How Tina Fey's Chicago love story led to the movie and musical 'Mean Girls'

CHICAGO - Above the door of the Second City training center resides wisdom from a noted alumna named Tina Fey. "There are no mistakes," the stenciled quotation reads, "only possibilities."

For Fey, whose formidable career exploded at the Chicago comedy theater in the mid-1990s, that famously fearless approach to show business has led her from Second City to "Saturday Night Live!" writer and then star actor, to the movie "Mean Girls" and a hit NBC TV show called "30 Rock" to another hit NBC TV show called "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," to many more movies and cameos and animation voiceovers and American Express ads and Allstate commercials and a best-selling autobiography called "Bossypants" and the Broadway musical version of "Mean Girls," and well, far too many creative projects for any one human to keep track.

The flood is, of course, ongoing and includes a new fall 2020 project for NBC that, on this very afternoon in New York, is being devised in the offices that Fey and her husband, Jeff Richmond, call their creative home.

The Midtown office suite of Tina Fey, Multimedia Inc., is filled with people. It is