Meow House Theatre

Last night I went to a show at ImprovAsylum, which is the “other” improv place in Boston. It was … interesting. I thought I had been to a show there before, years ago, but I didn’t recognize the place so either I wasn’t there or they moved or I’m just forgetting.

It was a lot different from what I am used to seeing and participating in. I guess it would more be classified as short-form; they were primarily scenes, not games, but there was no Harold or any other long-form element to it that I could see, and there was a live pianist accompanying them throughout the scenes (even the scenes where they didn’t sing at all). They also performed sketch (something that is pre-scripted, like what they do on SNL) every few scenes. There were a couple of scenes that were longer than other and I guess had references back to previous themes but nothing was longer than perhaps 6 minutes. Can’t do a Harold in 6 minutes. It wasn’t bad or anything; just not what I’m used to. I have heard that the IA teaching style is formatted after The Second City’s and I’m wondering if their performance style is also modeled after SC. I haven’t been to SC so I really can’t say; I’ve seen brief individual performances but not an entire mainstage show. I guess I had thought a full evening at SC would be more Harold, but now that I read the Wikipedia article on it:

“Second City revues feature a mix of semi-improvised and scripted scenes with new material developed during unscripted improv sessions after the second act where scenes are created based on audience suggestions. A Second City innovation is the inclusion of live, improvised music during the performance,”

it doesn’t appear that way at all. I never gave it much thought, I suppose. It sounds like the Del/Charna improvOlympic collaboration is more the style I’m used to and which I prefer. Now I understand why some iO and Annoyance people have recalled looking down their noses at SC, saying “that’s not real improv.” (Not that that stopped some of them from joining Second City and having great success there.)

It was also shockingly expensive. Twenty dollars a ticket—on a Thursday night! I don’t pay anywhere near that in New York, with professional full-time actors who appear regularly in movies and on TV and whose names are recognized all over the improv world and beyond. AND it was sweltering hot in there. Not in the actual performance area, but there’s an anteroom where you wait until they open the theatre doors, and it was easily over 85 degrees. Considering they had far more than 100 people in the audience, at $20 each, on a Thursday no less, I think they should be able to afford air-conditioning. Maybe it was a one-time thing.

It was quite a long show—90 minutes, although including an inexplicably long (nearly 15 minutes) intermission—so this might be why they feel justified in charging $20. (Although you could get 90 minutes at UCB for $10; even just $5 if you hit the timing right, when they’re doing a free set.)

I also didn’t discover until near the end of the show that I had an assigned seat listed on my ticket. The box-office person should have mentioned this; further and most puzzling, the seat they assigned me was right next to someone else (with many seats empty otherwise) and directly behind a large support pole. I would not have been able to see a damn thing. What the fuck? What a bizarre way to do it.

And lastly, not that this has anything to do with the show itself, but I sent them an email five days ago with some questions about classes—in other words, “IA, I might be interested in giving you hundreds of dollars”—and nobody has bothered to respond to me yet. That kinda pisses me off. Perhaps that has colored my less-than-100% experience with the show.

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Sunday, August 5

Today is the end of my improv week in New York. We have our graduation performance at the UCB Theatre at 4:00.

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I got up pretty early and before taking a shower or anything went to Duane Reed to return a curling iron I had bought (having forgotten my own from home), which I used only once or twice. It kept smoking, which didn’t seem quite right. At first I thought it was just from being new but after the second time with little puffs of smoke coming out of the end, I said uh-uh and returned it. I came back to the hotel to finish packing and realized I had forgotten to buy a hair pin or barrette of some sort, which I wanted so that my hair wouldn’t fly in my face during our show, so had to go back to Duane Reed. Thankfully this is not a long trip, as there must be eleventy million Duane Reeds in New York City and I only had to walk 50 yards outside my hotel to get back to one. There were two, in fact, right across the street from each other, and I know at least two more within a block-and-a-half heading toward Columbus Circle. I can’t imagine how they all stay in business. I couldn’t find a barrette that 1) didn’t look like something a Japanese schoolgirl would wear; and/or 2) would work in my hair, which is extremely thick so there aren’t many barrettes or clips that can hold it decently. I had been using two chopsticks to put it into a twisty bun all week but wanted to wear it down for the performance. Since I couldn’t find anything suitable, I just decided to wear it entirely down and hope it didn’t keep falling in my face.

I then headed down 8th to find a non-chain breakfast place, which I did and finally had Belgian waffles, something I’d asked about at several places during the week and had always been told, “Oh, the waffle maker just broke.” Yeah right it “just” broke. You just don’t want to make waffles, dude. Take them off the menu why don’t ya.

Back to the hotel, packed, checked out. I was planning to watch Sharilyn’s graduation show at 2:30 so I had several hours to kill before then. I decided to take the bus up 8th Avenue, which turns into the famous Central Park West as it runs along the park. It was a glorious day out, the nicest day of the week so far, at least at that time of the morning. I rode the bus up to 96th and got off and walked through the park until 71st and then got back on the bus and made my way down to Chelsea. I passed the building where my mom used to live in about 1953, corner of W. 81st and Central Park West. Her little apartment must be worth about $6 million+ now. O what could have been, if she had only held onto it, right? Can’t dwell on these things or I’d just be depressed all the time.

I was surprised at how many people were there for the 2:30 show. Probably 50, and these are paying customers. I have since discovered that it’s kind of unusual for an improv school to have graduation performances at the lower levels. The Second City doesn’t, at least not for their intensive programs; ImprovBoston doesn’t either, not until you get up to Level 5. I almost didn’t stay for this, in fact; it cost me another $400 to stay for the two extra days, plus an increase in plane fare, and I had asked if it was mandatory that we stay for the performance and was told “no,” but that most people did. And thank god I changed my mind and said screw the cost, I’m staying, because it was totally worth it. I think Second City, IB, and anywhere else that doesn’t do a show at every level is making a big mistake. It doesn’t have to be long; 20 minutes would be enough, even. But the experience of performing in front of a real audience on a real stage is unbelievably powerful, and especially on a stage that is THE stage for improv. If I studied at Second City, I’d be incredibly disappointed to look at that stage and know I wasn’t getting on it in front of anyone, in front of people who actually chose to go to a class show, who wanted to see non-professionals perform, and were happy to pay for it.

Sharilyn’s show went really well. I was in the front row and used her camera and mine to take pictures of her and the other cast members. Their structure was a little different from what we did: they also did monologue/scene, but they did three monologues all at once, by three different people, and then did all their scenes based on those three monologues. (Our structure was monologue/4 scenes, three times.) She had a really cool walk-on (that means someone else is really doing the scene but someone in the back line will “walk on” and do or say something, very briefly, that adds to the scene). Hers was during a scene where two people were on some kind of carnival ride that went under water and they were deathly afraid, yelling they couldn’t breathe and were going to drown, and Sharilyn walked on and around them with her arms opening and closing in a big V, whereupon they started screaming, “Shark, shark!!!” It was really funny. Just that 3 seconds, with no dialogue on her part, really added to the depth (pun!) of the scene.

They got done and I waited outside for her to say goodbye, as she was flying out and couldn’t stay for my show. Then I went back in and met the rest of my class. We did some warmups and then headed backstage so the audience could start being seated. This is when I really started to be glad I stayed. There’s a big sign on the door: “UCB performers and staff ONLY!” and it was very heady to be able to go past that door into the back. Which, in case you are interested, is incredibly small and cramped and filled with video and sound equipment and various other mysterious “stuff” that takes up 80% of the space. We had split up into two groups while doing our warmups and spent our time backstage thinking of our name and deciding who would introduce us. My group became “The Semi-Colons” (I had suggested “Splendiferous Zeppelin”; the somewhat bizarre looks I got in return were clear indications that nobody there was a true Stephen Colbert fan); the other group called themselves “Where’s Sweden?” which was a funny reference to something that had happened on Day 1 of our class: one of the students was from Sweden and was talking about how many Americans did not know, even within a continent’s reach, where Sweden was, assuming it was in South America.

I thought I was going to be really nervous and had contemplated taking a Valium beforehand, just in case, but I didn’t. My group went first, Ari (who was directing) introduced the whole class, and the second I got out from behind the curtain I had no nervousness at all. None. I was pretty shocked at that. I had to remind myself that I hadn’t taken the Valium. I should add that we had been told (and this is what happens at every improv performance I have ever attended) to enter the stage pumped up, dancing around, psyched, excited, etc. But everyone except me just walked out there and lined up! I went out all over-exaggerating my excitedness, doing the snaps, you know? Everyone else must have forgotten that they were supposed to be kind of goofy for the entrance. I hope I didn’t look too weird, but what the hell, I kind of like looking weird. Improv is one of the few places where the weirder you are, the funnier you are.

Someone from our group introduced us and asked for a suggestion from the audience. Someone shouted out “Elephant!” so the deal is, whoever is inspired by that word in whatever way–a direct inspiration (e.g., a story about elephants)–or indirectly (e.g., “elephants are gray and that reminds me of winter, so here’s my story about Christmas”)–just steps out and does a 2-minute monologue. Well, “elephant” immediately reminded me of “nose,” which reminded me of something that happened to me when I was little, so I stepped out first and this is the story I told:

“When I was little, I had an older brother and older sister. Well I still have them. Anyway, I was pretty messed up as a child, with my glasses and eye patch and hideous overbite, as my class knows after hearing story after story on it this week … this whole class has been like therapy. So I think being ostracized so much outside the family made me want to really be “in” on things in the family, and as all little kids do, this means wanting to join in with my older siblings, no matter what THEY want, because they just seemed so exciting to me. I wanted to play with them and hang around with them and do whatever they were doing. I especially adored my older brother, and followed him all the time. If he made a sandwich, I wanted to make one. If he told me Tabasco sauce tastes good, I wanted to drink it. But of course, older brothers and sisters do not want to play with their younger siblings. That didn’t stop ME from wanting to join in though, and I did it as much as I could, no matter how much they protested. So one day my brother was chasing my sister and as usual, I inserted myself into the activity. They were running around and I was following and they were trying to shoo me away to no avail. They weren’t getting rid of me, oh no. At one point, my sister ran into a bedroom that had two very low twin beds on the opposite sides of the room, and she ran under one of them. I wanted to be in on it–whatever “it” was, it looked so fun–and followed her into the room and ran under the other bed, lying on my stomach with my face pointing down to the floor, balancing on my nose. Well, my brother came in and thinking that my sister was under the bed I was actually under, jumped on top and started jumping up and down and of course I didn’t know this at the time but my sister who was watching described it vividly years later, “Your face just went–FLAT!–into the floor. You had your nose showing and then it.was.gone. So there was blood everywhere, I’m screaming, my sister is screaming, my brother is petrified yet denying everything, my mother ran in and saw what happened and said to my brother, “Stupid, STUPID, how could you do something like this?! Look what you’ve done to your little sister!!!” And my brother, justifying things as only a 10-year-old can, shouted insistently, “It’s not my fault! I didn’t do it on purpose! It was an accident! I thought Carla was under there, not Mary!!!” Because it would have been okay if he jumped on the bed when someone else was under there, right???

And that, ladies and gentleman, is why my nose is no longer the cute, pert, upswept bump-free nose of my toddlerhood, but rather this thing [points to profile]. Thank you very much.”

And then we did four scenes off that monologue. I don’t think I participated in this round, because I had done the monologue, and the best people to riff off it are the ones who are getting random ideas from it, as opposed to the person to whom the event actually happened. Then another monologue and four scenes, then another and four scenes, and then we were done. I did I think three scenes altogether, which is about what everyone does, although if you just stand there the whole time, that’s okay too. (”Okay” meaning nobody is going to scold you for not jumping in, but really, the point is not to just stand in the back line.) I did one with another woman, in which I turned out to be a man (you take as a fact what is offered from your scene partner–no matter what it is–and she called me her husband, so that means I was her husband) and we had 13 children, two of them having died because we had so many we forgot to feed all of them, and with the wife pregnant again with twins we were thrilled that we’d be back up to 15 and able to field a hockey team. Yes, infant neglect and mortality can be funny. I forget the other ones I did; I think that one was the longest and has stuck in my mind the most.

Ari was a really good director. He would just cut the lights at whatever point in the scene he felt it was done, whether that was 10 seconds in or 90 seconds in. It helps to have a good director who knows when to cut because that keeps the pace of the show fast and the energy high. I had felt that the earlier cast was allowed to go on a little bit too long in some scenes, and would have benefited from having their lights cut sooner. (But what do I know; I’m not an expert on this.) Then our show was over (strangely, we exited without bowing–I said after we got behind the curtain, “Hey we were supposed to bow!” but nobody else seemed to think this was a big deal that we hadn’t–and we sat down to watch the other half our class perform. And when they were done, we all went back on stage to be clapped again, and wished farewell by Ari.

Right after the class, I was out in the audience space (the performers exit by the regular door that everyone else does) and several people from the audience came up to me to tell me that I, specifically, was really funny. I was shocked because I didn’t think I was especially funny at all, let alone “really” funny. It must have been the monologue. I guess everyone can sympathize and empathize with a sibling story.

I am incredibly glad I decided to screw the money and stay for the performance. Never again will I even consider not doing so. And I think that one factor alone–performing on THAT stage in front of a real audience–makes UCB classes far and away better than any other training center. There is nothing like the feeling of dozens of people all looking at you and clapping. I’ve had that lots of times before, of course, via other shows or performances, but for an improv performer, acting on that stage is like being at Carnegie Hall is for a pianist. It’s got a lot of history and backstory and aura to it. And I loved every second of being up there.

Now I gotta figure out how to work out a weekly trip to New York so I can take another class. Soon. Really soon.

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Friday, August 3

The last day of class was today. We spent the whole time preparing for our performance on Sunday. More doing monologues and riffing off the monologues into scenes. I was getting really sleepy by about 3:30. I hadn’t even been staying out really late, but the combination of 6 hours a day of acting class, plus all the walking in the baking humidity, well by Day 5 anyone would be tired. Everyone in the class said they were wiped. At the end of the day, Sharilyn and I went back to my hotel so she could use my laptop (her power cord had died on her own laptop and she was having to pay for using her hotel’s Internet station–something like a dollar for 3 minutes–so I said she should use mine. Even though my wireless connection was not that great–we had to practically do gymnastics with the machine to get it in a position where it could pick up a decent signal. Next time I stay there I’m asking for a lower-floor room. (They had told me my floor was having problems with the wireless.) Or geez, install some more access points!

Sharilyn used the computer for a little while and then went back to her own place. I was so tired that I didn’t even want to get up to get dinner, although I was getting hungry, and kept putting off getting my butt off the bed and by the time I thought I really better go find something, a huge thunderstorm had started and so I was trapped, so to speak. It was pretty late by that time–after 11:00 PM–and while there were plenty of places nearby I didn’t have an umbrella and didn’t want to go out in the lightning anyway. So I watched some terrible movie, whose name thankfully escapes me, and just went to sleep.

Saturday, August 4

My plan for Saturday was to head back over to the Paley Center (aka The Museum of Television & Radio) and catch another panel or two from The Daily Show, and maybe a couple of old episodes, and then go do a little shopping. I wanted to buy some sneakers of some kind. I had only brought heels with me and wanted some sneakers for the performance on Sunday. Just in case; you never know if you’re going to be running in place or leaping across the stage, and while I am very comfortable in heels it would be just my luck to fall flat on my face on stage in front of all those people.

I got to the MTR at noon, right when they opened. A funny thing happened before that: I had been there before and knew exactly where it was, but I guess when I was walking I must have had my head in the clouds and so walked right past it and crossed Fifth Avenue, which means I was now on the East Side of Manhattan instead of the West Side. I could tell within a block that something had changed; it was like being in a different city almost. I tend to spend most of my time in NYC on the West Side or in the Village. It’s kind of a shock to see the East Side.

Anyway, once I saw La Grenouille I knew I had gone too far and turned back. I ended up buying a membership to the MTR. I figure I go to NYC often enough that I’d get full value out of it; plus, day tickets only allow an hour of viewing time (although they often give you more anyway) while a membership gets you 3 hours. So I got it. Also, members get notified of panels ahead of time, before the general public, and the tickets to those are pretty hard to come by so all the advance I can get is good.

I ended up choosing another couple of old Daily Show episodes and a couple of panels (one from 1999 and one from 2005). One of the episodes had a hilarious segment with Stephen dressed as Hitler–mustache, hair combed forward, brown shirt–reporting from Berlin where he couldn’t understand why people (especially old people) were yelling at him and refusing to talk to him as he was trying to do a story. This is one of the “lost episodes” and I had not seen it before. What I mean by “lost” is, most of the Daily Show episodes from 2003 to the present are available through file trading (a chunk of early 2003 is missing for some reason), but episodes from 1999-2002 are fairly scarce. Episodes pre-1999 are practically non-existent. Oh, they’re out there–someone probably is sitting on a gold mine of VCR tapes–but freely available, there are not many. If anyone has anything they’d like to share, please contact me. This particular Hitler episode I’ve never seen a screen cap of, nor heard discussed by anyone, and I don’t have it myself (and I have 99.5% of everything Stephen/Jon-related since about 1994). While at MTR, I was a very bad girl and took a couple of photos of the screen, which is HIGHLY against the rules, and actually one of the employees came over after I had already put the camera away but he must have thought I was fiddling with something (which actually I wasn’t at that moment) and said in a suspicious voice, “You aren’t recording anything, are you???” Man that made me nervous! So because I feel bad that I even took the two pictures, and plus I think a lot of people would misunderstand both Stephen dressed as Hitler and my publicizing of that particular picture, I think it’s best if I leave it off the blog. They might show up somewhere else, if you know what I’m saying. And some of you do.

After leaving MTR, I walked back to the subway and intended to take it down to the West Village but for some reason, when the #1 got to 14th Street, it reversed course all the way back to Penn Station, and by that time it was getting late, so I just got out there and found a shoe store and bought a couple of pairs. Then it was back to my hotel to get ready to go out. I had gotten an email on my BlackBerry from Sharilyn saying that while she was at TKTS buying tickets for a Broadway show, she saw a guy she recognized: Howard Feller, Jon’s former partner from 13 years ago on The Jon Stewart Show. Only Sharilyn would recognize him, of course! She must know (or at least know of) every standup comic who has had the least iota of success in the past 20 years. If they played in Peoria, as the saying goes, she probably saw their act at one time or another. She asked if it was him and they got to talking and he said he was doing a standup set that night. So she and I decided to meet at my hotel, go to dinner, and then get to Howard’s act. We went to a nice Italian place on 8th with a waiter straight out of The Godfather. Very charming, with a marvelous accent, but I expected him to all of a sudden walk quickly in the back as a silence descended over the room, and then someone was gonna get his brains blown out. Thankfully that didn’t happen. Good food, good dinner, as we discussed some crazy Internet people. Yep, there are people on this here Web who are far more nutty than I. You wouldn’t believe it even if I swore I was not making up characters for my next mental-hospital drama. But enough about that.

We got to the venue–a restaurant that had a guy out front hawking the show–and were led into the back room … where we discovered that we were the first audience members, and as it turned out, the ONLY audience members. Which means they cancelled the show. Not before we got there; after. Due to no customers. There were a few people there who clearly worked there, and we asked if Howard was still coming in and they thought he was so we waited a while so that Sharilyn could talk to him and possibly ask a few questions for her JSS site. We were just about to leave when Howard appeared. He looks EXACTLY the same as he did in 1994. Jon looks a lot older but not Howard. I mean, he looks the same then as he does now, not the same now as he did then. There’s a difference there; think about it. Well we had a nice talk with Howard and he was quite taken with Sharilyn. I felt a little like a 1950s chaperone. O, if this had been some other former (or current) TV star, how different things might have gone … but let’s just say that Sharilyn felt it was best to maintain a professional relationship in this particular case. We did have a nice talk with him–he was very pleasant and told us what he’s up to now, still doing a lot of standup, and shared a few funny stories from the JSS–and after a while it was getting pretty late (late for me is midnight, keep in mind) so we said our goodbyes and hit the road.

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Thursday, August 2

After yesterday’s break, we were back to class today. In the morning we worked more on scenes, characterization, inspiration, and really defining the “who/what/where” that is probably the most important element of starting any scene. It sets the whole rest of the conversation between the players if there is a clear, strong offer and it’s obvious who these characters are, what they are to each other, and where they are located. Then you can go in a million directions from that focused starting point.

In the afternoon, we started preparing for our graduation performance by practicing monologues and bopping scenes off the monologue. The monologues are supposed to be first-person experiences, true ones, from the speaker’s own life. Not necessarily funny; just something that happened to them or something they observed, and whatever the effect of that incident was. First we just practiced straight monologues, so everyone could get the feel for how long the intro is, how long the body, and how long the conclusion is. Then we started going up into groups and based on a suggestion from the audience, someone in the group would go out and do a monologue; then that person would step back and the whole group would do four scenes based on it. Not directly based on it; if it was a monologue about someone getting into a car accident with your boss, who subsequently fired you, nobody was supposed to go out and do a scene about getting into a car accident, or about getting fired. You could do a scene about being made the department manager at work; or finding a new job; or working at an auto-parts store; or watching the Challenger explosion. The monologues are supposed to inspire you, not dictate the plot of your scene. Sometimes people would go out and, despite Ari’s instructions, riff exactly off the monologue and they would get stopped and told to rephrase and rethink. (Later on, instead of being able to restart, they’d be “dinged”–similar to what would happen, and did happen, during the actual show when someone took an idea directly off the monologue: he got one sentence in and had the lights dimmed, which signaled the end of the scene. That in itself was funny; not that he did it wrong, but that it was a 3-second scene. Those can be very effective, actually, and tell a lot even in that short a time period.)

Anyhoo, I think every monologue I told during my turns was about my life as a hideous child: I was incredibly pasty white, I had glasses, an eye patch, a 1″ overbite (thank god for orthodontia), fever blisters all over my mouth all the time, I was extremely shy, very small for my age, very smart and terrible at sports (which means I practically had UNPOPULAR FREAK tattooed on my forehead) and wore unfashionable clothes due to being too poor to afford the cool stores. The whole class was always a little depressed, I think, after my stories. (Don’t worry, I’ve gotten over most of the pain by now. )

We had heard that on Thursday night, Dan Bakkedahl (from The Daily Show) as well as several other performers I really wanted to see were going to be in a show at UCB called “Gravid Water.” This is a show where the cast is half improvisers and half regular actors. The regular actors have a part in a scripted play memorized, and they play that character the whole time, never deviating from the script, while the improvisers entirely improvise their own parts. Further, the improvisers have no idea what the play is that they’re going to “be in” ahead of time, and so have no time to practice or think how they might try to turn the scene.

I was not expecting that this would be all that good–I mainly wanted to see Dan and Peter Gwinn (a writer on The Colbert Report and regular UCB performer)–and I was stunned at how amazing it was. An incredible display of talent on both sides: the scripted actors might have even had it more difficult since they did not alter their own parts at all and had to react logically to the improvisers’ lines. And when I say the scripted actors didn’t deviate at all, I mean they did not at all: in one scene, the scripted actor was supposed to eat a sandwich, but a fly had landed on it (a real fly), and Peter Gwinn told her this several times as part of “his” part, but goddammit the script said to eat that sandwich and so she ate it. She didn’t give one iota of indication that just because he had said a fly was on it that she’d deviate from her scripted part. I was dying, having been sitting in the front row and seen the fly having a nice leisurely walk all over her edible prop.

Peter did another nice scene from Evita, where the person playing Evita (Kate Tellers) sang the entire part and he mostly talked back although he did get a couple of sung lines in there too. It was really amazing. Dan had a long scene from The One-Armed Man, by Horton Foote, which is a play about a mill worker (Ptolemy Slocum) who lost his arm in a workplace accident and who returns to his old job but his boss is unsympathetic to his problems, and eventually the “man” kills him. Dan was really good. He’s not used enough on The Daily Show.

He came out after and signed Sharilyn’s TDS Emmy DVD (this is a “for your consideration” DVD sent out to voting members before nominations are due) and he didn’t even know what it was. This seems to be a common occurrence with these DVDs; Rob Riggle had no clue what it was either when he saw one a few weeks ago. He looked pretty tired and probably wanted to get out of there (he has a newborn) so I didn’t ask him to sign anything for me; I didn’t have anything special like the DVD anyway so I didn’t want to keep him.

Christina Gausas also did a nice scene (with Peter Gwinn and Stephen Ruddy, who also directed) from The Mall by William Inge. I’ve seen Christina several times before in Let’s Have A Ball and highly recommend catching her shows if you can. She’s a longtime UCB performer and very talented.

After Gravid Water, we headed over to the Magnet Theater on W. 29th to see John Oliver do standup. We got seats in the front row, yay. The whole show was good (there were several comics who performed before John did), and John was great. I didn’t know he did standup at all and he was really funny. I must report that I and my big mouth interjected ourselves into the show (sitting in the front didn’t hurt, obviously). At one point, John was talking about the differences between the U.S. and the U.K. (he’s English, for those who don’t know) and we had this conversation:

John: So what do you do in America if someone breaks into your house?
Audience: (silence)
Me: Shoot him!
John: So you have a gun?
Me: No, but I could get one easily.
John: Well see, that’s the difference between the U.S. and Britain!

My claim to participatory standup fame.

When the show was over, we stayed to talk to him (Sharilyn had met him before and talked with him about doing open mic at the Comedy Cellar) and as soon as he saw her, he clearly remembered her and said, “So did you do it?!” And she showed him the pictures on her phone of her standing up there, at the mic, in front of that famous wall, and he got a big smile on his face and exclaimed “No way!!!” He looked really happy for her. We talked to him for about 15 minutes and he was a very nice guy. Seems totally unaware that he’s famous; I guess by New York standards he’s not, but among TDS watchers he’s quite well known. He gave me a funny autograph that said: “To Maryelle, Good luck finding a gun! -John Oliver” So much nicer than the standard impersonal scribble a lot of actors give. (Picture below; unfortunately I spilled something in my suitcase on the return flight and it got a little wet, hence the bleeding ink.)

All in all, a very good day! I have a picture of me and John that I’ll put up later, when I remove my demon redeye from it. John looks great just as he is.

Edit: here’s the picture. Why am I so blotchy?

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Tuesday, July 31

More class today. Really fun although it’s a little hard being in a class this large (15 people). I am used to classes of 10-12, or even less. I think this is just a tad too large for comfort. Actually we had 16 originally but someone who was there yesterday never came back today and either dropped out or perhaps switched to a weekly class instead of the Intensive version. It is quite a lot of class time; by 4:30 I was getting tired. Improv is a fairly physical activity. You don’t just sit there doing reads. I mean, it’s not a marathon or anything but there are a lot of warm-up games where you’re either running around, literally, or singing in a somewhat frenetic manner, so sometimes you actually get out of breath. It’s like walking a few miles during the course of each half of the class. And there is a LOT of mental gymnastics and that takes the pep out of you after a while. Coffee was my very best friend this entire week.

As part of our class, we have to see at least two improv shows at UCB. I ended up going to one on Tuesday, “Harold Night.” They do Harolds all the time but Tuesdays are a whole night of nothing but Harold. Often times they mix Harold performances in with sketch or other types of improv; I’ve been to UCB before this trip and all I’ve ever seen there are Harolds although I know they do quite a lot of other comedy also. It was pretty good and we had front-row seats, which is always nice. UCB is a typical black-box theatre: it looks like someone’s basement, only bigger. So front row means you are really close. I liked the first group, “Beverly Hills,” the best. It’s clear that Harold Night is popular: it was very crowded; all the seats were filled and there were a lot of people standing or sitting on the floor. We stayed through four or five groups and then hit the road. It’s tiring acting all day and all the walking around you do, plus it was roasting hot in NYC that week. It’s hard to stay perky in the humidity.

Wednesday, August 1

We didn’t have class on Wed. so it’s basically a free day to do whatever you want in NYC. Sharilyn and I went to The Paley Center for Media, formerly known as The Museum of Television & Radio. Yes, I did feel weird being in NYC and going to a museum to watch TV, but MTR (it will always be “MTR” to me) has an enormous repository of tape that is either rarely or never broadcast: TV shows that were never syndicated or panels the MTR puts on with the casts/crew of different shows and movies, which I’ve never seen shown on TV. These panels are the best thing they do, in my opinion. Naturally, given both Sharilyn’s and my interest in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, we wanted to watch a couple of old episodes of TDS–ones that are not available via The Mysterious Underground of online trading. (Nor which are ever re-broadcast by Comedy Central for some unfathomable reason. When either TDS or TCR take a break, CC only shows episodes from the previous week. Never anything older. It’s really baffling not to mention way fucking annoying.)

Anyway, we watched a Daily Show panel from 2001 with Jon Stewart, Madeleine Smithberg, Ben Karlin (former exec. producer), Paul Mercurio (former writer and desk correspondent, currently a standup comic in NYC and the warmup comic at TDS tapings), and Stephen Colbert (no explanation needed–I hope). It was really really interesting. This was long before any concept of TCR had ever been developed, of course, and only a couple of years after Jon took over TDS from Craig Kilborn, and under whose leadership it completely changed from being a rather “fluffy” parody of an early-evening infotainment show to the politically oriented smart funny biting satire that it is today. (All the best to Craig, but thank god he left.) There was one hilarious part where Jon goes over to Stephen and gives him a big kiss and you can hear him whisper into his mic “You’re SO sexy!” I’m not sure if he realized how well that would get picked up! Then Stephen expressed dismay by saying, “Jon, you never go far enough! You always stop before the tongue!” Oh I love it how those two boys love each other. I am so happy for the success of Stephen’s show but those two had the most fantastic chemistry and it would be wonderful to see them working together now in some public capacity.

Even older than the TDS panel was a Jon Stewart Show panel from (I think) 1994. Sharilyn is the resident expert on The JSS. I bet not even Jon knows as much about it as she does. This wealth of knowledge about a show that went off the air 12 years ago will figure into one of our “escapades” later in the week, which is doubly ironic after watching this particular panel. Jon looked so adorable, so young, so sweet. He was just a kid (even though he was, what, 33 at the time? Such a babyface. And no pudge yet.

We also watched Jon’s very first episode hosting TDS (January 11, 1999, I believe) with Michael J. Fox as the guest; and another one also from I think 1999 with Mike Myers. This was apparently the second time that week that Myers had appeared but I didn’t know that until they started referring to his just-prior appearance. It’s really a damn shame that Comedy Central cannot see the value in releasing these old episodes, or can’t work out whatever residuals deal they need to work out. From what I’ve heard, they give great creative control to their producers and “charge” for it with really shitty (relatively) salaries and revenue packages. Jon and Stephen make by far the least of any late-night talk show host. But they get a lot of artistic freedom from CC to do what they want, how they want, without a ton of bothersome interference from the suits. I guess to a large extent that makes the crappy (again, relatively) pay worth it.

After MTR, we parted ways and I went back to my hotel to get dressed and ready to go visit a friend at her job. Sharilyn was going to attend TDS, having just gotten the ticket on line that morning. Unfortunately she got there a little too late and couldn’t get in and they told her to try Colbert, but since she had just attended a taping there a week or two earlier and they have gotten very strict about their “6-month rule” [you can only attend a taping once every 6 months], it was a no-go. Even though they needed people to fill the audience! I have heard there has been some noticing on the set of repeat faces and certain persons were getting annoyed by that, so they really cracked down on it recently. (They didn’t used to be so strict although the 6-month rule has technically been in effect for a long time, but it was never really enforced.) Anyway, she was too late for TDS and TCR wouldn’t let her in, so she just went on to her next activity, which was doing open mic at The Comedy Cellar, a well-known club in New York where all the big names have performed, both when they were nobodies and after they became super-famous. It’s kind of like “home” to a lot of them, and for a standup comic it’s a big deal to perform there, and especially to perform there for the first time. There is a lot of sentimentality attached to that back brick wall. My plan was to get over there after visiting my friend so that I could watch her set and take pictures but due to unforeseen circumstances I totally missed it and barely even made it to the Cellar in time for the regular show at 9:00. We saw several different comedians, including Darryl Hammond of Saturday Night Live. He was good but seemed a little three sheets to the wind. All I kept thinking of while he was up there was Bill Clinton after a six-pack. Anyway, we watched the show and then went home. Well I’m pretty sure we did; I have to check Sharilyn’s blog to make sure I’m not missing anything! She had the right idea by making an entry every day; much smarter than the way I’m doing it all after-the-fact. Part of my excuse is that I had an extremely crappy wireless connection all week and could barely check my email, let alone make changes to my Web site.

More later!

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I am back from my week in New York City, where I took an intensive workshop in longform improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. And even though I really don’t like this word, there is no other one to describe it but AWESOME!

Monday, July 30

My flight was supposed to leave at 7:50 AM, which would get me to JFK at about 8:30, from where I would then take a cab directly to the UCB school on W. 30th and 7th. However, the weather did not care that I had to be there at 11:00 AM, and decided to fuck things over for me by having a thunderstorm after I got to Logan. Therefore, we didn’t even leave Boston until almost 9:00 and then sat on the tarmac for quite a while in a stack, and so I didn’t get out of the terminal at JFK until 10:30. Obviously I was not going to make it to my class by 11:00. They’re pretty strict there about being late and not allowing people in past a 15-minute grace period, so I knew I was screwed. I had to wait forever in the cab line too, and didn’t get to Manhattan until about 12:15, and the UCB receptionist said that perhaps when they had their bathroom break at 12:30 I could go in. Which I did and it was fine, although I felt kind of out of it having missed the first part of the class where I’m sure people introduced themselves. On a happy note, my comedy writer/performer/producer friend Sharilyn from Canada was also taking a class at the same time–a class identical to the one I was in, but taught by someone else–and she came in during the break and said hi and we made plans for lunch. That area of NYC (Chelsea) has tons of little restaurants, at non-tourist prices, so it was pretty easy to find something different every day for our hour lunch break.

Betsy Stover was the instructor for this session. (It turned out that the instructors often split up a workshop; we also had Ari Voukydis, who happens to be Betsy’s husband, teach us for about half the time too.) If you have a chance to see either of them perform at UCB, or even just to watch some of their television appearances, please do–both of them were super nice and of course hilarious.

Not to get too much into the mechanics of the class, which I’m sure nobody who isn’t already in improv would care about, but at UCB they teach the Harold form of longform, created by Del Close and Charna Halpern and most commonly identified with The Second City Theatre in Chicago. Lots of improv groups do the Harold but Second City is the grand-daddy of them all. This was an intensive class, 6 hours a day, and man that is a LOT of improv all at once. Most of the stuff I learned is stuff I already knew (not that I’m an expert at it, but rather that I’d learned it before) but it’s always nice to see different teachers’ perspectives on it (and this was doubly interesting given that our two instructors have not only been performing improv at UCB for years, but are married to each other).

Monday night I was pretty tired after getting up at 2:30 in the morning the previous day so I just got done with my class and went back to my hotel with Sharilyn and hung out and then we went to dinner, where the waiter thought she was a CNN anchor and a customer came over to tell me how beautiful my hair was. **blush** Then it was off to bed.

I have pictures for future posts; it’s not all just boring text!

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