why can't you think about zach woods?
(imagine me answering this while gazing wistfully out a window into the middle distance)
oooh, yeah. the ucb. upright citizens brigade theater. in those days, we spent half our lives there, the little black box theater, watchin' long form improv. and zach? zach was the best of the best. maybe the best there ever was. the way his brain worked...no one was doin' it like him. he knew what a scene needed, I'll tell you that. he showed up at most assscats, twice a week, and you knew you were seein' somethin' special.
we lost everything in the pandemic...but we lost zach long before. he'd been in switzerland, filming the ill advised american remake of force majeure starring julia louis-dreyfus for a lotta months, and didn't even have time to pass through a los angeles theater before heading right on to london for the better of part of a year, making avenue 5 - that show. that show was the bane of my existence. but it finally wrapped, in winter...the very end of 2019. and zach? well zach was back in california, back in that dusty 'ol theater that sometimes smelled a little like weed...weed and laughter. we had so much hope then. hope for the return of those weekly appearances.
but then...the pandemic hit, and we lost everything. not just zach, but all our faves, all the genius. all the laughs. but most of the elite, they gave us podcasts, or sometimes instagram lives. lapkus. mantzoukas. gabrus. byers. they lived in our phones every week. even the more elusive, the hollands and cardens and tarvers, had a back catalogue of appearances. not zach. the man was a ghost. a purist. existed almost entirely onstage.
ucb stayed closed for years, but it outlasted us. this time, we were the ones who left, back to the east coast, vaccinated but working from home. been near four years since we were seeing zach with that wondrous regularity, four years since those glory days, with no podcast comforts to ease that transition. ucb is returning now...maybe he'll be back. but we'll never know. never see it. sure, I can throw on a silicon valley or even my enemy show, avenue 5, and I can recognize lines he improvised. *lights a cigarette* but it just ain't the same.
theartofmadeline
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
blakekathryn
yousharknotpass
areudirty
ellievsbear
2087
romaincrisis
