A lot of folks wrote in reply to my ponderings on Saturday Night Live performers with little or no hair. Lots of people mentioned David Koechner and Chris Elliott, neither of whom lasted long there, and Paul Shaffer. Shaffer was hired as a musician and angled his way into Featured Player status for a while. No one mentioned any other cast members so I guess there haven't been any. A few guest hosts were noted like Charles Barkley, Bruce Willis and Patrick Stewart…all big-enough stars to trump anyone's concerns about the show looking too old or too bald or something.
Jason Czeskleba wrote…
Regarding the SNL cast and baldness, I recall that in Jay Mohr's book he tells an anecdote about discovering (during a pickup basketball game) that one of his castmates was "completely bald" and wore a toupee. He doesn't say who it was, but he says that it's someone who had been in the cast "a long time." He says that person kept his baldness a secret (and still does), but that some of the writers and cast were aware of it. He also mentions that Chris Elliott wore a hairpiece and that this was commonly known. Assuming Michaels was aware of both these things (which seems likely) then his aversion to baldness must not be as extreme as you've heard.
I think I've spent just about enough space on this matter. Jay Mohr's book, which I wrote about here, may be one of the things that caused me to remember what that other cast member said about the obsession with hair on Saturday Night Live. Mohr was "candid" in a way I'm not sure I'd want one of my co-workers to be about a shared employment experience. (He didn't make it too difficult to figure out who the secretly-bald cast member was.) I respect the heck out of Lorne Michaels for his accomplishments but I suspect that once he's gone, we're going to hear a lot from people who couldn't get on that show — or could and didn't profit much from the experience — and harbor some anger towards him. The thing about hair may be the least of it.
In other news: I've received a lot of info on the orchestra situation for that Sound of Music telecast and I'll be getting it up here in a day or three. And I'm even happier than I was yesterday about the donations rolling in for Bob Kahan. Some questionable donations notwithstanding, he's over five and closing in on six thousand smackers. I Facebook-chatted with Bob yesterday and told him not to get cocky; that the money wasn't for him. It was for his cats. I notice the volume has increased since he took down the photo of himself and put up one of his pets. Cats, as you may have noticed, are very big on the Internet.