter behaviors that served no purpose,” she recalled to The New York Times in 2014. “That