I didn’t feel too terrible when I got up in the morning so I counted a win as I slid into the Del Close Theater at 10am. Susan Messing was there already and showing off her reputation with sweet style.
“I’m going to try to get you fuckers out of here right at noon if you’ve got any more workshops to go to,” she joyfully exclaimed, “and I know you’re all hung over but try your best to focus.”
The workshop was called Group Pretty and it was all about making appealing group shapes on stage. We played a game where we made ourselves into the shapes of various things Susan wanted us to be.
“Hey, that doesn’t suck at all!” she said at our first attempt to make a sailboat. “This is where all that mirroring shit finally pays off! If you just look at your partners and mirror what they’re doing, we’re all going to get off. Make a sense?”
We moved onto techniques to make a person “fly” on stage and physically interpreted narrated dreams in interesting group games which was definitely the highlight of the workshop in that it forced a heightening of listening skills. The workshop continues next Friday and I’m hoping to get a better understanding of the use of it all. So far it’s felt like stuff I’ve been over before (which I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at since she designed the Level 2 curriculum I was subject to last week). Still, it’s good to keep those skills sharp.
I grabbed a small bag of peanuts to hold me over and downed them in minutes as Jet Eveleth walked in and told us to stretch out. This workshop was a personal feedback workshop with Jet in which she distilled us to our personal strengths and weaknesses. Due to Colleen Doyle freshly kicking my ass all week long I was highly aware of the things I needed work on and she nailed them distinctly as well.
“You are one of the most naturalistic people on stage,” she said. “When you work, there’s something about it that feels tangible.”
She subconsciously rubbed her fingers together like she was sifting through dirt.
“Your challenge now is to put everything into the other person. For the rest of the workshop your mission will be to mirror and maintain complete eye contact.”
It was shockingly similar to the notes Colleen had given me. I have the feeling that when I return to Houston I’m just going to be intensely staring at everyone.
I must say, as a quick add-on to all of this, that Jet and Colleen are the two that have had the biggest impact on me through this whole process so far. Colleen took no excuses and no bullshit from me and believed deeply in revealing the truest truth. Jet personifies the agony of doom. In both workshops I took with her she flatly stated multiple times about how she was going to die someday, that we all were going to die, and she didn’t want to waste valuable living time on not doing the best possible art. They are both halves of a philosophy that I perhaps have allowed myself to be scared of falsely.
To know your own mortality is vital to the creation of a life filled with meaning. That we are only here a short time defines us. Rylie hated death, as so many real doctors do, and felt it her mission in life to eradicate it. Family, friends and others through the years have ignored it or changed the subject when it came to their doorstep. Neither of my grandfathers ever shied away from it and they lived with purpose and love and when their respective deaths came they took them standing tall. Gran Gray’s came to him without warning and in immense pain but he lived his life making sure that everyone lived theirs. I couldn’t see it at the time, being impetuous and not understanding half of what he was trying to do for me, but he always knew about death and worked the hardest to make sure I knew enough of the world to find what made me happy. When Papa Whitey got sick, he pragmatically spent the last six months making sure that everyone would be taken care of and never ceased to express his love. “It’s so great that Cris is pursuing the thing he loves,” he told my mom when she said I was going to school for theatre. “You have to do that.”
My grandfathers. Zen Geniuses of America and unknowing improv gods.
I caught sight of the other Texan girl that was at the British show last night (who turned out to be named Karen) and we talked outside for a bit and she invited me to the beach. We went and grabbed Dimo’s and talked for a little bit about the workshops from the morning and I caught sight of her extreme blue eyes. I tried not to stare too hard at the scissortail tattoo on her chest and the ones on her arms but they were quite beautiful. We split up and I went to a surf shop down the street to pick up a bathing suit. I settled on a gray pair from Billabong that looked like regular shorts that the lady behind the counter called “hybrids.”
Osterman Beach is on the north end of Lake Shore Drive and about a 10-minute walk from the place Karen was staying above a shoe repair shop run by an old Slavic man. After spending forever trying to find a cab in the rain in the midst of the chaos of a Cubs game letting out, I met her outside her door and we walked up to her apartment to get some supplies that she forgot for the journey. Karen is renting out a Bohemian haven of an apartment. You walk up a secret and ancient wooden staircase to a series of rooms that look to be retrofitted from storage attics, the Chicago answer to Hubbell’s Zen domain. These are the kinds of places I want to live in forever.
As we walked to the beach Karen and I continued to get to know each other. She’s starting a baking business in Austin called Scissortail Savories and Sweets and told me her specialty is chocolate cream pie. “My dream would be to have a pie shop that had coffee in the daytime, beer and wine at night, and an improv theater in it,” she said. “And I’d rent out rehearsal rooms to whoever needed them and book troupes like you’d book bands. Austin could use a place that doesn’t have allegiance to any of the other theaters but lets everyone come and play together and gives the younger teams a place to perform.”
We set up a little area and reclined in the sand on a couple of towels and talked some more. Her bathing suit revealed an immense back piece of a girl in a tornado and we talked for a bit about the nature of tattoos. Finally, she looked at me with an air of mischief. “Want to get in the water?”
Running as fast as you can towards the ocean is in the top five key experiences of human existence. Scaring seagulls, hopping over mini waves, yelling into the heavens our eternal laughter, the tangible feeling of unending joy, crashing into a body of water so immense that you can’t see the other side of it. Of course, this was a lake and not an ocean, but the only thing letting our senses make that distinction was the fresh water. We swam and splashed and dove and loved everything.
A weird difference in Chicago beaches is that they corral you into a small space. We couldn’t swim out past our waists (and you can be damn sure there was a lifeguard in the water to keep you from it) and we had to stay between two guard towers. It was a prison beach. Lame. Still, it was a beach and it was awesome.
We walked back to Karen’s and hugged our goodbyes and I left with a kiss on the cheek and a bit of a brain buzz. I caught a cab back to Deena’s and washed up and headed down to iO. Eric’s Harold troupe had been cut by the spooky secret masters of the Harold Commission so I booked it to the Cabaret to see their final show, opening for the Late 90’s. Karen told me she’d seen them play before and almost walked out, but I thought they had a solid show. Maybe it was their knowledge that this was their last hurrah but they went all out and just had a lot of fun on stage. Eric disappeared before I could catch him but I texted him my appreciation.
I walked outside and called Karen to see what her plans were for the night. “I’m not sure yet,” she said through crappy reception and the loud noise of Wrigleyville surrounding me, “but I wanted to let you know right now that I’m married.”
About that time Aaron and Magda (the Polish girl) walked outside. They’d just been upstairs for Improvised Shakespeare (which blew their minds, naturally) and were on their way to meet up with Brady James, a TNMer who was in town for the weekend, to see the Neo-Futurist show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. I remember Derek Dupuy freaking out about this show to me when we were on tour last October and I hadn’t responded to Brady’s texts so I decided to tag along. We got a cab from a 20-something Romanian guy that looked dressed for the club that was secretly a front for the Eastern mob. He was listening to old 90’s techno hits off his phone (the highlight was Real McCoy’s “Another Night”) and he and Magda spoke in Polish to each other for a bit.
“It was strange to speak to a Romanian for so long,” Magda said when we were walking up to the theater. “In Poland they are all beggars.”
Brady met us at Simon’s Bar down the street and we watched a bit of the Olympic opening ceremonies before heading to the theater to wait in line. We got there 30 minutes before the doors opened and the line was already around the corner. I caught up with Brady for a bit and met his high school friend (Brady is apparently an Illinois native) until the doors opened up. Apparently, Brady did tech for this show when he lived in New York.
“You know this girl, well at least you’re Facebook friends with her, named Roberta Jofre?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I know Roberta,” I said. “We went to college together. She’s awesome.”
“Oh, cool!” Brady replied. “She’s in the New York cast of this show.”
Well damn. It’s always good to know my old friends are doing so well.
When the doors opened we were led up some stairs and through a hallway with strange paintings on it into a large, un-air conditioned room. I got a snickers and a coke and milled about for a bit before they announced that the house was open. The entry fee was nine bucks plus whatever I rolled on a die. I checked in on foursquare so that I could roll a 5-sided die and ended up rolling a 1, so I floated the guy a Hamilton and he gave me a Neil Rackers trading card from when he was on the Cardinals (oddly synchronistic since he became the star Texans kicker for a few years afterward), a menu and a punch card. I was led to a Hispanic woman who asked me my name and then wrote the word “Sarcophagus” on a nametag and handed it to me to put on, after which I was led into a 200-seat black box stage and took a seat in the front row.
The menu had the titles of 30 plays on it, all with strange and brilliant names like “My Gratitude Will Be Swift and Terrible” and “You Rest, I’ll Take the Wheel.” Strung up on a clothesline above the stage were 30 pieces of paper numbered 1-30. A chalkboard was on the back wall that didn’t look like it had ever been cleaned and next to it was an old darkroom timer. A girl was going around picking up the backings from everyone’s nametags and she had a forceful personality and bizarre platinum Wolverine hair tied up in a bandana that already had me entertained. I busied myself reading over some of the other things on the menu and psyched myself up when suddenly the show began.
As it turned out, every single person who was taking tickets and writing nametags and collecting sticker backings was a member of the show’s cast. It was the very definition of poor theatre, the kind of no-frills stuff that is by its definition hungry.
“Who has never been here before?” Wolverine girl asked. “If you haven’t been here before, let me explain things for you. In your hand is a menu. Fold your menu so that the plays are easily visible to you. 30 plays are on your menu and tonight we will perform 30 plays for you in the space of an hour. When we yell CURTAIN, you shout out the number of the play that you want to see and we will perform whichever one we hear first.”
She then went over to the darkroom timer and set it for 60 minutes. As she punched the time they all screamed, “CURTAIN!”
What came next was a breakneck hour of experiential expressive performance art. My ass hit the edge of my seat and stayed there for the whole hour. There were absurd plays (1. The Neo-Futurists Try to Explain Neo-Futurism to Trevor’s Ass), satires (22. Real life sadness filtered through fake German performance art), political commentary (23. Dictionary Dardai Maintains His Standards). One play saw Wolverine girl singing Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” while making origami that she gave to an audience member. Another had someone pouring Kool-Aid into a clear plastic cup that had the Kool-Aid Man’s face drawn on it with a sharpie that they then dropped a brick block on while Yello’s “Oh Yeah!” played. After each play, no matter how much it floored you or moved you, they yelled “CURTAIN!” and you had to shout out the next play and reset as rapidly as they were so you could experience the next one.
The one that got me the most, that almost entirely killed me, was one called “The Grieve.” They wheeled out two clothing racks with empty coat hangers with clothespins on them and began hanging up various sheets of colored paper while music played and the lights came up and blacked out in a cycle. A girl sat downstage center flipping a notebook full of colored paper as if she was showing the audience. The other cast members were in different parts of the stage also hanging up different things, pieces of paper, etc. and they did it all with solemn seriousness. Then, suddenly, Wolverine girl made us all stand up and put our hands over our eyes and we screamed, a mournful wailing that was reminiscent of Greek tragedy keening. It was suddenly as if the whole of my fear, sadness, pain, everything in emotion I garnered through loss that I ever felt or ever would feel that made me who I am, my old grandparents and the ones I never knew before them, my family, my friends, Rylie, Ashly, Lauren, Amanda, everything came up from where it lived in my stomach and up my spine through my brain and out of my eyes and mouth in a howl that made me understand the intentions of Ginsberg. And before I could even muster up the ability to kick in with my conscious self and cry at the raw power of expression and experience and emotion that just shot through me, I heard, “CURTAIN!” and had to reset.
We said our goodbyes to Brady and his friend and took a cab back to iO in time to see the short-form Jam end. Kevin was hanging out drunk (he’d tried to audition for Second City but had been dropped from the schedule in a clerical error and wasted five hours waiting for a no-show) and Dan was there too. Aaron and Magda went home and I talked for a while with Oopey who’d come from a house party. I walked downstairs to the Cabaret to see what was up and found a guy drunkenly doing an interpretive dance and lip-synching to Mellencamp, Katy Perry, and “Let Freedom Ring” which he ended with a salute that I Instagrammed. Oopey and I tried to get a house party going somewhere but everyone was too tired for it so we split ways and I headed back to Deena’s overloaded with questions about the why of everything.
