Let's Get Intense

Craig began class in a state of attrition. He seemed to have spent the previous evening hating himself for the way that he came off on Wednesday and operated with a tenderness that bordered on the unnatural (for him).

“You guys are all poets, artists and geniuses,” he said. “I have full confidence in you tonight and I love you as a group together. Whatever you do it will fucking rule.”

We played around with some ideas and experienced some other forms and settled on an interesting little piece Craig called the Typewriter. It starts with an organic opening and the cast splits to one side. As each scene is played out and edited, the people who participate in the scene (characters, scene support, tag outs, walk-ons, etc.) run to the other side of the stage and “sit out” until everyone has been in a scene. After the last people finish their scene a group game is initiated and everybody resets for the next round. It was simple and fun and it assured that everybody got at least one scene in where they were contributing. It seemed the fairest thing for an intensive performance.

Kevin showed up wearing a nicely rounded-off mustache. He’d initiated an idea that all the men were to grow mustaches for the performance and ended up being the only one who did it. I’d planned to shave as well but hadn’t showered yet. Everybody else backed out on the idea, though, so Kevin decided to keep the ‘stache for the show and be the only one doing it so I kept my beard intact.

People seemed preoccupied all day long with the idea of the show that night but I couldn’t bear to really think of the concept. I just continued to recite to myself to have fun. Just have fun. I had a grilled cheese and fries at Salt and Pepper for lunch and just kept myself in a Zen zone. I went back to Eric’s after class and turned on Buxton while I showered and jammed my favorite songs. There was no way that I was going to let this night become anything but a blast.

Through some weird scheduling mishaps our performance time was changed to first, which meant that Eric and Lauren and Aaron could no longer come see it. The only people in the crowd were intensive students and strangers. I think I preferred that.

“It’s awesome that we’re going first,” Craig said. “We won’t get self-conscious after seeing other people’s shows and we’ll be able to start partying first.”

I showed up to the theater at 6:30 and waved at the cute bartender I talked to at the Cabaret the week before. She smiled back and that released any lingering tension about the energy in the room. My mind was calmer than it had been in a long time. It was the kind of calm you realize might be a defense mechanism against an uncontrollable losing of your cool, but I’d take it. The moment of truth was fast approaching.

We warmed up in the green room and began the waiting game. People filed in, bustling and conversing. I went pee to relieve any lingering nervous stress and started a chain of last-minute bathroom usage. I found myself thinking back to the first time I got on stage to do improv, (almost exactly) a year and nine months ago, and how I kept shaking my hands and singing songs to warm up with. I’d been gripped pretty hard with fear at the time and I didn’t yet remember what to do with it.

I think back a lot to when I competed in UIL One-Act my senior year of high school. It was my first starring role and it was in competition against other schools. As we placed ourselves and before the curtain rose I had a handkerchief covering my face and I could see it shake with the beating of my heart. I remember in that moment being alive. I’d never felt like that ever again on stage or screen. When I improvised I felt that way a few times, or so I thought. Considering what I’ve learned now about fear and how I was circumventing it, I understand what Kurosawa truly meant when he said, “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.”

Charna took the stage and quieted the audience. Her introduction was appropriately flattering.
“The basic thing about improvisation is to be a risk taker,” she said. “We have a program that lasts for a year and then people get on stage to perform. These kids came from all over the world and in five weeks they are putting themselves out in front of you. I think that’s really being a risk taker.”
Behind the stage we stood, spread out in a line due to the cramped quarters. We looked each other in the eyes and connected, nodded. I took a deep breath and smiled.
“Without further ado, let’s get to the first of (I think) eight troupes tonight. I present you now with POUND TOWN!”

The first thing I saw when I hit the stage was one of Charna’s dogs, the black one that always sat outside the 3rd Beat Room, scooting across the audience to be with her master. Ten jokes about the dog ran through my head but instead I looked out and really took the audience in. The place was packed. Caitlin was sitting in the front row already laughing. Chris was behind me to the right repeating “YEAH!” as loudly as possible. Kevin clasped his hands and stepped forward.

“Can we please get a one word suggestion of anything at all?”
“Pheasant!”
“I heard pheasant, thank you.”

We all took to holding rifles aimed at the air and firing them indiscriminately.

KEVIN: It’s pheasant season in Oregon!
CRIS: Here we come to mimic what we used to do in the wild, but we’re civilized now.
DAVE: This is how we express how civilized we are.
ALICE: At one point we used to have to do this to survive, but now it is merely fun.
JAVIER: It’s a LOT of fun!
KEVIN: We have a license to do this, so…
CHRIS: We can!
CHARIS: It’s okay.
ROB: The government say it’s fine.
MATT: Governments regulate our fun.
CRIS: And governments are right for doing it!
CHARIS: Yeah, we tell the government what to do, so…
JAVIER: The government’s us, so it’s kind of like us telling us what to do.
JANIE: That’s why everyone should vote!
DAVE: I vote for us!
ALL: YEAH! FOR US! FOR US! FOR US! *firing off rifles in salute*

We broke to stage right to general applause and we were off. We had our themes firmly in place. Government control, being forced to do things for survival, sport, competition, oppression, rebellion. Everything worked its way in. We had a spelling bee coach haunted by the ghost of his old coach who then died and haunted his student. Dan made a bomb to blow up the government. Dave and Charis derailed my presentation at work by preparing me a salad that I couldn’t resist. Deborah tried to force Javier to kill his pet duck Mr. Quackers (Rob). Ken was a chili cook-off champion that gloated over his trophy case. One by one we attacked every theme and everyone got to play one or two extremely meaty characters. Our games were playful. We missed edit points a few times and there were some scenes that definitely hit sour notes, but in general we rocked it. I wasn’t sure that it showcased five weeks of intense study, but I had fun. Realistically, that’s all I needed.

The lights faded away as all 14 of us stood on stage humming the American national anthem and when they came back on I suddenly realized I’d done the thing I came to do. Five weeks of training and it just culminated. As we took our bow and I thought about that, I felt my face grin almost as wide as the night I graduated from the New Movement when I got a room of 150 Austinites to chant “Houston.”

We went out back and I ran into Aaron’s group standing with Miles Stroth preparing for their show. Craig gave us some simple notes and congratulated us on a job well done. We put our hands in the middle one final time and screamed our name to the heavens in victory. We knew then that we’d probably never exist again as a whole but that didn’t matter. Tonight we were Pound Town and we were legendary.

I walked back in and settled next to Jet Eveleth to watch Marissa’s group go up. I relaxed fairly quickly when I deduced that they weren’t doing as well as we did. At one point it got super weird when they threw a darkly comical jab at the Aurora shooting and tensed up the audience. It created a strange recurring character of a scary hitman played by the scariest-looking guy in the troupe. It didn’t go somewhere good, for sure.

Aaron’s group went up next so I took the front row to watch them pull off the Deconstruction as taught by Miles. It was interesting to be sure but the root scene (involving Australians Tane and Kimberly) was a clinic in shitty scene work. They argued about films and never built a real relationship. The rest of the crew pulled out what they could and earned some good responses. Aaron ended up hardly playing and I felt kind of bad for him as he tried his best to work through the piece while struggling not to judge it.

I watched the next group (Senja the Finnish girl was in it) and then walked over to Salt and Pepper for some dinner. Chris, Javier and Janie were there with Janie’s roommates and her brother so we all talked in a daze of just-completedness. After the food I went back over to catch the last few groups. I’m biased of course, but from what I saw I think we ended up being the ones that had the best-received show. I wasn’t interested in thinking about that, though, so I did my best to relax as the last group, Nick and Karen’s, finished up their set.

A party then broke loose that ripped apart much of my final night expectations. We danced and drank and talked and smiled. I was looking at this wall next to the bar that had a lot of pictures and articles of Del Close and someone came up and told me his ashes were sitting inside the book on the shelf above them. I stood and contemplated the idea that I’d spent the past five weeks and performed in the same room as the burned corpse of the father of modern improvisation, then the idea got too strange and I walked back to some other mad revelry.

I saw Miles standing on the sides talking to Jason so I joined the discussion. It’s weird to find myself a fanboy. I didn’t want to be but I had this impending sense that I would never see this guy again who had so much to say about improv and no problem saying it to anyone who’d listen. I showed a little too much eagerness to learn, though, and he pinned me to the wall for it.

“Fuck you! You’re trying to rape me!” he accused. “I believe this guy’s sincere but you just want to rape me!”

I was thrown and tried to recover but I realized he was a bit right so I just said a dumb quip and left the conversation. Aaron later told me that he took them all out to eat and took stabs at every one of them in similar fashion. I guess you don’t become one of the world’s best improvisers by not being observant.

We closed out the night in the Del Close Theater, talking about plans to come to everyone’s cities for festivals and other great ideas. I guess I should’ve felt some sense of weight lifted off my shoulders, of being done with my hard labors and now truly capable of some rest, but I didn’t. I felt more weighted, in fact, like this was the start of something even bigger and more unknown that I may or may not be prepared for. For that night, though, I just tried to drink and have fun. I have all of next week to think about how to change the world.

After 2am we walked out to a cold hard rain that was beating us down in noir fashion. We played in the streets like mad improvisers do, running from awning to awning. Jason and some people started out to Pick Me Up so I tagged along and ate breakfast enthusiastically. We spoke stupidly to crack ourselves up and existed at the height of dumb drowned drunken wit. When I received pancakes Jason was confused because I “didn’t order any,” to which I replied that the “pancakes were implied.”

We paid our tabs and said our goodbyes and I walked home smiling. The weight never left me but it seemed a friend now, a strangely fitting shirt I might get used to wearing and might become my favorite. Again, I thought, all of those thoughts were for the following week when I found myself in Houston wondering what comes next. I slipped up the stairs and peeled off my soaked clothing and climbed under my sleeping bag and dozed off to drunken dream.

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.

I woke up and arrived early. Craig had nicknamed me “Late” the day before and since I was treating him like a football coach I was using his negative reinforcement to fuel myself to do better. Today focused on the Deconstruction, a form developed by Miles Stroth that’s a more structured version of what Omar introduced to Antoine and me for Fade to Black. Two people begin a scene (called the “root scene”) and play for five minutes. The scene gets edited and three scenes are done that explore major themes that arose in the root scene. The root scene then comes back for another 3 or 4 minutes to heighten whatever is going on. After that there are five “world” scenes that expand the universe of the three theme scenes. The root scene returns for one final 2 minute hurrah and then a run begins inside the universes created in the piece.

I really enjoyed playing this way. Craig seemed preoccupied with the fact that it gave two people way more stage time than the rest of the group but I never really cared about that. If I begin to tally how often I’m on stage in comparison to others then I think about that more often than I think about anything else, which is about the time my improv dies. It actually is helping me a bit with my thoughts on understanding other forms as well, especially what I want to do with the Harold. I’ve been making a list of all-important things that need to be accomplished within a Harold and the games/openings. There’s more than a little of the same philosophy in Deconstruction, which I guess is apropos since Miles was Del’s “war chief” and developed the Deconstruction with Del at his side. The concept of exploring theme and world but without an eye for plot, keeping the piece grounded in one element, these are all thoughts that I think make great Harolds. In the best pieces, scenes are strange half-things that bubble to the surface of a writhing piece of themed performance art. In Deconstruction the performance art is a scene that’s broken down to its base elements and it’s something concrete to hold on to. I’d like to inject a bit of that into whatever I do with Harold.

I talked with Alice a bit about what was happening tonight and she told me she was going to a show at the Annoyance that had TJ in it. I had yet to go to the Annoyance and my time was running out so I decided to meet her up there at 8pm. As I waited at the Red Line terminal on Addison I ran into Senja, the Finnish girl taking the intensive as well. We played together in a couple of jam moments and I became slightly enamored with her. She has the kind of smile and eyes that make you want to be her friend and she’s delightfully goofy. We talked on the train and all the way to the Annoyance discussing a festival in Finland that I’m going to try to go to.
“It would be great if you came!” she said.
“Would doing improv in English be accepted there?”
“Definitely. We have a show that we do that is in English and it is very popular. There are a lot of immigrants there and everybody knows English.”
“Wow.”
“Yes! And when you come we will go to Amsterdam as well. There is a very big improv scene there.”

I think that may be my favorite part of this intensive. In the past five weeks I’ve become close friends with people from London, Australia, Finland, Poland, Canada, and everywhere across the US. I have enough contacts to set up a world improv tour if I can swing the cash. At the very least I will be seeing some of these people again in their hometowns.

When we got to the Annoyance the box office wouldn’t accept my credit card.
“Cash is preferred.”
“Does that mean you can do card, then?”
“There’s an ATM over there.”
“I don’t have enough money on this card to use an ATM. I have a check coming in tomorrow.”
“Well cash is preferred.”
Senja finally got annoyed and ended up paying my way in. Smooth move.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, “just buy me a milkshake at Salt and Pepper tomorrow.”

Alice showed up about that time with Charis and Libby. I don’t know why I didn’t expect to see the room filled with intensive students but we seemed to be all that was there. At this point I’d become quite tired and was still feeling kind of bad so I ordered a drink at the bar. It took me a whole thirty seconds after I was in the theater to realize that I’d been served the beer by Mick Napier. He looked like Mark Hoppus got hit with an aging ray, wearing jean shorts, a black t-shirt, a blue baseball cap and a severe look on his face. A wallet chain hung off of his belt loop to complete the ensemble. He was mostly in intense conversation with Noah Gregoropoulos when Noah wasn’t making out with his young girlfriend (wife?) and I didn’t really have anything to say to him so I let it go.

I sat next to Alice in the front row and it ended up spelling my doom. The first group up, Fish Nuts, wasn’t anywhere near the top of their game. They spent a whole 30 minute piece riled in confusion and misunderstood intentions. When that combined with my own fatigue I began dozing. Unfortunately when you doze off in the front row it’s visible to everyone so that was quite embarrassing. Chicagoland came next and though they were mostly solid (Noah’s girlfriend didn’t seem the strongest but she held her own with TJ, Noah and the other guy) the damage had been done. I slept through a portion of the show in direct sight of TJ. Sweetness.

I took the Red Line back to Wrigleyville and was debating finishing out the night with Jet and Susan when Lauren called. She wanted to get together for drinks so I walked down to meet her at Friar Tuck’s. The place was impossibly crowded so we left after one round and ended up at this cool little dive on the corner of Broadway and Addison called Joe’s. We put a bunch of songs in the jukebox (Moondance being one of them again) and talked and smiled. Mills called me at one point to get some strange suggestions for topic discussion back home so I gave him Benjamin Franklin and Lauren gave him in vitro fertilization. He thanked us heartily and hung up the phone.

I’m glad that I’m hanging out with Lauren so much in this final week. The past two days I’ve felt kind of disconnected from improv in general which feels odd to me. Lauren has grounded me, though. She’s the kind of girl that can do that, I guess. Truthfully, though, I think I’m beginning to feel the fear again. I’m not sure if I ever really forgot Lauren. We ended quickly due to circumstances beyond our control as well as general childhood stupidity. Have I still loved her all this time? These thoughts rolled around in my head and mixed with notions on improv as I walked back to Eric’s to prepare for the next day.

I stirred to waking on the air mattress and blearily glanced at the time to see that it was 11:13am. FUCK. I jumped to standing and threw on clothes and was out the door in two minutes. Class this week was at the Underground Lounge, a closer destination but far enough away to be anxious. I remember Caitlin telling me that the place was a dark pit that had to be locked to keep the homeless out so I spent most of the time getting there hoping they’d hear me when I knocked.

They didn’t. I arrived at 11:20 and began pounding on the door to no avail. There was a key in the mailbox that didn’t fit so I started texting frantically. Finally at noon I pounded with all the might of a SWAT team. Finally I heard steps and the door opened to a confused and annoyed face.

“I’ve been knocking for 40 minutes,” I said as I brushed past Craig Uhlir.
“Are you supposed to be in this class?” he replied.
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, you’re an hour late dude.”

I walked downstairs to find an Armando monologue going on. This whole week was dedicated to forms, culminating in us choosing one to perform on Thursday. Craig sat down in the center of the group of tables and chairs and continued to take notes.

“Sorry I missed most of your monologue. Some dinkel couldn’t be bothered to show up on time.” He called everybody dinkel. It was his favorite word.

As I settled in and tried to catch up to the flow of the class I changed my expectations in my head. Craig Uhlir isn’t an improv teacher, he’s a football coach. He’s the epitome of the stereotypical Chicago sports fan. His personality falls somewhere in the center of Harry Caray and Mike Ditka. It’s motivating to those of us who have a sports background, so long as we make the switch in our heads, but I wonder a bit for the more reserved in our group as to what they’ll be able to get out of this week.

We covered Armando fairly extensively and then went into La Ronde. They teach it a little differently here than they do at TNM. In their La Ronde, once the round has been done the piece is over. Also, the Slacker isn’t the same format, but a La Ronde that can go on forever a la Beer Shark Mice. Craig has an affinity for these formats because they lead to extremely fast and aggressive play which is something he prefers to do.

I knew after seeing Craig in Middle Age Comeback that I wasn’t going to enjoy his teaching style this week. I don’t find a lot of interest in aggressive “DudeProv” anymore. It’s fun to do, sure, but the entertainment value has eroded for me. I’d prefer to see slow play that feels fast because the energy is there. This just seems like guys shouting and jumping on each other. That’s why I wasn’t really blown away by Cook County Social Club.

I headed back to Deena’s after class and packed everything up for my move to Eric’s. Deena wasn’t there so I left the keys (plus a demanded $90 for utilities for the three weeks I was there) on the counter and went out the back door. I left a towel but I didn’t care. By that point I just wanted out of that place. Deena’s weirdness really got under my skin and I wasn’t interested in having it in my life any longer. Eric picked me up at the Walgreen’s like the last time and I got immediately settled back into my little space by the couch. I was anxious all day in general, what with how it started, but being back in a comfortable place relaxed me instantly. The Armando was going tonight and I was somewhat interested in checking it out since I knew Miles and some Week 5 teachers from out of town would be participating but at this point I was so tired that I just wanted to relax. Eric and I went to get wings and beer at Mullen’s and that clinched the idea of not going. “Sometimes you just need a break,” Eric said as we walked back to his place. “I don’t blame you for not feeling into it.”

He had a little more beer at his apartment so I drank a few and reclined on the couch with The Book of Tea until improv was so far from my mind that I was claimed by dreamless sleep.

I guess I can’t really call it a “Day of Sloth” as I pretty much spent all of it writing, but I didn’t leave Deena’s couch until about 7pm when I decided to shower and head to see the Deltones. I hadn’t seen them yet and it dawned on me that this was my last Saturday in Chicago and I had better see what all the fuss was about with them. I’m lucky enough to have made friends with the door guy (who I discovered trained at the Dallas Comedy House and moved up here a year ago so we talked for a while about Texas improv) so he let me in to see the first half of Whirled News and got me in after intermission just in time.

I passed the interim time chatting with the box office lady who turned out to be the girl from the Shock T’s, a hilarious music trio I saw in Dallas in March when I was covering the Dallas Comedy Festival for Improv Wins. She said they have a show at the Upstairs Gallery on Monday so I’m definitely hitting that up.

The Deltones did not disappoint. Joe Bill was playing this time as well as the extremely physical blonde girl from the Katydids. They did a show about D&D nerds coming out of their shells and discovering that they were cool all the time. There was a song that heavily referenced Game of Thrones and Joe Bill deftly avoided being caught in unknown references that his scene partner was trying to pimp him into.

Chaos Theory was in the late slot so I stuck around and watched them and Henrietta Pussycat. Still coming off of and ruminating on Miles’ workshop, I was able to see exactly when the scenes were derailing and needed saving. I am going to punch this data into me so hard that I don’t even think about it anymore, I just know it. Miles’ theories are the glue that holds every other philosophy of improv together for me.

Haterade came afterward and I stuck around for that. To continue the British audience volunteer streak, Jason got up as MC Self-Deprecation and did just that. Robert Price was the other audience volunteer, as MC Harvey Fierstein. I finally ended up talking to Ross Bryant about all the things he does. He’s a genuinely cool guy.

And then I looked over and Miles Stroth was in the building again.

I’d been hanging out most of the evening with Steve Calamia, an intensive student that went to HSPVA but lives in Virginia now. He was a lot less shy than I was and walked straight up and asked him improv questions. I sat for a minute with the British married couple and Marissa and talked about how we were nervous about approaching him. Finally, like a band-aid, we just walked up and said hi.

“Hi Marissa, hi Cris,” he said.
“That is so amazing that you still remember our names,” Marissa said. “How do you do that?”
“Well, I just bother to.”

We passed the next hour and a half talking improv and hearing a bit more about his story and what he does. As it turns out, he has his own training center in Los Angeles where he spends eight weeks on the stuff he taught us in the workshop. I logged that away to research for the future. We also talked a bit about other forms and he confessed to hating the Bat when I mentioned it in passing.

“I get it,” he said, “but it’s just a radio show! It’s a gimmick form!”

Miles reminds me a lot of Derek Dupuy back in New Orleans. He’s opinionated in the valid kind of way that’s backed up by careful research and experience. He has an air that can come off as condescending because of this but it’s really just that he’s passionate about what he does and has possesses an extreme amount of confidence.

Miles ended up leaving around 2:45 and I hung out until 4am shooting the shit with the bartenders about service industry stuff. I somehow ended up with an umbrella in the process, a large teal one with a broken release button. As I walked back to Deena’s I was doing tricks with it to the amusement of a stranger walking alongside me who it turned out used to intern at iO. “Umbrellas go there to die,” she said. “If you take an umbrella from iO you’re giving it a new lease on life. I can’t tell you how many umbrellas are left there a week.”

Urrrrrgghhhh.

I spent a couple of hours drinking water and getting into a decent headspace before taking a cab down the street to get to Susan Messing’s workshop. It didn’t take long for her to discover that I was hung over and she wouldn’t let me live it down.

“You drank your ass off last night, didn’t you?”
“You said I could.”
“You fucking asshole! What did you drink?”
“I started with beer, moved to giant margaritas, then drank a bunch more beer.”
“Did anybody else just feel sick in their stomach for him? You alcohol mixing idiot.”
“I like to challenge myself.”
“Hahahahaha, Fuck you.”

Despite this gross start to the workshop (the hangover disappeared halfway through), I received a lot more from it than I did last week. It combined with my newfound understanding of group games to broaden in my mind the concept and purpose of playing big games in groups. I dig Susan’s in-your-face style in general, too. I’m not sure if I could handle a whole class with her, but it’s fun to nerd out and download some sweet knowledge from her insane genius brain.

The workshop ended fairly quickly and I grabbed some water and shook off the rest of the hangover and resettled. The next workshop was called “Position Play” with Miles Stroth. I knew nothing about the man when I signed up for it; the description just looked interesting and useful. I talked about it the night before and learned that Del Close referred to him as his “Warchief” so he had at least some cred. I was wholly unprepared for what happened next.

We all settled in and a man the spitting image of Jack Kerouac entered. He had salt and pepper hair and an expression permanently etched across his face that made you think he was looking incredulously into the eyes of the sun. He looked everybody over and began speaking and that’s when everything changed.

“All right, we’re just going to start off with scenes so I can get a feel for how you play and learn your names,” he said.

There were 20 of us in the workshop and two by two we got up and did scenes that lasted about a minute and a half, stating our names at the top. He never gave suggestions, never commented on the scenes, just called them and said thank you. Then when everybody was done he took back the stage.

“Okay, so Cris, Marissa, Georg, Naisrin, Andrew, Ida…”

He named everyone. Perfect pronunciation, even the Polish and the Germans and the people with strange names. After hearing each one time.

“This is the part where I talk at you for a while and then we’ll take a break and then go into scenes,” he said. “Usually I cover all this material in eight weeks, so we’ll see what we can do in three hours.”

He then proceeded to break down scene work into four (almost five) categories and the best things to look for when you play these scenes. It was a concept I’d heard before (one of them was TNM’s favorite, the straight/absurd) but he expanded it into a full-fledged workable philosophy. “You can approach improv any way you want,” he said, “but I guarantee you at the end of the day everything fits into these four categories.”

I was writing furiously in my iPhone. Matt was in the class with me and when I went to talk to him during the break he had four pages filled in his notebook. Marissa just sat there stunned. We knew it. We were sitting in the presence of a genius.

We came back from break and started doing scenes. He’d let it go for about 30 seconds to a minute before stopping and jumping in to guide the scene toward a direction. For the most part we did straight/absurd scenes as they’re the easiest to pull off. Twice I found myself, as Miles put it, “caught between scene types.” As the workshop wore on and I watched people carefully and listened to when he corrected their trajectory I became utterly determined to get one good scene in before the workshop ended. Miles called for one last scene and I attacked the stage and took the persona of an absurd character who broke the tea set in the house because he thought it kept society from interacting as humans. Ida, a girl I didn’t know at all but had seen at the Neo-Futurist show and around the intensive, fell into a perfect straight character after being course corrected and we played it pitch-perfect to the point where I was congratulated by some of the other students after class.

“You see, I like this because he’s doing exactly what she’s telling him to do,” Miles said. “She called him out on something and he responded by embodying that something. It’s just that simple.”

The guy was amazing. For the first time in this intensive I felt like I was sitting in the room with a true Zen Lunatic. Everyone else, including TJ and Dave and Jet and Susan and Colleen and everybody else that’s blown my mind these past four weeks, they pale in comparison to Miles Stroth. They’ve defined improv for themselves and have the ability to share that unique vision with the rest of the world whereas he defines improv as what it is. Every question I asked was met with a wry smile, like he was reminiscing going through that problem himself, then spit out super-intelligence. I’ve never seen anything like it in anything I’ve ever done.

I walked out of that workshop in a daze and found myself at a Mexican place off of Broadway and Diversey. As I was consuming some tacos I looked at the movie theater across the street and decided to check showtimes on my phone. It turned out Moonrise Kingdom was starting in 10 minutes so I went over and got a ticket.

It was a charming little movie theater, the one I was initially going to take Dave to see Batman in before I wised up and showed him incredible American super-cinema. It may have been too small for the Bat-Canvas but it was perfect and intimate for Wes Anderson. Like the wine and the tiramisu at Vivo, my mental state after being obliterated by Miles Stroth paired well with the setting and film to create a beautiful and moving experience. That little girl is a force of nature. I can’t wait to see what she does.

I wandered home and downloaded the soundtrack as well as the Francoise Hardy album that Kara Hayward’s character was listening to, plus two albums from an unknown American folk rock singer from the ‘70s called Rodriguez who went quintuple-platinum in South Africa unbeknownst to him. I drifted around on Facebook for a bit and came across Ween’s “Baby Bitch” that someone had uploaded. In my already compromised mental state I immediately drifted back to the car ride with Rylie where I heard it first, reliving some of the happier times we had together, and downloaded that album as well.

With all this new music and emotional states and philosophy rolling around in my head I took a shower and went to catch the Improvised Shakespeare late show. I sat next to Rob and they did a piece set in Thebes with a theme of gluttony. A particularly amazing moment that almost had me in tears was when they characterized Crete (the sort-of enemy nation) as an ineffectual army of whiny, middle-aged Chicago suburban dads. The short-form jam was afterward so I hung out and participated a little bit but mostly had some beers. Nick and British Andrew showed up at the end and we shared a cab to meet up with Karen and her roommate Kayla at a bar down the way.

I walked in and was immediately assaulted with honkey tonk guitar. It was another Texas-themed bar. Awesome. I ordered an Old Style (still tastes eerily like Lone Star) and grabbed a seat and talked to Kayla for a majority of the time before she got inexplicably depressed and bailed, prompting Karen to go after her. Nick, Andrew and I hung out for a bit longer and then left, Andrew and I sharing a cab ride back to Belmont driven by an Asian guy who laughed at everything.

“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.

I learned a valuable lesson about being a student today.

I walked into Jeff’s class determined to find the answers to all of my questions about the Harold. I’ve never been the kind of student that’s asked many questions. A consequence of being intelligent is a fair amount of hubris involved in the state of learning. There’s the attitude that if you don’t get it without asking a lot of questions then you’re either an idiot or the teacher is bad at explanations and since you’re so smart it must be the teacher. Silly, I know, but there it is.

A truly intelligent person, though, and this is what I learned today, is someone who will ask the right questions to get the best explanation out of the teacher. It’s the same thing I discovered when I began interviewing people for online publications. If you ask the right question and then remain silent, a person will go off talking and give you everything you need plus a lot more that you didn’t even think was available to know.

I had a sense that Jeff was wildly intelligent in terms of his experience and who he studied under. Nobody else in the class seemed to have the problems with him that I was having, either, so it was shaping up that my frustrations were all deficiencies on my end. With all that in mind, I decided to annoyingly ask every question or state every feeling I had implicitly to see if I could work through it.

Unsurprisingly, it worked. We were studying group games today and I was enlightened as to their original (and basic) purpose within the framework of the Harold which then coupled with what I gleaned from Monday and Tuesday’s lessons about openings and scenes, leading to a deeper understanding of the purpose of the opening and how scenes inevitably play out to make the Harold shine.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The group games, at their inception, were actual short-form games that Charna made Del put into the Harold. When David Shepherd started ImprovOlympic with Charna they were essentially a ComedySportz type of place that only did short-form competitions. When David left after a falling out with Charna, Del was brought on as a replacement and started shifting the company to long-form by introducing the Harold. Charna thought that her students wouldn’t be interested in long-form so as a compromise they would stop the Harold after each beat and play games like “Sit, Stand, Lean” or whatever. Eventually, as the Harold evolved and performers got more into long-form, they decided not to predetermine which games they would play. Then they started making up games on the spot that fit the theme of the show. The group game then evolved into the form we have today.

To listen to the way Jeff talks, Del seemed to not like the idea of group games at first. He relayed an anecdote (that I’d heard before but not in relation to Del) that Larry David used the Harold as a basis for the format of Seinfeld. “That bastard stole my Harold from me,” said Del (according to Jeff). “It starts with a monologue opening, then they begin three separate storylines, then the commercials are Charna’s games, then they advance the story in a second beat, break for more commercials, then everything is tied up at the end.”

It’s immensely helpful to understand the group game as the Harold’s “commercial” for itself with the basic thematic structure of a short-form game. It makes them more like recaps of what’s happened so far. I’ve heard before that the notion of the group game is to clear the slate, more accurately articulate the theme and focus in on where the show will be going next. If you add on the idea that it is essentially a little bit of short-form inside of a long-form show and that it’s an appropriately themed and focused commercial for the Harold, the whole piece gains a clearer structure that can allow the theme to flow through it effortlessly.

The game structure is remarkably similar to the way that UCB approaches scene work. “In the game, you establish a reality, alter it and then heighten quickly,” Jeff said. In that way, the Harold group game can be approached as a one-person UCB scene where the character’s many facets are portrayed by the entire Harold team. So, in effect, the Harold game slot is a short-form game commercial in the structure of a UCB scene where X amount of people portray the point of view of one single person that calls back the suggestion, defines thematic focus and looks cool at the same time. At least, that’s how I view it.

As I continue to enlighten my understanding of the Harold I still hold firm to the idea that it can (and should) evolve a bit more. Knowing the purpose of the group game makes me love it and doing the Speed Harold for the past six months with Rogue has definitely illustrated to me a need for it. I’ve been brainstorming what else could be done in that slot. A good contender is the solo start, essentially boiling the group game down to one person playing, but I think that some of the importance and gravitas is missed by doing that. I’ve only seen one Harold team while I was here execute the organic opening, themed edits and group games in ways that I found theatrically satisfying (Fiction for the Poor) and from that experience I’ve determined that the scenes aren’t what makes the Harold epic storytelling based on Wagner’s Ring Cycle (wiki that shit, it’s true). It’s always been about the framework. My goal now is to make sure that even a six month old improviser can execute one to audience satisfaction.

I walked outside at the end of class after being made to execute a complete Harold in four minutes (my group was the only group that succeeded [FTW!]) and ran into the British married couple whose names currently escape me. Their section was about to participate in a flash mob directed by Jet Eveleth and they were going up to the Del Close Theater to warm up and rehearse so I walked up to watch. As I walked in the door I made eye contact with Jet and she motioned for me to get on stage and join in. We developed a basic language and practiced it for a little bit and then put our belongings in Charna’s office and headed out the back door. We decided to set up outside of the Captain Morgan bar at Wrigley Field. A funk/soul/Motown cover band was playing so we hid Jet’s iPod and went to play. A homeless guy and a bunch of Cubs fans joined in periodically. We jumped, climbed, danced, grooved, made pyramids, lifted people up and carried them for a while (of which I was one such lucky person), performed free-flow rituals and had the time of our lives before doing a big finishing bit as the band closed out a song and then took off in separate directions like we’d never met each other before. At one point I was participating in some impromptu contact improv when one of the girls from the other section started climbing all over me like I was a tree she was scaling. I planted my feet and flowed to her energy as she made it over my head and flipped around to land behind me like a ballerina gracefully being lowered to the floor by her dance partner. It felt just like those freeform dance parties TNM did at FunFunFunFest, a group of people coming together to be ecstatic and share love, fun and play. As I walked back to the theater I was struck by how amazing it was, remembering that today was the day that so many people were showing up at Chick-fil-A’s across the nation to support the persecution of homosexuals and the transgendered. I was amazed that, on a day that many people the country over were dwelling on the pain, sadness and hate that exists in the world, we focused on the celebration of being happy and together in a wonderful ritual of the moment.

I picked up my stuff from Charna’s office, talked a little bit with Jet and the gang about what was so good about the flash mob and how we could make it even better for next time, headed to Mullen’s for a bit with some people to relax and regale in what we’d just accomplished, then wandered back over to iO for the 8pm show. A comic book themed two man group called The Harold of Galactus was in from Canada for two nights so I decided to check it out with my skeptic glasses on. It was a fun concept for a show and while the improv wasn’t mind-blowing it reenergized my passion for comics in the best way and had me brainstorming on a project I’d shelved years ago when I became jaded with the industry. I spent a bit of time trying to place the voice of one of the improvisers and I was nearing the point of insanity when I realized he was the guy that voices Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series. “It was weird,” Jeff said in class the next day, “because I’m really good at making video game characters look exactly like me when I customize them so I heard his voice and kept wondering how it wasn’t coming out of my face.”

I didn’t have TJ and Dave tickets this week so I took the opportunity to see Colleen and Jason Shotts do Dummy again. I was more moved by their show two weeks prior but it was still a home run. I sat next to Caitlin and her roommate the entire show and we bantered for a little bit as we’ve come to do. Caitlin makes me feel like a kid in all of the uncool ways. She’s achingly innocent, the epitome of a 21 year old. She relishes in it, which I’m really happy about. People should always live fiercely in the now and play to the limit of their wisdom, gleefully existing inside the benefits of their age. The downside to that, though, is that she’s just young enough to be eons away from where I am. Seven years will be nothing in ten years, probably, but now it may as well be the other side of everything. Even so, because I am weird that way, I walked her home and made out with her on the front porch like a couple of adolescents outside of her parents’ house. As I did this my spine surged with that element of youth I lost in the interim seven years. The breaking of Ashly’s heart, the move to Los Angeles and subsequent move back when I fell in love with Rylie, the two years following with Rylie and the two years to now I spent putting her behind me and building another life in improv and theatre. There is so much time between then and now, too much time, but then again not enough time to not feel it closely. Maybe that’s an always thing, I don’t know. All I know is I walked back to Deena’s in a haze and slept without dreaming.

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.