Two Things I've Learned

Tonight was a great night of shows and elucidated two things for me that have been percolating for a while. Two tricks or lessons or sign posts whatever you'd like to call them.

1. Pronunciation. Saying words in an odd way is funny. Not all the time of course but talking normally or with a little bit of accent and then every once in a while inappropriately stressing a syllable here or there or injecting consonants or vowels where there shouldn't be any makes people laugh. You set up expectations and then subvert them. It can also help discover character- what kind of a person would say x like that. Jeff and I had a fun first beat scene in the Schwa show tonight. We were two southern ladies at the race track fanning ourselves. We were doing accents, Jeff better than mine, and every tenth word or so I'd say weirdly. It got a big reaction, the audience loved the scene, and it started the show off at a good pace.

2. Trust. In improv classes and on teams trust is something you hear a lot about. "Trust your teammates, trust their ideas, trust the work." Which is all well and good, its a good idea but realistically difficult to implement. Just telling people to trust each other- people who may be strangers, people who may not like each other- does not bring about that bond. In improv as in life real trust must be cultivated and takes time. I trust a few of the people I perform with certainly not all, that's no slight on those I don't but it's a rare thing and should be. I'm comfortable with everyone I perform with, comfortable enough to try or do things that make me uncomfortable but comfort is not trust. I have to trust someone to do something I directly do not want to do, I have to trust someone in order to do something I think is a terrible idea.

During the Prime set tonight I initiated a scene as a fortune teller at a fair. I was calling for someone to come get their fortune read, I anticipated it would be one of the other performers. After a couple seconds Craig come out as my assistant and said something like "here's one! here's a girl wants her fortune told!" indicating a young woman sitting in the front row. I was stunned, I looked at Craig to see if he was in fact serious, if in fact he was indicating I should interact with this audience member, he was. In retrospect it's not that shocking, I've seen it done many times, people talking directly with the audience, but I've never done it and I've never seen Craig do it. I thought that it could be really disastrous and making that move could open the flood gates for a lot more audience interaction. In short I thought it was a fucking terrible idea and I did not want to interact with this young woman. But I trust Craig- he's a great friend, a mentor, and long time collaborator, he's never given me bad advise and I still frequently follow his example. I got down on a knee and began to read this young woman's fortune. Craig was backing me up and Brett and Sabine came out shortly there after. The young woman was receptive, excited, and played along. It went over very well.

I did something I'd never done. I did something I did not want to do that I thought would go badly and it went well and people liked it. I did it because I trusted the person that set me up for it, but trust is no common thing.