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Sweeney took her time getting into show business, spending five years in the accounting department at Columbia Pictures before joining the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improvisational troupe. From there she was plucked for the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1990. Look-ing back on that show--a hotbed of battling egos and brutalized workaholics--Sweeney has mixed feelings. "There were great highs," she says. "On the other hand, it was like a military school that you went to for four years, and you didn't know that the world outside was a nice place. I'm just really glad I used to be there." She made up her mind to quit in February of her fourth season, after spending a night in tears at a friend's house because none of her sketches were getting on the air. "It was like an epiphany. A voice said: 'You know, really, if you're that upset you should leave.'"
God Said "Ha!" grew out of improvised monologues that Sweeney performed at an L.A. comedy club on Sunday nights during Mike's illness, a sort of weekly onstage therapy session. She and a writer friend later put together 45 minutes of her material as a demonstration tape to try to land a network sitcom. Instead she decided to fashion it into a full-length stage work, performing it in San Francisco and Los Angeles before moving it to New York City this month.
Sweeney now has a new boyfriend, a rented apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side and a prospective Broadway hit. The success of her stage confessional has taken her aback a little. "I know it doesn't seem like it, but I'm a really private person," she says with a wondering laugh. "This has been kind of embarrassing."