Let's Get Intense

I’ve officially decided that Craig Uhlir is a fucking dickhead.

Not that he means to be, but he is. There are ways he could go about everything that would give him and everyone around him such less hard of a time. He naturally chooses the most abrasive way to phrase things and then backtracks to what he actually means to say. He reacts passionately, which is his strength and also what makes him an insensitive asshole that’s easy to provoke.

Chris and Javier were talking about the Cook County show the previous night and Chris talked about how he thought the opening Harold team, Uncle Magic, was “terrible.” Craig (who Eric later told me is in charge of the Harold Commission and does the scheduling) inquired as to why and Chris talked about people who jumped into scenes they didn’t need to and how one guy in particular inserted himself into every scene and some other mechanics that he didn’t like. Craig asked what he liked about Cook County that was different and Chris mentioned the flip side of those choices, that people weren’t afraid to jump in and force the scene in another direction.

“That’s interesting to me that you say that,” he said, “because those Harold teams are guys that have worked hard to earn their time and have struggled for years and honestly you’d better fucking bring it tomorrow because you’re talking smack like that I can’t wait to see you fail hard in front of everybody tomorrow because you’re just being a fucking hypocrite with what you’re saying and that just makes me fucking angry.”

This, of course, started off a bunch of people jumping up to defend Chris and his statements and Craig continuing to belittle everybody for their opinions or justifications. At one point, he silenced Javier, saying, “I’m done hearing from you.” He then realized in the moment how much of an asshole he was being so he backpedaled a little bit and kind of apologized (but not really and not saying he was sorry, just self-deprecated for a sentence) but underhandedly implied that he still thought we were hypocrites. Things then cooled for a second and he was about to go into another thing so let him know my real opinion.

“Honestly, it’s a little hard because I came here expecting great Harolds and have encountered only good ones.” I was being generous. “When I found out that most of these teams have only been improvising for a few years, and even less years together as a team, I had to adjust my expectations because I expected to see the best Harolds the world had to offer. Also, of course, we’ve been working at this for five weeks so we easily notice the missteps because it’s all fresh in our minds and we’re looking at it extra-critically. Plus it’s improv so there’s a fair amount of failure involved.”

I was attempting the yes-and-fuck-you thing I like to do on stage when someone’s being a dickhead. I soothe their nerves, make them comfortable and explain very nicely not only why they were being a dickhead but why they have no leg to stand on with this behavior. His actions really poisoned the well of the entire class for the day. Sure, he had a point in that these people work hard for what they are given and we’re harsher sometimes than we should be. However, the fact that they put work and time in doesn’t automatically make their improv better and the fact that I’m supposed to give them the benefit of the doubt because they live in the hardest improv market to break into is patently ridiculous.

I’ve had the luxury in the past five weeks of seeing some of the Harold teams perform more than once. While generally each group performed better the second time I saw them, I felt dead-on in calling out teams when I did so. Fiction for the Poor is light years ahead of any other Harold team out there based on the show I saw. They’re the only Harold team I’ve seen that does a great Harold, which more than partially led me to my conclusion that the form needs to evolve. If iO doesn’t care enough to make each Harold team at least as good as The Reckoning (which I was never blown away by but they do a good Harold) then nobody should get offended when I call iO teams out on being simply average.

Still, I continued to hold to the adjustment I made in my mind on the first day. Craig is a football coach, not an improv teacher. With this mind adjustment I was able to glean the lesson he slipped into his tirade. Even if he didn’t know it, he was telling us that we need to understand the importance of supporting choices. When Cook County does a move that’s uncalled for, that has the potential to “fuck up” a scene, they bear hug that weird choice and take it to the sky. In most Harold shows, weird or risky choices are often left out to dry by the rest of the team and make the person who made the choice look like an idiot and develop a complex; usually because people were judging the scene or show they were in and sold out the other performers.

Again, though, as an educator you have to keep a lid on your outbursts to make sure they don’t come from a place of spite. Chris hit a nerve because he was harshly criticizing Craig’s work to his face, but it’s not the instructor’s job to fly off the handle and yell at a student because of what he thinks. Quite the opposite, in fact. As he said multiple times throughout the day as he was yelling at us in the middle of exercises, “You didn’t pay Charna $1,100 to do bullshit.”

The funny thing about all this, from my perspective, is that I’m not really a fan of Cook County at all. I get what they do and I see that they have fun and that fun is infectious, but I stopped liking aggressive “DudeProv” a long time ago. Sure, it’s fun to do and it’s awesome for what it is. So are well-written teen comedies like Can’t Hardly Wait. I’m more interested in pulling off art, though. That’s not going to be done by being a hooting dickhole, on stage or off.

Despite all of this, class was appropriately challenging today. The well being poisoned, we were afraid to make a lot of moves and Craig yelled at us for being afraid and “putting more rules on it.” The moments where we were freer and played with more abandon were good scenes, but I had to keep pushing down that desire to just walk out the door and say fuck it to the rest of today and tomorrow. I was angry, frustrated and too tired to deal with the heavy amount of fuckery involved.

His negative reinforcement worked, though. I went into baseball player mode, the mode where I get tattooed to the wall for something and then overcompensate to be the best on the team at that thing and therefore showing the coach how much of a dick he was being for being so harsh with me, effectively giving coach what he wanted. In this case, it was looking people in the eyes. My head was on a swivel. I ceased to care about sight lines. I just kept floating from eyes to eyes. It worked magic for me and my brain hurt, for sure. I just wish I hadn’t made the discovery as a way of giving Craig the best example of what he wanted me to do as a “fuck you” gesture. I’d have preferred to discover it in a more nurturing atmosphere.

We decide what form we’re doing for the show tomorrow during class. At this point, we’ve worked so hard and come so far and learned so many interesting forms that I just want to do a montage and play. Maybe an opening, perhaps the Invocation, then just scenes. The show is about playing and having fun. We may as well not overcomplicate it.

I decided to skip Felt and went back to Eric’s to center myself and relax until TJ and Dave. I took a shower and talked with Eric for a little bit about Craig’s outburst and he gave me a good perspective on the whole thing. With another hour to kill I reclined on the couch and surfed around on Facebook and came across a blog post from Chris Gethard that Stephen put in our class group. It was a long-winded answer to the question of fear in improv and what it means to him. I was particularly inspired by a quote that seemed to echo some of Jet’s sentiments on performing with the idea of death around the corner waiting:

“Fear is not to be avoided. It is to be followed. Fear is like the light on the end of Rudolph’s nose - it’s the beacon we follow into a foggy and uncertain place, where we can’t see more than three feet around us, where we know we might spiral out of control and crash at any second, but where we are armed with the knowledge that if we can somehow navigate those storm clouds successfully when we are piloting blind into such a situation, we might just get the job done and we might just do something legendary.”

Around 9:45 I decided to walk down to iO and met up with Kevin and Matt. Alice walked up right afterward and we were able to get Kevin’s favorite seat again. This was the first time I actually got to see TJ and Dave on their own and the theatrics of it hit me yet again. The playing out of the Ike Reilly song, the little talk they have on stage into each other’s ears, TJ putting his hands over his eyes to take in every single member of the audience. It’s the perfect setting of mood.

The show was good as always. TJ was an uncle taking his nephew to go see Body Worlds and couldn’t keep his lunch down because of the grotesqueness. From there they went to get ice cream and ran into a bickering couple who worked in the shop. It was fun and free and I knew again the things I was interested in doing with this art form. I had to wonder, though, if it was something that could be accomplished with a larger team. TJ and Dave don’t have anybody to jump into or edit their scenes so they play without fear of getting to the point. Even when Tracy Letts was in the equation they were able to go nice and slow. If I was to put a 10-person team together like this, it would have to be judiciously cast and there would have to be a large amount of rehearsing that would have to be done.

“It is our understanding that some of you will not be here next week,” Dave said at the closing of the show. “Thank you for being here now.”

I talked a bit outside with Matt Higbee afterward about the pacing of the show and the intensive in general. He said he’d come for the intensive originally as well and ended up staying. That story was starting to become more and more common with other students. At this point I count about 10 people who opted to stay. At least five of them I know for a fact had planned on leaving at the intensive’s end. It gave my already weary minds a lot to think about as I walked back to Eric’s and crashed out immediately.

“This class takes scene work to the next level by addressing the problems that plague most improvisers. With an acute focus on point of view as well as getting out of your head, this intensive will get you to the next level improvisationally.”

The things you get to read in an improv theater as you take a piss.

I contemplated the image of a lost Level 1 student dumping 100 bucks into that workshop as I got settled in to start the last day of the fourth week. It’s weird having come this far and still a week and a half away from home. I think back to 4th of July playing dominos on Oddo’s bass case in my front yard and that night in Austin with Hubbell talking out my fear of this great unknown adventure that awaited me. A couple of times over the past few weeks Dave related his view on death in the middle of scenes, comparing it to going on a vacation. “When the moment comes you never want to leave because it’s the unknown, but once you’re there you’re having a blast. I’ve never been on a holiday I didn’t have a great time on, so I imagine death to be the same way.”

Today was a series of back-to-back Harolds. I was in two of them. The second time I had a lot more fun, but I didn’t feel the greatest about my scene work. Jeff really liked the scenes, though, and commended me on having the attitude of trying something risky or different when I executed a poorly-conceived tap out that failed spectacularly. I’m sure he wasn’t patronizing me, that’s not his style (if he was I’d be pissed because that’s not what I’m here for), but it’s not the kind of work I want to do yet.

In general, it was a relaxing final day of Level 4. After the lunch break I just committed to having fun and being myself and being natural. I trust everyone in my section implicitly. Ken, Deborah, Janie, Dan, Dave, Rob, Charis, Stephen, Alice, Chris, Javier, Kevin, Matt and I have formed the bond of common experience and we now exist with the luxury to relax into each other’s personalities and blend effortlessly.

As it turns out, Jeff wrote a book called Guru that chronicled the last two years of Del’s life. Jeff was assigned by Charna to help Del run errands since by that time he had been quite impaired by his health issues and rampant insanity. I’d vaguely heard of the book but Jeff brought some to sell if we wanted a copy. Intrigued (and feeling a little bad about my initial negative opinion of him), I decided to pick one up. He signed it, “To Chris, So great having you in class. Keep on improvising. It’ll make you rich! Jeff Griggs” I handed him a 20 and that was it.

After class, backpacks and book in tow, we all went out as a full group for the first time ever. We went across the street to Vines for some food and beer and discussed everything under the sun. We played a few hilarious rounds of “Fuck/Marry/Kill” and “Never Have I Ever” and traded crazy life experience stories. Then, as the sun set, we walked down to Trader Todd’s for karaoke. In the window of a book store a block down from iO I saw gleaming copies of Guru in the window identical to mine with a big sign that said “Del Close: Guru $6.” Motherfu…oh well, it was still cool to get the book directly from the author and even cooler that he taught me for a week and that I got it signed. Rob wasn’t particularly happy, though. “That fucking bastard.”

We got to the karaoke place, a tropical themed bar that smelled like coconut and Jimmy Buffet rejects. The MC of karaoke looked like Michael Domangue’s crazy uncle with huge crazy hair and a giant Lincoln beard. We ended up closing that place down in style. Janie had this huge 18-dollar margarita that she kept refilling that we were all sipping on and I was hammering back pina coladas and beer. I sang “Say It Ain’t So,” “Sweet Caroline,” and a duet with a stranger on Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently.” The whole time Del’s face sat impishly grinning on the cover of Jeff’s book in the center of our table and I imagined him the spiritual guide on this bonding experience, blessing it like he did in his SNL days as House Metaphysician or his times with the Merry Pranksters or those crazy early weird days with The Compass Players, a whole life of creating and sculpting the structures of our art form ahead of him. We weren’t the first group of wayward improvisers being shepherded by him, we won’t be the last, but we exist like those before in a state of limitless potential energy. Somewhere out there, in the future, we exist at the height of our improvisational ability. We 14 may never be in the same room again after next Thursday, but this was the moment when our roads converged. This was the early times. This was the 2012 iO Summer Intensive.

We ended the night with a member of our party scoring the waitress’ number and I stumbled my way toward Deena’s. As I got to walking it suddenly popped in my mind that I’d yet to have a Wiener’s Circle chardog and get yelled at by the servers there so I wandered down and got that taken care of. I was patiently waiting for my two dogs and fries when one of the servers (I thought) asked me a question, to which he quickly said, “Shut the fuck up!” I was really excited to receive this abuse and didn’t have anything to come back with so I just threw my hands up and went, “HAHALL RIGHT!” and stepped to the side. The server standing next to my abuser smiled warmly at me, amused.

I sat out front wolfing down my chardogs and fries and a girl started coming on to me when I heard a lot of commotion at the register.
“Oh, someone ordered a chocolate milkshake,” the girl informed me.
“What’s that?” I asked. I remembered Jeff telling me to order one and see what happens but it had completely escaped my drunken mind.
“You go up to the counter and order a chocolate milkshake, then they flash the lights on and off and make a lot of noise and the girl at the counter shows you her breasts and they tack five dollars on your bill.”
Seriously?

I finished up my meal and started to wander home when the girl ran after me to give me her number. Without thinking, I drunkenly turned around and kissed her, told her to have a nice night, then walked the rest of the way into the night. On the way home, a rabbit hopped out in front of me and I wasted a couple of minutes trying to chase him. Unfortunately, rabbits are Chicago’s answer to squirrels so he wasn’t interested in getting picked up. Oh well.

Week four. In the bag. Let’s hope I’m not too drunk for the rest of Susan Messing’s workshop tomorrow.

Now I’m starting to get a little bummed out.

I don’t think I like Jeff Griggs as a teacher. He’s not very good at explanations and when you seek clarification he seems like he intends to confuse you and be vague. It continues to key into my thoughts that the Harold is no longer used to make art at iO. It feels like a lackadaisical version of my old lighting and scene design classes from college where they teach you hand drafting so that you gain a respect for it before moving on to AutoCAD. The Harold is feeling more and more like the thing they have to teach as opposed to the thing they want to.

Talking to other students today, though, it seems like other teachers have more gusto for it. Jet Eveleth and her fiancé are teaching one of the classes (lucky assholes) and they seem to be having a blast. My friend Nick from Austin is being taught by Brett Lyons and he loves it.
“I felt like shit all last week,” he said, “but this week I’m just saying fuck it and having fun and it’s working like crazy.”
I want someone to make me passionate and answer every question that I have about the organic opening. At the moment, I feel like I’m being taught by a Ryan Heine who actually listened and took good notes. It’s good instruction but it’s not making anything clearer.

We worked mostly on first and second beats today. My scenework was worse than it was on the first day. I was uninspired and frustrated. We seem to be avoiding the “gay arc” for the most part (as Susan Messing puts it) but we’ve just straightened it out into a line. We also march a lot, so much so that I got a complaint from half the people in Aaron’s class in the Cabaret downstairs. You know you’re doing something dumb if you’re doing it over and over again to other people’s frustrations.

Jeff’s voice is aural Ambien also, which doesn’t help. After lunch I just want to pass out. Apparently I did for a bit. Javier and Chris were talking about a rant Jeff went on about Scientology (which they said was strangely pro) and I seemed to have missed it all. Maybe he’s crazy?

Or maybe this is me putting prejudice on it. Maybe I need to step back, calm down, focus on my wants and have fun. I don’t know. I do know that I need to ask more questions, at least.

I went back to Deena’s after class and napped for a solid hour. Being behind on blog posts has screwed up my sleep schedule but getting back into writing these has been immensely beneficial in these final heady days. I need some way to organize everything I have rattling around in my head. All this improv stuff and girl stuff and money stuff and weird stuff and who am I even stuff. My body is starting to show signs of wear from sleeping on couches and air mattresses and floors. It’s begging me to keep it in better shape. Deena told me today that I need to be gone by Monday because she’s going to Greece so I’ve set things up to move back in with Eric. I still have to see Michael Pizza, The Second City Main Stage show, Messing With a Friend, Three Sisters at Steppenwolf, Blue Man Group, Delicate Men, The Deltones and a few others. I still have to see and eat some major Chicago stuff. There’s just so much more left to do and learn and be. The pressure is on.

I showered up and got ready to head down to the theater. I’ve decided that my Tuesdays are best spent seeing Jet and Susan. It’s an amazing combination. The show is damn good. It may be my favorite thing I’ve seen here. It’s crazy amazing. I ended up sitting next to Charna the entire evening as well, which was interesting. Birthday Girl opened for them and I really liked their Harold this time. We were a really great audience as well and had an energy that fueled them nicely.

I talked at length with Nick after the show ended about stuff to do once we get back to Texas. He wants to set up times to come perform in Houston and travel a lot. He’s a good guy to work with creatively. I get a good buzz of energy off of him. I have the feeling that we could collaborate on some really cool stuff.

I think I’m going to miss the walks home when I get back to Houston. It’s a good time to mull over everything going on in my head. The more I have going on, the more I need those think times. Maybe when I get back I’ll give myself a mandatory walk around the neighborhood at the end of every night. Maybe.

“Are you the Cris without an H?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Okay, great.”
Coming in late to the first day is the cool kid’s way to always being remembered.

Acting as if I had any time left to rest after everything that happened to me last week, we barreled on through to week four with Jeff Griggs. We’re stationed in the Del Close Theater this time around, a stage that was only a vague legend seen on YouTube a few short weeks ago but now feels like a comfortable chair at home. This new, immediate and shocking familiarity reminded me of the first time I stepped into the New Movement Theater in East Austin and how small it seemed, only to become the place as large and immense as my mind could make it when I was in it for the final time.

“This level is all about the Harold,” Jeff said as he introduced himself to the class. “The past few weeks you’ve been doing scenes and working on yourself and I must warn you that we won’t be doing a lot of that here. We’ll just be working on understanding Harold.”

And away we went to work. The day was devoted entirely to wrapping our heads around the organic opening. We played some intense pattern games that cooked our brains as a warm-up and then began doing openings in rapid-fire succession. We first worked out only doing physical action, moved to action with sound, then we were allowed to move around the space, then we were allowed to use words and statements.

Like in previous weeks that we’ve touched on it, I’m beginning to pinpoint the thing that makes the organic opening worthwhile. The idea of transformation, of taking a suggestion and extrapolating it to the cosmos, to turn potato into a commentary on the widening gap between the 1% and the 99% or goofy cultural differences or whatever, to cast the net wide and then rein in a theme that perhaps says something about the human condition, is an intriguing and powerful notion that should be brought to all of improv. However, I’m still not convinced that the organic opening is perfect as it is.

The Harold needs to evolve again. It’s been fairly the same since Del died and though I see flashes of brilliance in people like Jet Eveleth who are pushing the boundaries of what it is (when they do it), nobody is really focusing on what it could be. That’s not anybody’s fault, really. Charna and the Harold Commission have a business model they’re working on, as does UCB. Most people seem to have left any idea of creating art with the Harold far behind. Two-person groups are (rightly so) where the glory is these days. The Harold is a brand and nothing more. It’s used to weed out the lesser improvisers and find the talented ones. It’s mostly done by people who aren’t doing this for art, and because of that I see even the most talented people tripping in it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought of this, actually. When I first joined Rogue and was trying to understand Harold beyond Ryan Heine’s broken explanations I looked at plenty of tape about it and was not convinced. I’ve looked everywhere at teams that people say make good Harolds. I’ve done a fair amount of them myself by this point. I’ve seen some amazing work from people, but it’s usually shimmering through a lot of dirt. The brilliance of the Harold is there, but it’s not fully formed. Perhaps it was once. Perhaps, when it was first invented, it was perfect. However, this is an art form crafted by a madman and I think he designed it to evolve beyond him. At this point, I’m not sure it will ever be evolved to its perfect state. It may just be one of those things that needs redefining every ten years or so. All I know is that it needs to change now.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Even Shakespeare gets a new “definitive” interpretation once a generation. That’s probably what Del wanted, even if he didn’t know it himself. I’m going to need some time to process this, though. The greatest heights in our art form are locked inside this puzzle. I just have to crack the safe.

Dave mentioned going to see the Hancock Tower in the evening and I told him to text me. About an hour later he texted saying he wasn’t really feeling like it. I contemplated walking up to catch the Armando but then realized that it was Monday and my friends back home were doing FilmInstant, a sort of RiffTrax/Mystery Science Theater 3000 via Twitter that was created by Dan Woods, Drew Platt, and Cyrus Cooper. At 10pm CST (the Central Stranded Time Zone) you select the film of the week on your Netflix Instant Queue and follow a hashtag with people giving their commentary on it. I did one with them before I left (Robocop) and it ended up being the 2nd highest trending topic worldwide after Anderson Cooper being gay. I told Drew I’d do it from Chicago if I had the chance, but the intensive has been rather, well, intense. However, with last week’s Armando being so weak and already having writing to catch up on, I decided to do it.

The film for this week was A League of Their Own. It’s one of my sister’s favorite movies ever and I honestly like it a lot as well. As I was tweeting and watching I grew a deep nostalgia for 90’s films. It was the time I grew wonder for the power of cinema. Before the onslaught of digital cameras and CGI but at the pinnacle of analog filmmaking. It’s all so grounded. Nobody’s photoshopped, sets were fully built. There’s substance to everything. I miss the attitude as well. The Cold War had ended and it was a full ten years before the War on Terror began. If I’d known that the world would become such a darker place by the time I graduated high school, maybe I would’ve cherished the era more. Well, at least it was fun.

I woke up with the idea of spending the day on an explorative adventure through the parts of Chicago I’d yet to see. Eric was going to Pitchfork Music Festival so he offered me a ride to his friend’s place in Wicker Park. As I was doing my morning ritual, though, my right ear closed up suddenly. I grabbed a Q-tip to try and remedy the situation and removed a humongous chunk of dark earwax that looked like it came from some horror film. Unfortunately, there was much more where that came from and my Q-tip escapade only caused it to become irrevocably impacted. Attempting to ignore my newfound hearing impairments, I went with Eric to meet up with his friends for bloody marys.

We picked up one of his friends (an improviser at iO whom I’d seen at the party the previous night and we stomped and clapped along to a country song while people danced) down the street and proceeded to a huge apartment above a toy shop on Division Street populated by his other friend. If I had to state an aesthetic to this guy’s place, I would call it “bohemian yuppie.” There was a couch and a nice TV, an enormous kitchen with ultra-modern appliances, an air mattress and some assorted junk but the apartment was largely unfurnished. I was reminded of the pictures I’d seen of Steve Jobs’ Woodside mansion from the 80’s. It’s the type of living space I long to have for myself.

We walked down to The Smoke Daddy BBQ and I had a damn good bloody mary with a rolled-up piece of brisket as a garnish. I think this was the longest I’d gone in a week without talking about improv to someone and yet I still found myself flanked by improvisers cracking jokes and patterning out scenes. I poured over Instagram photos watching my friends having fun in my apartment and my city and I smiled. It seemed the Megaphone Marathons were going awesomely.

I said goodbye to Eric and his company as they were about to hail a cab to go to Pitchfork. I explored a bit more but decided my ear was too annoying to ignore any longer and stopped at a CVS to get some medicine. I hopped on the Blue Line and took it down to Jackson where I connected with the Red Line to get back to Wrigleyville. The train was packed and a family with bikes ended up sandwiching me into a corner. I saw a cute little anarchist hippie reading a book on how Monsanto was poisoning our food and giving us cancer but I decided not to say hi as I couldn’t think of anything less romantic than the train that I was on.

I had my iPod in and was bobbing my head to Benjamin Wesley and the new Metric album when I got to the Addison stop and found myself almost knocked off the platform by a sea of blue shirts. The Cubs game had just let out and baseball chaos was gripping the station. I enjoyed the energy surrounding Wrigleyville post-game. Chicago is a place full of hooting idiots when it comes to sports fans, but the camaraderie is unmistakable. A few enterprising men had set up bucket drums and began playing feverishly for tips. The place was jumping.

I feel like all of my earwax troubles were being worsened by all the stuff I was jamming in. I could feel the medicine dissolving some buildup but I could also feel it becoming more and more impacted. I resigned myself to my new impairment and decided to look up an ENT on Monday. About this time Aaron Facebook messaged me and we met up for Dimo’s. The place was crawling with even more douchebags and one guy threw his water cup in the air after loudly singing Sister Hazel. I had a nacho slice and a macaroni and cheese slice and we walked over to iO to try to get into the Deltones to no avail. Aaron’s classmate Jack suggested we walk down the street to a bar that sold 40’s for $12 and it turned out to be Texas Country themed. After the longest conversation about boots I’ve ever had, Aaron’s first Jaeger-bomb and a bachelorette party we decided to walk back and barely squeezed into the Harold Show downstairs after one of the teachers raised hell for us.

The first group, Gold Star, was extremely unimpressive. Their organics were boring and typical and their connections, though solid, were obvious and didn’t really speak to a bigger theme. I know Rogue has better Harolds inside of them. The second group, Chaos Theory, was really fun to watch but not mind-blowing. They did a bit about Houston which was kind of interesting. Writing this, I realize I’ve yet to be blown away by a Harold in Chicago. While the ones I’ve seen have succeeded in putting on solid shows, I feel like the Harold can be the kind of epic storytelling that moves the audience to reexamine the way they think about the theme. Maybe I need to do more research on the subject.

There was a rap battle called Haterade afterwards so I stuck around to see what that looked like. I posted up in the corner next to Joe Bill and we began laying down our very scientific critiques (mostly meaning we drunkenly laughed and hollered). The winner was this guy who called himself Boo Radley and took on the persona of a serial killer. It was a clinic in comic timing and facial expression. The MC of the event was one of the Improvised Shakespeare guys (he was also in Chaos Theory) and another one rapped. I need to become friends with that group. Not only do they seem like cool people, they’re some of the more brilliant improvisers I’ve seen.

I found myself sitting at the bar at the end of the night having a really fun and in-depth conversation with one of the other intensive students, a cute girl from Baltimore. She kissed me and gave me her number and told me to call her the next day and I walked back to Eric’s in the euphoric glow of victory. It’s funny what a great night can do to make you forget about only hearing out of one ear.

The amount of Dimo’s I’m eating is beginning to reach the inordinate. Last night’s drunken escapades featured as its closing act Scott Lowe, Kevin and I talking improv through the chomp chomp chomp of teeth meeting dough inside a cacophony of Wrigleyville partiers. This time I got a Southwest Eggroll slice (amazing with a nice burn) and one covered in peppers. Hell yeah Thursday.

Week one culminated in a stumble through our first Harolds after covering a couple of more popular openings. The awesome and also bummer thing about them was that they were about as good as the typical Rogue Harold; awesome because of how much better I’m definitely going to get and bummer because it showed me that the work my friends and I are currently doing is consistently on par with Level 1 students in Chicago. I’m buoyed by the knowledge that the greatest Harolds the world has ever seen lie inside the hearts and minds of the people in Rogue because I’ve already participated in one, but our goal of making consistently brilliant work seems a little far off right now.

I realized, through doing/seeing multiple openings with scenes in a row, the narrow way in which I’ve been pulling inspiration. I’m not sure why this was the case as it seems so simple as to be embarrassing to admit now, but I’m thankful for the mind expansion nonetheless. We did an invocation opening on “dildo” as a suggestion (as a way of experiencing what it was like to get great things out of shit suggestions) and one of the statements was “You are my best friend in between relationships.” I initiated to Dave with the excited phrase, “HEY, best friend!” Dave, looking shocked and worried to see me, said, “Steve, I didn’t think you were coming to the work party?” He was going off of another invocation statement, “You are the thing that I can never live up to,” and we had a scene about how we were good work friends but I always got the girls when we hung out together. It was beautiful. Not only did I learn that doing a scene inspired by more than one part of the opening was possible (and worked in a kickass way), I realized the beauty of personifying the relationship or opinion of a suggestion in my or my scene partner’s character.

Steve’s birthday was on Tuesday, so at the end of class we presented him with a party hat and a candle sticking out of a glazed honey bun. After this week, I want to continue being friends with this guy. He has to be one of the more insightful and genuinely caring people I’ve ever met. He’s in the Second City main stage show right now; I’m going to have to check it out before this month is over.

One thing that I forgot to mention about Steve that I think may be the most valuable lesson he had to give. On Wednesday, in the middle of class, he stopped everything and asked us something that we were doing or experiencing outside of improv. Rob talked about a meditation he went to underneath where he was staying that was in the style of Osho’s active meditations. Chris brought up this guy that he saw on the internet called Braco the Gazer who goes from city to city charging people money to stare at them, after which these people go through extreme emotional moments and claim to be healed of physical ailments. People began talking about books they were reading and I shared the recent Kerouac rabbit hole that I’d fallen down and my failure to concentrate well enough on Proust during this trip. Steve advised me to not worry about following Proust’s plot so much as there hardly is one in Remembrance of Things Past, but to focus on the thoughts which are the things that make the work as important as it is.

Of course he’s read Proust.

“I did this to illustrate to you how important it is to keep outside interests that don’t pertain to improv,” Steve said. “If you’re a painter and the only thing you do when you’re not painting is look at paintings in museums and galleries, then the only thing you have to inspire you is other paintings. You want to be inspired by real life and the real world, so make sure you still live it.”

I grabbed drinks and some disgusting hummus at Goose Island next door and talked with Charis about our backgrounds and lives. Charis is a terrible confluence of events. She’s wildly intelligent, down to earth, hilarious, tattooed, British, and beautiful. I came to the city to train in a Buddha-like state, taking in the environment and downloading improv knowledge like there was a plug in my cortex. I hadn’t planned on women that light the imagination on fire.

The class had planned to meet at iO at 9 to celebrate week one ending. I wasn’t actually intending to see any improv but we had time to kill and ended up seeing a short series of one-person character sketches at the upstairs theater. It reminded me a lot of Block Party back home and gave me a few more ideas for things I’d like to do there when I get back. Aaron was there as well and as we were comparing class notes (he felt similar things when going through his Harolds today) and giving each other directions to places we’d eaten I was bowled over by an excited and frightening realization.

“Aaron, do you not freaking love this city?” I asked.
“Definitely,” he replied. “Once you get yourself oriented here, it’s so easy and fun to navigate. I rode my bike all the way downtown in about 30 minutes the other day.”
“Is this going to be one of those things that when we’re done with these five weeks you and I move up here and get an apartment together and keep on going?” I asked, trepidatiously.
He looked at me with a little shock, but it was the kind of shock that let me know that he had been thinking along similar lines.
“It’s possible,” he said, a sort of cheshire grin slowly breaking across his face. “If I could get a job here… I don’t know yet.”

Afterwards, the class met up outside and we were led by Janie to the Red Line which we took to Jarvis. We then walked for about 20 minutes through some really sketchy suburbs to a neighborhood dive on the closed Morse stop called Red Line Tap. It was everything someone would want out of an American dive bar. The scent of decades-old smoke lingered on the walls and salty old men plucked out blues and country in an open mic MC’ed by a large, tattooed, shit-talking, ass-kicking lady. Charis’ friend Libby forgot her passport and they headed home, leaving Matt, Kevin, Deborah, Janie and I to take whiskey shots and drink 312 beer. When that finally got old, we took the Red Line back to Wrigleyville and Rebel Bar & Grille where they had 1/2 off draft night. I got drunk on three-dollar Magic Hat #9 and shouted improv philosophy over thumping dance music. Scott Lowe, Friendswood lunatic and Dallas Comedy House badass that provided me a crash pad in March and who is currently going through the Second City conservatory, joined us at the tail end of the evening for the previously-mentioned Dimo’s overdose.

As sad as I am to be done with Steve as a teacher, I can’t wait for the rest of this crazy adventure I’m on. As I look over the posts from this week and think about how far I’ve already come, I’m blown away by just how much more I have the potential to learn in the next four weeks.

Well, there’s week one. Time flies, but really it doesn’t because I can’t believe this has only been a week.

I woke up around 8am, as is becoming my custom in this adventure, and talked with Eric over a couple of cups of coffee while I wrote. He was interested in hearing about how I was finding the intensive, how things were going down in Houston and my point of view on the New Movement’s philosophy of not taking suggestions. When people find out that I come from TNM, if they’ve ever heard of it, the conversation eventually rolls around to the subject of not taking suggestions. The outside opinions seem to fall into the two primary categories of those that find it interesting and those that don’t like it. In this week’s class, Steve has talked a great deal about how he thinks it’s important to “show the magic trick” by taking a suggestion. “I like to think of it as ‘what will my mom understand?’” he said. “If she sees a show and thinks back on it, she can make the connections to the suggestion and how it related and then know without a doubt that it was all made up on the spot and be even more impressed with what we do.”

Eric’s viewpoint on it was one I hadn’t heard before. “I think it’s primarily a difference between just performing and doing a show,” he said. “If you don’t take one then you’re just performing, but if you take a suggestion then you end up doing an entire show based around the theme of that one thing and what that means to you. It’s like the difference between a campfire and a flashlight. They both illuminate the area but one is more focused.”

From my point of view, seeing TNM as I was learning improv with Rogue, not taking a suggestion confused me as to what they were doing. It was more of a personal message confusion, though, since I was hearing from Ryan Heine at the time that improv had to have a suggestion or it wasn’t improv. When we finally ended up joining TNM in June 2011, I didn’t give much thought to the philosophy behind it except to ask Rogue to toy with it since we were the house troupe, but through the ensuing many talks I’ve had with TNM and non-TNM people about it since then I’ve come to view it as a simple style choice. There is something cool about growing an entire universe out of the seed of one simple word. There is also something undeniably awesome about creating from the impetus of the mind without the artifice of a suggestion. I say pick a favorite and go make art.

Class saw us going through some interesting twists on basic exercises. We finished out the secret wants exercise from the day before, where two people get a piece of paper with an objective on it (mine was “You want to have sex right now”) and have a scene where they try to get what they want out of the other. It fit in nicely with my realizations on acting techniques and emotional changes from the day before, giving an overarching goal and taking multiple different steps to achieve that goal. Afterwards we did a yes-and exercise where we sat in a circle and came up with an ad campaign for a product (ours was “unwanted pregnancy”). It caught me off guard immensely due to the surprising resistance I felt in my mind. I usually have no problem yes-anding in exercises, but for whatever reason I kept thinking that everyone’s ideas were some of the stupidest things I’d ever heard and I had to stop short of saying “no” each time. Powering through that negativity, though, to state an emphatic “YES, awesome idea!” with loud claps and cheers, was learning all over again the basic principle of our art form. Ultimately, when you make yourself agree and expand on ideas, you move to a place that is amazing and beautiful.

We began the journey into what I’m sure will be the long road to understanding the nature of the elusive Harold by covering the invocation opening. I’d done more than a few invocations in my time and so this wasn’t new information but it reminded me of how much I like them. The focus of it is wonderful, especially when compared to many teams that attempt organic openings and have no idea what they’re doing. I think that if I was to have my way, my Harold team would do invocation openings and slowly grow them into pure organics as we grew more comfortable and confident with each other. At the very least, it’s a thing to try in rehearsal.

We ended the class with scene painting, what we call “dressing the stage” back home. We created a scene of a gym with a Stairmaster, dumbbells, mirrors, TVs, and posters of Rocky IV and Popeye the Sailor Man and then did a 25-minute set in that environment. I was bowled over yet again with the inventive nature of the people in my class. Even Dan, who I found out had no previous experience and is in the middle of couch surfing around the country, is patient and open-minded and intelligent enough to pull through gold.

I ate lunch with the guys at a Thai place and had an amazing red curry and grabbed a shower before the shows. My friend from college Seth Dodson was playing upstairs with his puppet improv group Felt but I heard that he wasn’t going to be there so I saw a Harold show downstairs and was kind of disappointed at the quality. They were each strong shows, but of the caliber (or weaker) that I see back home. This is a testament to the great talent my friends have, but I came to Chicago to learn and be blown away nightly. Thankfully, though, the 11pm upstairs show was more than happy to oblige. I didn’t get into TJ and Dave so I caught Dummy, another SpouseProv duo that decided to take my statements from yesterday and rip them to shreds. They got “masturbation” from this guy who they then interviewed and discovered that he was on a first date, proceeding to do a show that utilized body language, tension and silence to create some of the most moving theatre I’ve ever seen in my life. Colleen Doyle, the female half of this duo, is scheduled to be my Week 3 teacher. I cannot freaking wait.

I can’t seem to shake this routine of going out and getting drunk after shows. Conserving money is a priority, but then the conversation with improvisers of all levels is too phenomenal and enlightening to pass up. I was next door at Mullen’s with Eric and some of the Harold performers from the evening and they gave me some wonderful insight on performing in Chicago and where they all came from. TJ hung out for a little bit and Eric talked to him about some inside joke. I didn’t have the nerve to crash that party yet, but he’s on my hang out hit list. Before I leave this city, I will talk with TJ Jagodowski and pick his brain on the nature of everything. I mean, I’m here, right? I may as well try to know every improv grand master personally.