The actor Jane Lynch (sixty-two, ostrich-tall, short platinum hair in meringue-like peaks) met up with a friend, the podcast host George Hahn (fifty-two, clean-shaven, smart peacoat), at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street the other day.
“I love your hair!” Lynch exclaimed. “Who did it for you?”
Hahn ran his fingers through his boingy coif. “Oh, this bar-ber I went to,” he said, drawing out the word. He offered Lynch his arm, and they strolled into Central Park. “I wanted to sit in a barber’s chair, you know?” he continued. “The sound of clippers! The dude chitchat! I love the smell of Barbicide and Pinaud. It makes me want to wear Sansabelt pants.”
“The training they have to have to become a barber?” Lynch said. “They’re not fucking around.”
“The best barbers have really been under the wing of masters,” Hahn said. “The master and apprentice is a relationship that we’re really losing.”
“Do you know Tom Nichols?” Lynch asked. “He wrote a book called ‘The Death of Expertise,’ about how everybody’s, like, opining about things they don’t know about.”
“Like me, on MSNBC,” Hahn said, with a little snort. (He is a regular guest on the network.)
“No! You’re a generalist,” she said. “But you are basically smart.”
Lynch lives with her wife, Jennifer Cheyne, in the California wine-country hamlet of Montecito. “My neighbors are Meghan and Prince Harry,” she said. “I haven’t actually seen them. I have seen Rob Lowe around, though. He’s a man of the people.” Hahn has lived in Manhattan for twenty years, except for a sojourn in his home town of Cleveland. “It was a clarifying experiment,” he said. “I had become one of those hackneyed old queens who was getting bitter about how the city was changing. After about a year, I missed it.”
Lynch and Hahn met and began what Lynch calls “a beautiful love story” two years ago, after she came across Hahn’s grooming tips on Twitter. “Back then, I was on there big time,” she said.
Hahn fanned out his free hand. “Jane: The Twitter Years!” he said. “That’s the memoir chapter.”
“George would shave every morning, live on Twitter,” Lynch said. “And he uses a real razor as opposed to a plastic one.”
“Actually, we met on Grindr,” Hahn joked.
“I should have been a gay man,” Lynch said.
“You kind of are!” Hahn said.
“And you’re kind of a gay woman,” Lynch said.
Talk turned to acting work—and to the odd jobs the two did to support themselves early on. Lynch is currently starring in the Starz reboot of “Party Down,” which ran for two seasons, beginning in 2009. The show follows a ragtag team of Hollywood cater waiters who serve tuna tartlets to rich people while wearing pink bow ties and dreaming about their big breaks. Lynch plays Constance Carmel, a has-been B-movie actor who lucks into marrying a wealthy movie producer, who dies before signing a prenup. In the reboot, Constance, now a well-to-do widow, owns the catering company.
“It was a workplace comedy that kind of got lost at the time,” Lynch said. “But we didn’t jump the shark. It was just the same thing every week. Same shit, different party.”
“I did some time as the cater waiter,” Hahn said.
“I was a terrible server,” Lynch said. “I did some temp work in Chicago, where I answered phones, and I was pretty good at the switchboard.”
Hahn mimed picking up a phone and affected a transatlantic accent: “Applewhite, Bibberman, Widdicombe, and Black! ”
“What’s that from?” Lynch asked.
“ ‘Auntie Mame,’ ” Hahn said. “Now, you would be an amazing Mame.”
“Thank you,” Lynch said. “I looked into doing it, and then I read the play, and it does go all over the place.”
“That guy who wrote ‘Mame’ was a servant,” Hahn said. “Some of it is autobiographical. He did have an eccentric aunt who lived in the Village.”
“How do you know this?” Lynch asked.
“I’m a nerd, and I’m gay,” Hahn said.
As the duo walked on, Lynch told Hahn that her wife had recently rescued a lame horse named Athena.
“I follow so many animals on Instagram,” Hahn said. “I learned horses love to play with each other.”
“Well, our horse is horny,” Lynch said. “She’s, like, screaming out to the boys in the field. She has to eat these calming cookies.”
Hahn patted Lynch’s arm. “I should try those calming cookies,” he said. ♦
