Kipworld

I hate how my posting once a week strategy makes the blog look like crap since it just pulls the stuff from the current week and then the right hand side goes all King Kon over the bottom of the page. Sure I could just go ahead and change the template, but that would be more work than tell you about last night’s improv show that we went to go see instead of having real rehearsal.

We were going to go see WeirDass, the two person show by Bob Dassie and Stephanie Weir (who is now on MadTV). I guess the MadTV gives her even more street cred than when she was in Chicago cuz the darn thing sold out before we got there.

I had dropped off my group at the theater while I tried to find parking (all those weenies who’d taken seats from us had also laid claim to every inch of available space on the streets). They called me to say no seats left and I told them, “Alright, back to Evanston.” Which would have sucked because I’d driven like a maniac to get down there and I really wanted a beer to calm my nerves a bit and give me a reason to live.

Ha! Ha! I’m a budding alcoholic! Just kidding.

Roni (another Titanic grad) was working the box office and she told us to go see the upstairs show. It was by Atlantis, doing a form called the Orange. Atlantis is one of these improv supergroups made up of experienced ladies and gentlemen, including drumroll TJ Jagodowski, the best improviser in the city. Never one to pass up a TJ show, we got tix (Roni hooked us up like a madwoman) I got beer (my old friend from IO classes, Jason, was bartending, Hi, Jason).

The show itself started pretty chaotically. One-word word association game into short monologulets that were inspired by each other a bit. Lots of whole stage listening going on, which was pretty impressive. The scenes were based on things that had come before, aping their setups, actually. The level of detail and recall was great, but some of the relationships seemed to suffer. The second act was pretty cool because by then, there were so many little games running around and they also presented scenes from the first act from the other perspectives. There were some people who dominated, and others who seemed a bit lost amid the hubbub. But who am I to talk? I’m just a kid who dropped out of the IO scene.

Here’s the thing. There are certain people like TJ and Noah who are legends and then there is this group of established folks and then the up and comers. Every time I see a show at IO, and I see people that took classes with me, or after me, I have this thing in me that screams, “If you’d stayed in, you’d be up there right now.” Sure, there are plenty of people who go through the IO cashmill, I mean classes, but it takes a while to get invited onto supergroups like that. I like to believe, in the inner workings of my brain, that I could hack it, that I could’ve gotten there with more time and money invested.

I hope that the show that Mike and Joe and I are going to put on puts me back into the scene. Is that selfish?