10/7/2002:

Yeah, yeah, I'm late again. I have reasons. Really.

It can't be work. I don't work that much. And yet the commute home drains me so much that I sit mutely on the couch when I get back...

This strip is also about sitting mutely and about endings. It's the end of another recurring Scrubs joke: Sil's sleepless nights. I'm sure she still doesn't get that much sleep in D.C., but at least now it's not for classes.

Anyway, one more after this strip.

But let's not be sad!

As I was driving home this past weekend, I caught a stray memory of home. I used to play with Legos, like many other engineering minded kids. I went from designing spaceships and cars to acting out stories with the more poseable Technics figures and their eternal struggle with my GI Joes. This was totally influenced by X Men, as each character had a special power. The Lego guys were the heroes, and Joe and Cobra forces gave up on their own personal enmity to band together against them: plastic with dots versus plastic with features. These stories were cribbed massively from graphic novels or movie plots, and yet as I acted them out, each character had different motivations for taking part in the struggle. Long after I'd stopped getting new GI Joes and Legos, the saga went on, with some casualties due to breakage. Those Technics guys would lose their arms easily so I made up exoskeleton arm harnesses out of regular Lego which looked pretty sweet. GI Joes were held together in the middle by a rubber band which would also break after being forced to ninja kick for months and months.

The reason I thought of this was because I was thinking about improv and imagination and how the story just appeared to me as I played. I couldn't think of a way to add someone else to the creation process. Susan Messing always saidthat kids play together naturally the same way she tries to teach adults to do improv. That seems a little idealistic, since improv is about saying "yes" and based on the kids I saw this summer, they love to tell each other "no." When Kuwie and I would play Secret Agent and run around with toy guns, we had to back up the action all the time because we'd tell each other that the other had died somehow ("You just stepped on a mine" or "You just got shot". "Rewind!"). We also had to tell each other exactly what was in the individual imagination. 'There are 4 guys around the wall! Just got one! Missed. I am now defusing the bomb!" Which is another thing we frown on in improv.

I guess all this is on my mind as I am moving from performing improv to teaching it. I need some sort of performance outlet and since my old team is scattered around the country, I'll need to either find a more individual mode like storytelling (or Lego play, think anyone would want to see me do that?) or find some new secret agents to play with.

kip