Most of our scenes are not that outlined. It's just the emotion that's described, and then the writer goes off to try to figure out how it's expressed. So the outline for this scene is 'Ruth does something inappropriate at the party because she's dealing with her feelings about George's remarriage.'

I chose to have her freak out on Cindy. I thought there was something interesting about that.

I can channel Ruth as easy as pie. She's so closely connected to my mother. She has a tightly wound quality and a lot of unexpressed emotion that comes out randomly. If you asked one of the writers to write a scene and showed it to me, I would know in three lines who wrote it. I know everyone's Ruth.

The idea of Ruth going to the party and bringing the potato salad was Jill Soloway's idea-- and that being a disaster. Sometimes an image or an idea really crystallized an emotional reality and the story grows from that. It was really the potato salad for me in this one.