Girlfriends. Also, narwhals.

Somehow, possibly because someone on the women's committee got me confused with one of my friends, I am heading up drama for my church's women's retreat, which will focus on female friendship.

My first thought was to adapt scenes from plays. I spent hours in the library and came up with nothing that passed my modified Bechdel test -- that is, that contained at least two women, {modification: who are not sisters or mother/daughter,} who have names, who speak to one another about something other than men.

Because of the nature of church retreats, improv isn't going to work, so I am supposed to write or adapt scripts for three short scenes.

There are reasons I am not qualified to do this. In outline form, those reasons are:

1. I have never been on a women's retreat. At any church. Ever.
    A) Aren't they for moms?
    B) Or at least grown-ups?
    C) I'm little.

2. I have never written a script.
    A) Remembering words is hard.
    B) Things always seem funnier when everyone discovers them together.
    C) I don't have good ideas when I'm by myself.
       a) A girl who has a theater background is talking out the scripts with me.
          i) It helps.
          ii) But only if she's there.
       b) Seriously, can I just have a couple of solid ensemble members and a suggestion of anything at all?


3. I am not good at female friendship.
    A) My ratio of guy friends to girl friends* is something like 9:2. If we expand that to friends I've had for over three years and still regularly interact with, that ratio is more like 9:1.
         a) I'm better friends with people I play with regularly.
             i) I mostly play with boys.
             ii) Why do girls quit playing?
         b) I do not have a roommate.
             i) My boyfriend has 5 roommates.
             ii) See 3.A.a.i.
             iii) A big part of me would rather spend a weekend being goofy with them than being awkwardly polite to women who I am sure are perfectly lovely and fun but with whom I'm not comfortable because I am shy-ish. Which I should and will just suck up and deal with.
         c) I have tried to put myself in situations to be better friends with women, particularly at church.
            i) They all seem to have a lot of girlfriends already.
            ii) It's hard to tell if there's room for more.
    B) When Blade tried to get me to brainstorm and feel more positive, he said, "Tell me a story about two narwhals. Who are friends. And also are girls."
         a) So I told a story about two narwhals
            i) who were friends
            ii) and also were girls.
         b) They swam around together for awhile, and that was fun.
         c) One day they looked around and realized they had been swimming in different directions for a long time and couldn't remember the last time they floated by each other.
            i) Neither could remember why.
            ii) Neither of them did anything to remedy the lack-of-proximity situation.
            iii) No one ever talked about it. 
            iv) Hey, I wonder where that gal went, I liked her.
            v) Shrug.
         d) The End.

With the generous help of newfriend 2.C.a, I have two scripts and one outline with some wiggle room in it. I feel pretty good about them. Still, it should not have been this angsty to come up with under 10 minutes of material. And my brainstorm story should not have been so sad.


*In this particular case, I am defining friend as "someone with whom I regularly interact, whose life I know and care about, and who knows and cares about my life." There are loads of people, guys and gals, I think fondly of but don't ever see or keep in touch with due to geographical distance or such wildly disparate schedules that when we do see one another we have to start off with something like, "So how was that thing you were doing last year? Where do you work again? Are you still dating that guy? Oh, wait, you moved? When did you move?"

Aw, Miracle Cat ...

Back in November, Stradivarius and the Other Kinds* recorded a Bat as a Christmas present for our friend Duke, whom we miss. The only advertising we did was through a Facebook event, which told us to expect 12 people including the performers. By the time the show started, we had 70 or 80 people in the audience. Maybe more. Such a fun surprise.

The recording arrived in Laos via Thailand last week. Now that Duke's had first dibs, I can post the show online. Download it here: Daylight Savings Bat (aka "Miracle Cat") -- 11/6/2010

I listened to a piece of it for the first time the other day. It's always awkward to watch or listen to shows you performed. Besides the "does my voice really sound like that?" feeling, my main reaction is to be overwhelmed that people seem to enjoy when my friends and I sit around for half an hour and say strange things into the dark.

My favorite element of the show is how many of the later scenes grew out of a mistake in the beginning. In the third scene of the first beat, Marty asks Meredith why he would even bring up the cat --- now that I hear it, he clearly intended to convey that the cat had died. However, Kevin and I didn't pick up on that nuance at the moment, and we mewed as though the cat were on the porch.

At this point, Marty and Meredith had several options for dealing with our mistake:

1. Ignore us and move on like they never heard the mewing.
2. Call us out as a new cat or a stray.
3. Acknowledge us as the same cat and
    a) ignore/deny Marty's earlier implication about the cat being dead.
    b) kill the evil zombie cat.
    c) treat cat resurrection as a normal occurance.
    d) get excited about a miracle.

I am so pleased they chose to be excited rather than force everything into making real-world sense or killing off what didn't fit into their preconception. Miracle Cat mistakes are my favorite kind of mistakes.




*Stradivarius and the Other Kinds is**: Josh Blaney, Skizz Cheney, Meredith Malony, Kevin McLenithan, Marty Jones, and me, with generous assistance from Brendon Culhane and Blade Barringer.

**Or at least, it was for that show. We may grow and rearrange soon.

Carol's Off the Christmas List

This is me with my friends Brendon (left) and Kevin (center). We are full of accurate information about the Festival of Lessons and Carols, which will be put on next week by Church of the Resurrection.





In a short form improv show, Madrigal only takes about two minutes to perform, even if you allow time for Brendon to come up with one of his increasingly complicated Origins of the Madrigal speeches. So I thought it would the three of us, veteran town criers that we are, no more than half an hour to film a Madrigal, especially without the pressure of a live audience.*

Apparently, having never made a short film before, I am naive about time. It took about two hours. (Brendon, who has made short films, insists we made good time.)

We filmed take after take, not only inventing new lyrics as we went but also playing with the frame and our presentation: Oh, no, we have to redo that one, Kevin stumbled on his words, Brendon was singing in a different key, Alyssa moved completely off the screen, were we supposed to be looking at the camera that time? None of these things would matter in front of a live audience, but they're noticeable and annoying on camera. So we would try again just one more time. And one more time after that.

After two hours of one-more-time's, we decided we had a passable take and called it quits for the night. Brendon suggested that, since we were finished working on the announcement, we should turn the camera back on and be ridiculous for awhile. The pressure was off, so we tried to do everything exactly wrong, just for the fun of it. 

That's the version we actually kept, the throwaway take we filmed at midnight. In comparison, the other takes look labored, like we were Trying to Be Right. The performance was better when we stopped needing to be right and really played.

Good work, Kevin and Brendon!

And if you're in the Wheaton/Chicago area, come to Lessons and Carols! We didn't make up that part about hot chocolate and Legos!

---

*It turns out that I am less nervous in front of an audience than in front of a camera. The bigger the audience, the less nervous I get. I am the opposite of everyone.

Del Close on Harold and Rhymes

I stumbled upon this 1986 video of Del Close talking about Harold.



"By this time, the scenes are beginning to relate, ... to rhyme with each other in some mad, conceptual way."

I love that idea, the idea that scenes can rhyme with one another. I'm horrible at actual rhyming games, where I'm asked to make up a song and have it make sense and be in rhythm on top of making it rhyme. I'm always the first out in elimination rhyme games like "Da Doo Run Run" and "Beastie Rap."

But I am good at seeing patterns within individual scenes and over the big picture of the show. I had never thought of those patterns as rhymes before, but they kind of are. Different scenes that have the same taste to them, characters whose motivations echo one another's, status interactions that parallel each other, objects and gestures that take on new significance each time they are used.

I love mad, conceptual rhymes.




Fellow improvisers, can you spot the following in the Del interview?

• At least one sentence that is quoted word-for-word in Charna Halpern's Art By Committee
• A performer who is currently famous (by improv standards) but is not mentioned at all in Del's monologue
• An unattributed Keith Johnstone quote
• A thinly veiled criticism of 1980's Second City

Harold with Your Eyes Closed

When I teach improv workshops or coach troupes, my first order of business is to get them comfortable with Harold. Harold is the simplest long form, but it is not necessarily easy. To an audience, it looks like an improvised play. To an improviser, the breakdown looks something like this:

Infographic by Dyna Moe, via Story Robot

Harold gets a lot of flack. Some workshops and troupes have told me Harold is too basic for them and they want to move on to something more sophisticated. (Ironically, those are usually the groups who don't do well with risk, and their Harolds are dull as a result.) Others have told me they didn't want to do Harold because it was impossible. (Maybe it is impossible, but I've seen it done so many times, and I've done it myself.)

Harold is an excellent barometer for how a troupe is really doing, especially when it comes to spotting games and patterns, heightening, and reincorporation. No one moves past Harold. Your Harolds get weirder or more elegant as you grow as a player and as a troupe, but a good Harold is never boring. If you can do Harold, you can do anything.

---

Some friends and I have been getting together for the past several weeks to work on our improv. There are six or seven of us, depending on the night, and we are called Stradivarius and the Other Kinds. We were each in wheatonIMPROV, but we had never all played together. We were in different eras of the club and on different troupes. Given the range of experience, I foresaw our practices being a little rocky as we fought to reconcile our various approaches to improv and life.

So I was wonderfully surprised when, twenty minutes into our first practice, the group mind clicked. I think it was because of the following two things: (1) We respect one another, despite not have much shared stage time under our belts, and (2) we all have a thorough grasp of Harold. We could do a Harold with our eyes closed. In fact, that is exactly what we did. ...  More on that later.

Relearning Church through Improv

Confession: Church did not teach me how Christians should act.

Church -- at least, the two churches I grew up in -- modeled for me that when two Christians disagree, one of them is wrong and needs to repent so the other one can lord their mistakes over them and call it forgiveness.

I learned that the best response to conflict is to quit and start another church two miles away and force people to choose whom they like best pray about where God is leading them.

I discovered that the key to avoiding these kinds of conflicts is to seem pulled together and in control. One easy way to do that is to volunteer to give announcements at youth group. Anyone on stage must have things all figured out, right?

Especially, I saw that the more you respect and trust a leader, the more devastating it is when they fail or they turn on you, and that those relationships are irreperable.

There were a few bright spots -- Heartbeat in seventh grade comes to mind, as well as some good conversations with youth leaders -- but those were the exceptions. Mostly, I collected compelling reasons not to trust people.

I didn't unlearn all of this mistrust until I started doing improv at Wheaton. I saw that if people trust one another, it's possible for them to be honest about their struggles, forgive one another's mistakes, and help one another grow.



---

This is another one of my favorite books.

You can buy it here. And you probably should.

Wells writes:

[One common] assumption is that improvisation is trivial and self-indulgent. This is perhaps because it is associated with humor and the ephemeral, and also because it can create intensely committed communities that seem united by no substantial goal, only the formal means of interacting. ... Underlying it is the assumption that Christian ethics is an intensely serious, somewhat earnest, and decidedly difficult discipline, weighing matters of daunting substance, and only to be entered reverently, soberly, and after serious thought. In this perspective, improvisation sounds suspiciously like a joke, an artifice -- an insult. Such a view risks being more solemn than God.

Throughout the Christian drama there is joy and playfulness. .. The church can afford to concentrate on details, because God has given her time to follow him. Taking time for the trivial is therefore a sign of faith, not foolishness. The church can afford to take the risk of the humorous and the ephemeral, because the joke is God's and the laughter is divine.

---

Some of my improv friends gave me rides to their church, where I found a community of people who don't seem to be pressuring me to have everything together or to agree with them about every tiny detail. They treat seasons of celebration and joy with as much importance as those of waiting and repentance. I learned that church didn't have to be as constantly traumatic as the churches I'd known. I've now been a member for more than five years. 

I know I am amazingly blessed to be part of a church that values the differing gifts of its members, even if those gifts are in the arts. Our artists at Church of the Resurrection write music, yes, but also stage dramatic interpretations of scripture, paint altar pieces, and film comedic announcements. I love it all.

So when I wanted to teach an introductory improv class as a ministry through Rez, the church told me to go for it. I'm SO glad that five wonderful ladies decided to take a risk and play with me these past few weeks. I am not a preacher, nor do I have extraordinary gifts of healing or tongues or evangelism or any of those big impressive ones. But I know God has met me through play more than in any other way, and play is something I can teach.

How to Be a Jerk

Dear fellow improvisers:

Are you having fun?

If you are not having fun, seriously consider the possibility that you are a jerk.*

If improv isn't fun, it probably has to do with judgment. You're judging other players, judging yourself, or judging your coach. Judgment is antithetical to acceptance, to YesAnd. In my head, this idea looks something like: 

If you are the jerk in the troupe, not only are you sabotaging yourself, but you're making it hard for your friends to play with you and hard for your coach to direct you, and now nobody's having fun. Just like you. So congratulations.

The solution to not having fun is to have fun. That means showing up** and playing with your fellow artistic geniuses. Having fun doesn't mean everything will be easy, but who cares if it's easy if you're having fun?

Even if everyone else really is better than you, have fun. If you're having fun, nobody will notice your shortcomings, and you'll get better faster.

Even if one of your troupe members really is a black hole of comedy, have fun. If you support them anyway, you might be surprised. And even if you're not surprised, this scene is over in three minutes, so who cares?

Even if you think your coach is trying to ruin your life by turning your troupe into an extension of his own ego, have fun. Play hard despite your director having an off night or your coach asking you to exercise a muscle you don't feel like exercising.

I know these blue boxes well because I have been guilty of all of them at different times. When I was stuck in that orange box, it had less to do with improv and more to do with how sick and depressed I was at the time. Talking to my coaches about it helped.



If you're in that green box, can I come to your shows? Better yet, can I play with you?



*Credit to Derek, who got me started on this train of thought a few years ago when I overheard him say something like this to a surly workshop. Susan Messing and Rachel Mason both say things along the same lines, but they are less quotable for being rated R.


**Physical presence without emotional presence doesn't count.

The Chart

This is The Chart.

Auden had sloppy penmanship.

Specifically, it's W. H. Auden's Romanticism chart. However, one of my literature professors at Wheaton called it The Chart with some amount of reverence, so that is how I think of it. (You can read a more legible PDF here.)

The basic idea of The Chart is that hell is getting what you think you want to an extreme degree. It is taking a good thing so far that it becomes an obsession. In the middle of the chart is balance, everything in its right place.

Another way of putting it is that one side of the chart wants Earth to return to being Eden/Arcadia, to return to nature and freedom; the other side wants Earth to hurry up and become Zion/Utopia. Neither extreme really lives in the present. Both take a good practice so far that it loses its context and becomes a bad practice.

Which, of course, makes me think of improv.

This is my improv extension of The Chart:

My handwriting typing is better than Auden's.

I find it helpful to check in once in awhile and notice where I'm defaulting in my scenes. For me, I find myself hanging out mostly on the left hand side of that chart, particularly when I'm tired or distracted. If I can be honest with myself about that, then I know what to work on. 

If I notice I've been basically myself in every scene lately, it's time to be a character so totally different from me that she (or he) might not even be sane. Or if I've been defaulting to high status, it's time to try being varying degrees of low status characters for awhile. And, incidentally, I notice that if I've veered way to one side for a long time, I'm probably sabotaging myself by playing out of fear.

It's awesome if you have a director who can tell you honestly what he sees and guide or shove you out of your comfortable default. Unfortunately, I'm my own director at the moment, so I have to trust my gut and shake up my own playing. This works better some days than others.

---

If you have the patience to read a couple of poems, you can see Auden's application of this idea that we all tend toward one end of this spectrum in "Under Which Lyre" and in the Vespers section of "Horae Canonicae." I hope you do have the patience sometime -- those are two of my favorite poems in the world, though I suspect I only half-understand them.

Cake! Caaake!

A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this post by Hyperbole and a Half, which chronicles our hero Allie's psychological meltdown when she can't have cake.

I felt this way about improv in the year after graduation. Rather, I would have felt this way if I hadn't been too sick to do stand up without passing out for those first few months. After that was over, though, I had crazy, get-out-of-my-way improv withdrawal.

Improv is my cake. Cake is also my cake. The following is improv nerdiness, interspersed with cakes!

Lauren and I made this for a friend's birthday. My mom probably helped with the icing.

I've used baking as a metaphor for improv when people in my workshops ask me why their scenes aren't working even though they're working hard on accepting, heightening, making strong offers, what have you. It's because that's not improv, really; those are just tools to help your improv be less sloppy.

If improv were a cake, technique would be the wooden spoon and mixing bowl and spatula. It'd be really messy to make a cake without those things. But if all you have is a really great bowl and spoon and spatula, you'll still go hungry. At least, hungry for cake. 

Time would be the oven, the form would be the cake pan. Cupcakes have the potential to be as delicious as bundt cakes, layer cakes, or crazy sculpted cakes; short form can be as fun as Harold and Armando. They're different shapes in which to pour your awesome scene work.

I made this cake for my friend Meredith, who is a vegetarian.

There is no definitive list of what to put in a cake to make it a good cake, just some general guidelines. Most cakes have some combination of eggs and flour and sugar and milk. Some have cream cheese or carrots or cocoa; some are vegan or gluten-free. It's a lot of stuff that wouldn't necessarily taste good on its own but works in combination with the other flavors to make something new. There's flexibility there, as long as you keep your proportions reasonable and your ingredients are good quality.

Most scenes have some basic ingredients, too: relationship, character, environment, game, and probably more I can't think of. Or fewer, depending on the kind of scene.

If your milk's gone rancid or your sugar has ants, your cake will be awful. Your cake pan and egg beaters might have been fine, but that doesn't save your cake. There's no sense investing in an expensive Kitchen-Aide mixer if you're not going to bother with your ingredients and proportions.

And once in awhile, for some inexplicable reason, a cake with all those great ingredients still doesn't turn out the way it's supposed to, and you can't always know why. You just have to double-check your ingredients, clean up your tools, and try again.

My mom probably did not help with this icing. This is all me.

FURTHERMORE. You don't have to have icing for a good cake. In fact, bad icing will ruin an otherwise good cake, and good icing won't save a gross cake. If I have to chose between a cake with bad icing and a cake with no icing, I'll pick no icing.

And I'll take a good, interesting scene that doesn't me laugh over a weak scene dripping with gags. Even good icing doesn't make up for bad cake, and funny jokes don't make up for shoddy scene work.

Truth: Icing is my favorite part of cake. But it gives me a stomach ache to eat it by itself. Good icing on good cake, though? Life doesn't get better. I mean, improv doesn't get any better. That distinction keeps blurring these days.

I wonder if the same could be said for many art forms, like writing and painting. Technique helps so much. But if there's not something the technique is serving, if its for its own sake, then you have some lovely shiny clean dishes and nothing to eat.

This is from when my mom pretended it was my birthday so my friends would come over and watch Schindler's List.

Fear, Failure and Feathers

Here is the picture from my elementary school history book that made me afraid of being tarred and feathered.

I thought it might happen to me on accident if I walked on our road too soon after new asphalt had been poured. I don't know where I thought the feathers would come from, though. Or the colonists.

(Other childhood fears included: scorpions, letting my feet touch the floor if the lights were out,* and the witch from "The Three Little Pigs."**)

I've been thinking about fear because of improv. I've heard that fear of public speaking is almost as common as fear of death. Several people lately have told me that they can't imagine trying improv, that they would be so afraid that they would throw up or pass out.

I want to tell them that a very good improviser I know has been known to throw up before shows. And I've passed out at key moments in plenty of practices, including practices I was directing.*** Improvisers aren't fearless people but people who choose not to let that fear keep them from playing.

However, we do let that fear drive us away from playing our best.

The common things improvisers are afraid of include: Not being funny enough, looking ridiculous, having too much responsibility, having no control. Really, those are all manifestations of the fears of being hurt and alone.

If I don't control this situation, it might go somewhere awful. And if it goes somewhere awful, it will look like my fault. And if it's my fault, other people won't want to play with me anymore. And if nobody wants to play with me anymore, I will be alone, and it will hurt. Therefore I must control all scenes and games or I will be alone. Probably forever.

When you actually write it out or say it out loud, you can see how irrational it is.

I think the best thing for me, and probably the best thing for many of my improv friends, was to experience undeniable failure.  

I didn't control the scene, and it DID go somewhere awful! I knew it I knew it! 

And then to realize that that's as far as it went. We moved onto the next scene after that, or we shook off that horrible performance and showed up ready for practice the next week. None of the other scary hurt-and-alone-in-the-dark things really happen after failure. Ok, so there's tar on your shoes. Acknowledged. But where did you think those feathers were going to come from again?

---

 *This was somewhat to do with scorpions, which were a real threat in my house, but mostly it had to do with that there might be some tar on the floor and I might accidentally step in it and get sucked in and be tarred and feathered.


** I know. There is actually no witch in "The Three Little Pigs." A wolf, yes. But no witch. I still had nightmares about that witch, though.


***Anemia + abject panic = fainting.

Fear Not

When I was in elementary school, I was in a church Christmas play called Three Wise Men and a Baby. It starred our choir director as a bear and is a little hard to explain in words.
 

I'm the one who brings the myrrh.

Right now, though, I'm thinking about the shepherds.

The angel comes to the shepherds in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. (Tangent: That participial phrase, "keeping ... night," placed after the word "field," should techinically mean that the fields were keeping watch. I'd never noticed that until I typed it out just now.) Anyway, the dialogue goes something like this:

Angel: Fear not.
Shepherds: AHHH!
Angel: I said, "Fear not."
Shepherds: AAAHHH!
Angel: What part of "fear not" are you not understanding? Nevermind. Listen up.

---

I've offered to teach an improv class for women at my church. We're not planning to take over the city or anything, just give people an introduction. We decided to start with just women, because for some reason it's harder to get women to play, so we thought an all-female environment would feel safer.

The announcement in the bulletin read:

Improvisational comedy workshop for women
Don't be scared: Improvisation is not about being original or clever. It's about working together with a group to create something beautiful and true (and often very silly). This is a great chance to stretch your creativity and to connect with other women at Rez in a lighthearted environment. Come play with us!

I heard a lot of enthusiasm, along the lines of "I'm so glad you're doing that! This will be so good for building community among different ages of women who don't normally spend much time together, and we have so much creativity in this church." The next sentence was inevitably, "But I'm too scared to come."


Hey, I said, "Fear not." What part of "fear not" are you not understanding?

Over the past few weeks, I've been following up with those ladies who liked the idea but didn't see themselves being brave enough to try. I explained that this is going to be a relaxed class, like recess for grown-ups. Some have decided to give it a go. We'll begin next week.

It's a job! It's a job!

Since graduation in May, I've had a seasonal job, a part time job, and several short-term gigs, but never a full time position.

Applying for jobs is time consuming. Most days, I spent several hours filling out applications, researching companies, and sifting through ads to avoid scams and pyramid schemes. I have record of having applied for over 200 positions, but I didn't keep a record of anything I applied for through staffing agencies, which don't reveal the name of the company unless they get you an interview. It's probably closer to 250.

To keep from going stir crazy while un/deremployed, I have:

• Held two internships, one as a writer at MAI and one as an administrative assistant/courier at World Relief 
• Helped Church of the Resurrection's office with miscellanious preparing-for-Easter chores
• Sang in Rez's choir
• Taught two semester-long improv workshops 
• Joined a Bible study
• Weaned completely off of medicine I didn't need anymore, and consequently slept a lot
• Radically changed my diet to accomodate a newly-discovered dairy allergy
• Read a zillion books (a random sampling of which would include Les Misérables, After Virtue, Oryx and Crake, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.)
• Got hooked on The West Wing, even the not-as-good seasons
• Learned to crochet 

Staying busy helped keep me from becoming resigned to un/deremployment, and that will make it an easier transition when I start my new full time job this week.

I'm the newest web coordinator for Web Works, which means I will write copy for small businesses, churches, politicians -- anyone who needs to set up a website. 

I start on Thursday. I like to think of it as Maundy Thursday, though I keep being reminded that it's also April Fool's Day.

---

If you're in the Chicago area, come to Edman Chapel (on Wheaton's campus, though this is not a function of the college) on Saturday at 7 for Rez's Easter Vigil.

Besides singing in the choir, I'm in the Red Sea reading, which means I'm an Israelite, then an Egyptian, then an Israelite again, then an Egyptian again, and then (spoiler) I die. There are drums. Come and see!

Holding Out for a Gyro

Last night was the closing night of my 5b class's graduation shows. I didn't know eight weeks could go by so quickly.

In eight shows, I have pushed my brother through a Stargate, witnessed my mother hang herself, researched cancer, fingerprinted a coffee drinker, used my roommate's toothbrush, played bass in a girl band, eaten seven oatmeal pies, avoided a lesbian affair, and been unsuccessful at culturing my own pearls.

This means I am officially an iO alumna, but I'm not finished with that place yet. On July 4th, I start Jim Carlson's writing elective. I am intimidated out of my mind. Unreasonable? Probably. Still true, though.

The director of the training center told us that it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before we find out who of our class is cast on a Harold team. There are about thirty of us, and only about ten of us will be cast.

Thanks to people who came and showed Holding Out for a Gyro and Ill-Fitting Leotard some love, especially the ones who braved game nights in Wrigleyville. I did not have a single show unsupported by a friend in the audience, which is not something most of the performers can say. I have good friends.

---

"Ok, guys, two-thirds of the way in, you know what to do: jet packs."
- Someone in the green room before every show