"You do improv? Like Second City? I saw the funniest thing there a few years ago!" The guy began bouncing around like Papa Smurf on Father's Day. "This little woman played the cello all nice and then all of a sudden she's like, 'Whole lotta love ... reeeeeaaar ... whole lotta love ... reeeeaar.' You know her?"

That cello-playing Led-Zeppelin-screaming babe is Rachel Dratch, and after almost four years on the Second City Mainstage she traded her local legend status for a "featured player" spot in NBC's "Saturday Night Live" cast. The move paid off -- a wicked Calista Flockhart impression and roles as a Dickensian street urchin and the love child of Angelina Jolie and her brother, James Haven, have extended Dratch's reputation beyond Chicago's city limits. And a guest spot on Conan O'Brien in June introduced her cello stylings to the rest of the nation as well.

In "Dratch & Fey," a two-woman sketch show she created with "SNL" head writer Tina Fey, Dratch employs the kind of homemade physical comedy that made you spray milk as a kid, like the suburbanite who pulls her nose up with a Scotch tape sling instead of plastic surgery. In contrast, Dratch's portrayal of a puma-mauling victim who urges a visiting Playboy Bunny to photograph her naked in her hospital bed as a centerfold test shoot is a savvy dissection of female objectification. But it's so funny that audiences gobble it up like a heartworm pill in hamburger.

"Dratch & Fey" got a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal. Did that change the economic profile of your audience?

We saw an increase in the number of people with gray hair and suits who didn't seem to be anybody's friends. That might have been them.

Was "Dratch & Fey" a financial success?

No, we paid to do that. We broke even last summer in Chicago when we did it at Second City, but when we decided to do it in New York this summer, we got scared because everyone was like, "Remember, things that are funny in Chicago aren't funny in New York." Like it's on a different space-time continuum. So we hired a publicist and made a deal with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where we got the theater for free and they kept the door. And then it sold out almost every night.

Did you always want to be an actor?

Acting was a little voice I didn't listen to for a long time. I grew up in Lexington, Mass., and most people in my suburb were professionals, so acting wasn't really something you did. My dad is a radiologist and my mom just retired from her job as director of a nonprofit, but I kept gravitating toward comedy. I majored in drama and psychology at Dartmouth, which wasn't a very arty atmosphere, and after I graduated in 1989 I went to Chicago to try comedy. My plan was that the comedy thing would fail, and when it did I'd go back to Boston to be a therapist. But each year I made just enough progress to keep me in Chicago.

How much progress was enough?

You have to audition to take classes at the Second City training center, and it took two auditions for me to even get to take a class there. After about three years, I felt like I should have a normal job, because everyone I knew in college seemed to be on a path to these stable careers as doctors and lawyers and stuff. I had a lot of conflict over that, so I applied to the Masters of Social Work program at Loyola University-Chicago. I was hired by the Second City touring company just in time, though, so I didn't go.

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