Bridget Everett is 52. She was 48 when HBO took on her show Somebody Somewhere, now in its third and final season. The show, in which she plays the lead character, Sam, loosely depicts Everett’s own life, or at least the one she would have lived if she had stayed in Kansas instead of moving to New York, where she eventually became a downtown alt-cabaret star. If you consider her start getting her equity card around the age of 26, that’s a good two decades to get to the position she is in now, where her show is a Peabody Award winner and she no longer has to wait tables as a fallback. Depending on your perspective, that’s incredibly cool or incredibly nuts.
“Dreams don’t have deadlines.” The first time I saw Everett say that was in 2017, during an interview for the indie film Patti Cake$, in which she plays the alcoholic mother of a bartender (Danielle Macdonald) who aspires to become a rap star. “There’s a quote from LL Cool J,” Everett tells the young interviewer, laughing, “it’s DDHD—Dreams don’t have deadlines—and I live by that and I think everybody should live by it because it doesn’t matter if you’re 15, you’re 23, or you’re collecting retirement checks, just keep going for what makes you feel happy and follow and live your dream.”
Everett herself was in her mid-40s by this point. She was known in Manhattan for her niche ribald cabaret show and she had done a Comedy Central special (Gynecological Wonder, 2015), but as Michael Schulman wrote in a New Yorker profile three years ago, “Everett was too rock and roll for Broadway, too bawdy for concert halls, and too musical for standup comedy.” The year of that supporting role in Patti Cake$ was the year an Amazon pilot, Love You More, which was supposed to be her big break, did not get picked up. Everett thought that was her one and only chance—it would be a couple more years before she would realize that wasn’t true.
“Dreams don’t have deadlines, don’t forget,” Everett said in a recent interview on The Kelly Clarkson Show that did the rounds on social media. She was promoting this last season of Somebody Somewhere but delivered the mantra with the same sheepishness as she did seven years ago. “I’m just borrowing it on permanent loan from LL Cool J,” she added. “It really is a great reminder to not give up on yourself. Because if you love it and if you believe in yourself and you have some kind of skill, you’re going to get there.” Everett admitted she had DDHD embossed on jewelry, artwork, and pillows. In that New Yorker piece from 2021, on the set of the first season of Somebody Somewhere, she wore a hoodie with a lightning bolt, a lightning bolt necklace (which is still present in the final season) and matching tote bag, which were all inspired by the same slogan. “It’s a reminder to fuckin’ seize it, make it count,” Everett said at the time.
LL Cool J, who became famous when he was just a kid—he had his first hit single at 17!—was coming at this idea from kind of the opposite direction to Everett, who got famous in mid-life. I don’t know exactly when he started using DDHD as his own affirmation but it does appear in his 2010 book, LL Cool J’s Platinum 360 Diet and Lifestyle: “The great thing is that these dreams don’t have deadlines. A lot of people get the sense that if they didn't envision a specific career when they were kids it’s too late by the time they’re adults.” The rapper gave his motto a bit more clarity in a red carpet interview this year at the MTV VMAs, describing it as having to do more with achieving longevity after hitting it big early: “You can continue to do this thing at a high level, you don’t have to be successful at one age and then all of a sudden taper off and wallow around in mediocrity.”
The sentiment evinced by this motto is all well and good—although embracing mediocrity four decades after becoming a star in your mid-teens also seems fine—but I can’t help but feel its aspirational quality rub awkwardly against Everett’s own creation. To me, Somebody Somewhere, a show in which a woman in her 40s spends the entire series deepening her relationships with her friends while achieving a better understanding of herself, is a show people love precisely because it isn’t about reaching some clearly defined apex. It is very much a series about the big reverberations of small things, and in its last season, it is particularly touching. Sam realizes that all her friends have paired off and that she is on her own. But even within that discomfort she manages to eke out moments of grace outside of herself, and to eventually find some equanimity (and maybe a pairing of her own). She puts aside her own little vulnerabilities—“Don’t worry about me,” she tells her sibling (Mary Catherine Garrison), before adding, “I mean, worry about me a little”—to support her friends. HBO was clear about spoilers, but I will say the last number Sam performs in Somebody Somewhere was undoubtedly chosen particularly for being about the journey rather than the destination (I’m being cheesy on purpose; the song, which I was admittedly obsessed with 15 years ago, is VERY cheesy).
I prefer this idea, that the dream is just an ongoing kind of daily motor, rather than a target to be placed somewhere in the future—a dream of a life doing what you want to do, regardless of where it ends up. Something tells me Everett feels that way too, regardless of how that lightning bolt has been playing in the press over the years. She said as much in a profile for Glamour earlier this month: “When I was waiting tables, a friend of mine said to me, ‘At what age are you going to just stop trying?’” she recalled. “He wasn’t being mean-spirited, but I was like, ‘Why would I stop trying?’ I love singing.” I thought of that when I finally clocked the luminous lightning bolt in the kitchen of Sam’s house in one of the last episodes of the series, realizing that it had always been glowing behind her, even though I had never really noticed it before.
