“Don’t try to be clever. Definitely don’t try to be the funniest person up there.”
“There is no risk of me trying to be the funniest person there,” I said. “I’ve seen you guys.”
“And don’t push an idea.”
“That’s going to be harder. I try to push things all the time. I tried to push someone to marry me for years.” I was only half-kidding, and I saw that Lisette could tell.
“When you’re doing improv,” Lisette said, “you listen to the scene. It’s okay if it goes nowhere. Let it go nowhere, and trustsomething will come. And listen to your partner. Listen to what they’re giving you, because they’re channeling their own life and creativity. And using that to build something new is one of the best feelings in the world.”
Lisette walked me through some of the sketches we might do in practice.
“Here’s the key,” she said. “Between now and then, you’re going to want to come up with funny ideas. Don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Just listen and respond honestly, and trust that the funny stuff will come. Because it will. Because you’re funny.”
“No pressure,” I said, drily.
“Exactly!” Lisette cried. “No pressure. Just be in the moment. It’ll come to you.”
“Can I tell you a deep, dark secret?” I said to Lisette. “In college, I wanted to write for Saturday Night Live, and I put together a packet and applied when I was twenty-three.”
“That’s great!”
“No, it’s not, because they rejected me. But you know the worst part? I didn’t realize that I could apply again. I didn’t know that sometimes writers applied for several years before they got the job. I thought that meant that I officially had been found to be not funny, like a stamp on my forehead, so I gave up and chose another career. I didn’t find out until years later that I was wrong. So this is bringing up a lot of repressed trauma.”
“Repressed trauma isperfectfor improv.”
I laughed.
I arrivedat Paul’s house right at 7:30 that Thursday for my very first improv practice. Lisette had explained to me that they practiced every Thursday for a few weeks in a row and then had a show about once every six weeks. It was July 13th, and theirnext big performance would be late in August. She said I was welcome to come to any of the practices, as long as I was on time.
“Paul takes it pretty seriously. But don’t be scared, though. Everyone will be nice. Except Mark, he’ll be mean, but that’s his way of being nice.”
I stood outside and took in Paul’s cute little house—much less ramshackle than the one I was staying in, neatly painted yellow with lights shining from the windows. Paul’s Mini Cooper was parked out front. The sight of the house made me happy and nervous, which I knew was another warning sign that I was feeling too much already. I reminded myself that it was probably Paul’s wife who had picked out this quaint little two-story building with the stained glass over the front door—the wife that Paul was hoping would return to him.
Paul opened the door and smiled when he saw me. “You came!” He seemed so genuinely surprised that I felt foolish, like I was a freshman in college who’d accidentally crashed an upperclassman’s party after mistaking a mention for an invite. I followed him into the house, peeling away my jacket. “Lisette’s made cookies,” he said, taking my coat, “as you can probably tell from the faint smell of burning.”
“Hey!” came Lisette’s angry voice from deep within the house. “Fifty percent of them are fine!”
Beneath the charred scent of oatmeal cookies was a hint of woodsmoke that suggested occasional use of the shiny black wood stove gleaming in one corner. Paul had a large wall of books and DVDs in his living room, an acoustic guitar on a stand, and a deep sofa flanked by two leather armchairs. The open floorplan included a dining area that led back toward an aluminum-and-black modern kitchen. It felt somewhere between a marital home and a nice bachelor pad: sparse, warm, with the appropriate allotment of leather furnishings and ascreen big enough to capture every detail of a movie star’s steely glare when he faced off with terrorists.
“It smells amazing, Lisette!” I called.
“I know!” Lisette replied as she spun toward the dining table with a plate of cookies. “I think I got it right, unless I messed up the salt and sugar. Who wants to test one?”
Lisette’s oatmeal walnut chocolate chip cookies were very good, in spite of a few burned corners. Paul opened up a bottle of wine and banged around with his expensive coffee machine while we waited for Mark, who turned up twenty minutes late, grumbling about a road closure. By eight p.m., everyone was settled into the living room, and I realized I had grown more and more terrified during the last half hour without noticing it.
It was bad enough to stand on a stage and act goofy—not that I’d done that much since high school—but it was entirely another thing to do it in someone’s living room after eating cookies and chatting about the weather. It felt like you were walking into humiliation in cold blood. Sure, in ordinary life, you might embarrass yourself accidentally, but this was making an evening of it.
I felt certain that I couldn’t go through with it at the exact moment Paul said, “All right!” He stood and clapped his hands together, the way he had done at the start of his show. “Let’s get to it. Abigail, you’re going to sit out the first one so you can get the idea, but this is a classic tap in and tap out game. All we’re doing is keeping the scene going. Lisette, you want to start us off?”
Lisette nodded and jumped up. I admired her fearlessness. She didn’t even hesitate. She walked up, sat in an armchair, and began digging through an imaginary bag.
Mark walked up, joining in the scene. “What are you looking for?”
“My shirt. I think it got mixed up with your laundry.”
