Kipworld

So, the tenth anniversay Titanic show came and went. More importantly, I got to perform with my team one last time. We all made it (handy that most of us still live in Chicago). We spent the day together just hanging out again. Went to JK Sweets, of course.

At first, I felt some of the same distance I felt before with my team. But as the day went on and we warmed up in Willard’s basement, I felt the old chemistry coming back.

There was a big group warmup at 4:30, led by Mac Antigua from the original team. He’s a motivational speaker for a living, and I went in expecting corny, but actually, he did a nice job of connecting 50 or so performers in a short period of time.

Then the show started.

The evening started with a few words by Mike and Peter. It was weird seeing them up there without me. I felt like I should have stuck around for one more year. But on the other hand, it was nice to be able to just be a guest and not have to worry about anything. The first team went up.

So much improv that night. Every team had 30 minutes (except for the new incubator team) but every team was so used to doing 20 min, that we were running pretty early throughout the night.

We took an unplanned intermission to make up time (even though I had to call and rush El and the rest of my friends who were coming).

We warmed up during the incubator show with memories. True, many of them were from the tour I didn’t get to go on, but I got some in there.

And then it was us.

I remember being heavier than usual. I remember some stuff. I remember a relationship scene with Joe and Heather. Improv shows do not lend themselves well to textual recall (hence the state of all my coaching notebooks with scrawls and lines everywhere).

I remember having an OK time. Not our best show, but not a bad showing.

Then Big Texas went on and did their rockstar thing. And I was so proud of them. When you think about it, I had as much time with them as I did with my Titans team.

Finally Mike’s team went on (name: Version 1.0. I love it). They did a 4 person show that was jaw droppingly good, for a bunch of folks who haven’t seen or performed with each other in ages. The patterns were so tight (I thought to myself, “Did I even do any patterns in our show?”). It was truly amazing.

Then came the party. 50 people crammed in a college apartment. Oh yeah. My team had a bet that the first person to make out with someone on the incubator team got $50 (a life callback to the time Indiana came and Heather got 5$ for making out with one of their guys). No one collected last night.

And then came the hanging out, just us time. We went to Laura, Heather, and Rebecca’s house in the city and just chatted and ate pie and stuff.

Lots of hugs and photos.

It’s amazing how much Titanic has meant to me. How much of my life and myself are in there. I can’t imagine college (and a bit of post college) without it.

And it all started with a piece of plywood with a flyer on it, my freshman year. Well, my part of it. It all really started in Mike’s head, 10 years ago. And though we laughed at him and his dreams, well, here they are. We laughed at him, we laughed with him, and we made the damn things happen.

See you in 10.