Evolution Through Creation

DAY NINETY-FIVE: The Pauper Becomes the Second Option

"People love witnessing creation." - My improv teacher, Spike.

It's a simple and even obvious thought that still manages to confound people.  When we witness something, we witness it in one of two ways.  Option #1 is as a casual observer.  In the most basic sense of viewing something.  If it's funny, we allow our bodies to laugh.  If it is sad, we allow our bodies to cry.  If it's awful, we allow our bodies to throw peelable fruits in its general direction.

Option #2 is as an absorptive viewer.  If it's funny, we allow our bodies to laugh, and then we attempt to dissect why we are laughing.  Am I laughing due to physicality, situation, diametrically opposed ideologies?  In this option, we are no longer static members of the audience.  We can critique the creation in front of us, and that is how we become better creators ourselves.

It took me a long time to start absorbing my entertainment in this fashion.  A recent example that springs to mind is The Beatles' "I Am The Walrus," a song with lyrics like "I am the eggman," and "Goo goo goo joob."  It's a song that as a 14-year-old beginning to acclimate herself to the later Beatles canon, I took it mostly as "What a silly song!  Who would be sitting on a cornflake???"  But it was The Beatles.  And I grew up understanding that The Beatles were infallible artists.  Everything they created was inherently a masterpiece because, The Beatles.

As I was listening to that song the other day, I realized it still doesn't make much goddamned sense, and from my knowledge of The Beatles, I'm fairly positive hallucinatory drugs are partially - if not completely - responsible for this song.  But to write down those lyrics, create melodies, and commit them to a recording - that requires the lack of inhibitions that creation stems from.  It's the reason talented people go undiscovered and untalented people are swimming in their Scrooge McDuck money pits.  You have to remove all sense of inhibition: fear of failure and need for perfection.  You are going to fail while creating.  But if you are good at it, no one will notice.

I've been having a really great time reviewing shows, movies and music I held so dear as a child.  Even as a child, I knew witnessing Buffy the Vampire Slayer was witnessing something special.  And I'd like to think some of Joss Whedon's sense of humor molded a bit of my own.  But re-watching episodes as a 26-year-old who is a decade older than the characters were at the start of the series, I can appreciate the beauty of the story-telling from a new angle.  An episode like "The Body" always felt like something special, but paying attention to the lack of sound, the patience of holding a moment, the out of frame paramedic, and the way each character acts in response - these are no longer elements I take for granted as appearing out of thin air and onto my television screen.  These are products of many people brainstorming in an office until they realize the perfect capper to Anya's inability to understand mortality and Willow's frantic outfit choices would be Anya finding the desired sweater and replacing it next to the chair nonchalantly.

It's watching Can't Hardly Wait 8 years removed from high school and having it resonate 8 times more.  It's understanding that the people who created that movie weren't just some "let's make a high school rager that will net us some money."  It's seeing a writer grappling with the idea of fate, and clinging to the hope that something besides our own meandering thoughts are guiding us through this thing called life, and it's committing that idea to paper.  It's having the courage to tell a story.  The courage to be judged.  The courage to create.

A few years ago, I felt adrift in my early twentysomething bullshit.  I was talking to a friend of mine who had about 3 years on me.  I was concerned that I spent too much time listening to depressing music, drinking wine, and expelling my emotions through aquatic viscera leaking out of my eyeballs.  She told me that was a fine thing to do, as long as I was an active participant in my emotional journey.  It's one thing to cry uncontrollably and spew "whoa is me" bile throughout your brain.  But the only way for such an act to be considered conducive to your emotional and mental well-being is to actively participate in your pain.  "Why am I crying?  Why does this hurt?  How did I get here?  And what can I do to stop it?"  It's a much healthier practice than "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"  See the difference?

So let's all try to be more active participants in our consumption.  Be it sources of entertainment, conversations, or our own thoughts.  If we become more active in our lives, we'll be able to create more.  And there's nothing more impressive to witness than creation.

Yes, and...

DAY TWENTY-ONE: The Pauper Improvises

A long time ago, I remember seeing this teenaged girl doing improv.  In the era of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" (where the points don't matter), she stood out as a young, fearless improviser.  During a game of "Party Quirks", she was deemed the quirk "thinks she's invisible."  And in a moment of seamless improv-ed beauty, she stood in a corner, boomed her voice over the party, and declared "I am God" before stifling back laughter in character.  We were all rolling in fits of laughter ourselves.  And for some reason, I still remember that*.

As I grew older, theater became less and less a part of my life.  I wasn't performing, and I was rarely going to see any new shows.  And college brought out a competitiveness in theater that I just didn't have the stones to contend with.  But no matter how much I distanced myself from that world due to insecurity, I never could shake it fully.  My years of performing ignited a fire within, and insecurity isn't the bucket of water tossed over the flame that one might think it is.  In fact, insecurity is more like a glass lid.  You place it over the flame and slowly watch it dissipate until all you see is smoke.  But if you lift the lid quick enough, the flame survives and flickers.

Until this bitch rears her gaping maw, that is...

This is all to say that I've been thinking of that young girl a lot lately.  As I have gotten back into improvisation, I realize how difficult it really is to be that whip smart.  Not just to come up with some witty turn of phrase, but to come up with something universally funny based on the situation, the irony, or the sincerity.  And I'm having difficulties understanding how it seemed so easy for her.

I'm not going to pretend that I've yanked the tablecloth out from underneath my faithful readers.  Yes, the young ingenue I've discussed is simply a teenaged version of myself.  This is not to toot my own horn, but I was weirdly good at improv when I was younger.  And considering how insecure I felt during every day life as a teenager, this is a feat that as a secure and confident 26 year old trying her hand at improv once again, I simply cannot wrap my head around. But for some reason, nothing I did on stage was ever embarrassing.  It was my security blanket.  My bowl of tomato soup.  The only place I ever felt I belonged.  And when you feel like that, the plebes from your other world just don't matter.

I've tried my hand at little bits of improv during my year of writing courses.  I've attended free Second City seminars where I suddenly felt like throwing up when asked to walk around a room and assume the identity of a princess with a drinking problem or a troll who is a prima ballerina.  I've vamped during scene readings and "Fucking with the Audience" sketches.  But I have yet to feel that same sense of belonging that I once held so essential to life.

And then last night happened.  During improv, we finally moved beyond the mirror games and Zip, Zap, Zops of the level A world and got to create our own characters and dialogue.  And something very strange happened to my body.  I suddenly found myself volunteering in the first group of one of these games.  And even weirder yet, a suspicious lack of hives.

I suddenly didn't feel this mental block that just a few short weeks ago kept me from being able to brainstorm any sort of object work outside of clay molding a bottle of Maker's Mark.  That fearlessness crept over my body.  The desire to do something I loved conquered the fear of looking stupid.  And I threw on my best Fargo accent and created a happy couple taking polaroids and eating wieners at a cocktail party.  What seemed like an impossibility every day for the past year has suddenly become my current reality.  Am I back to where that young girl was?  Well, not nearly.  But she's still in here somewhere.  She's just trying like hell to push that glass lid off before it's too late.