Dispatch from CBS: When Diane Ruggiero attacks

I should start this post with a disclaimer: Diane Ruggiero (pictured above right) and I are friends. Friend-ly? Friends-ish? Not exacty sure what noun to use, but I interviewed her when she had first made the transition from Jersey waitress to TV show creator (of CBS' "That's Life"), and we hit it off well enough that we've kept in touch, even when I wasn't interviewing her for one of the several profiles I've done over the years. (The two best ones are the one from when our first meeting, when she was brand-new to Hollywood, and one from five and a half years later, when she was working on "Veronica Mars" after her initial dreams kind of crashed and burned.)

Or, to put it another way, we know each other well enough that, when I (sitting way back in the cheap seats) asked her a question during the press conference for her new CBS show, "The Ex-List," she asked, "Is that Alan?" and when I confirmed that it was, she waved at me. (That's now two showrunners in two days name-checking me from the stage, and it needs to stop, immediately. I'm getting far too much grief from the peanut gallery.)

I say all this because I like Diane, and therefore recognize that I'm not unbiased when it comes to her. So don't take my word for it when I say her performance during that press conference was one of the funniest of the tour. Take it from more objective critics like Peter Ames Carlin or Robert Philpot. The general consensus seemed to be that even people who weren't fond of the pilot would give the show a second look based on how funny Diane was on stage. After the jump, some of the many highlights.

"The Ex-List" is about a woman (Elizabeth Reaser, aka Ava/Rebecca from "Grey's Anatomy") who is told by a psychic that she must find her soulmate and marry him within the year or else die alone, and that her soulmate is a man with whom she was romantically involved in the past. A critic opened the session with the obvious question of asking what happens if the show gets renewed for a second season.

Diane put a hand to her mouth, made like this had never occurred to her before, and let out a perfectly-timed, "Oh, no."

Later, a critic referred to the subplot in the pilot that featured a lot of "vaginal humor," and without missing a beat, she replied, "I actually let my vagina write half of the script, so it's not my fault."

She discussed how her father is so proud of her he intends to have his whole church group watch the pilot, and when she warned him about the racier material, he then made sure that she was being well-paid and had health insurance, and left her with only one other instruction: "Don't make fun of Italians."

Like many proud Italian-Americans, Diane tends to talk with her hands, and at one point, the gestures became so frenetic that they started to create feedback in the microphone she was using. She tried to keep her hands clamped to the armrest in her chair, and there was a very long pause.

"That's awesome," she noted. "Now I stopped doing that and I have nothing to say. What the hell was I talking about?"

At another point, while trying to discuss the dynamic between Reaser's character and her friends on the show, she shared a Keanu/Sandra Bullock-related game she and her own friends like to play.

"We have a 'Lake House' drinking game in which we watch 'The Lake House' and if you want to make a joke, you have to drink. And we're drunk in, like, the first five minutes, because none of us cannot, like, not make a joke. It's just ridiculous."

Finally, Philadelphia Inquirer critic Jonathan Storm asked her about her transformation from neophyte Meadowlands waitress to the sleek Hollywood veteran who sat before us, and the resulting monologue (interrupted on occasion by Stormy) was so funny and charming that it won over even the real cynics in the room. I don't know how much of it translates out of context, but I'm going to reproduce it in its entirety for you to get a sense of the pure, unfiltered Diane Ruggiero:

Maybe you had to be there, I don't know. Go read the old Star-Ledger profiles if these didn't work for ya.