2nd Conservatory Class and "The South Side of Heaven"

I had my 2nd Conservatory class yesterday and loved it. I was a little dizzy when I first got there because I hadn't eaten anything all day. But the hunger went away whenever we began our walking around exercise which I really enjoy. It just starts everybody off in a good place and allows us to get comfortable with one another before we go into scenes. I'm enjoying playing with everyone in my class. They're all committed and present, and we're kind of small for a class, or so I hear. Only 12 people. Which makes a little more close-knit and intimate. We then formed a line and did 2 person scenes. Our instructor Norm Holly would give us guidance in the scenes whenever we needed it, but never being heavy handed or negative. We split up in groups of 3 and and started scenes at a moment right after something awkward was said. So the first several seconds are steeped in silence until someone felt the urge to speak. In mine I had just been told that I was adopted by my lesbian parents and not carried in either of their wombs. It was really satisfying to have that natural tension build up and not feel the urge to rush to state something. The next 3 person group was the same exercise, only we built up to it and saw what causes the awkward pause. In that scene it was 3 guys going to see Brokeback Mountain when they had no idea what it was about, just that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are in it. At the end we all find out that we're secretly gay. Breaking up into another group of 3 we did a scene based on a situational faux pas which in normal situations wouldn't be that big of a deal, but in the correct context, is super important. Ours was 3 guys at a college football game who had all painted the letters of their college on their chests, but when one person paints the wrong letter on themselves, instead of UIT we became TIT. In our last group of 3, we're told to set up a situation where there's something that was never meant to be seen, but when it is, it needs to be dealt with. In ours it was 2 kids discovering that Santa Claus is real. But Santa becomes violent to protect his anonymity and we find out that he's near suicidal as well. I enjoyed all the scenes I did and the ones I didn't do. One of my favorites was about a family of dancers who find out their son wants to play basketball instead of perform ballet. The physicality that Danny, Ian, and Kristina had really took it to the next level. Next week we have to bring a theme song that a character of ours would enter a room to. I have nothing yet.

During our break I went downstairs and got a Burrito Bowl from Chipotle and ate it like a death row inmate. After class I decided I was going to try to get into the Second City mainstage show "The South Side of Heaven". After a little bit of "wait and seeing" I was given a free student pass and let inside. So I didn't feel like a complete freeloader, I ordered a Pepsi, misunderstood the offer and ended up buying a souvenir Second City glass, which is now the only glass I will drink milk out of. The show itself was amazing. I won't spoil any details for future viewers, but the scene work was seamless and there were times where shit just got real. It was a complete experience of all the basic human emotions and no one stood out as funnier or better than the other. It was a great ensemble and a great first SC show to see.

After that I hopped the Brown then Red line and made to i.O just in time to see Dummy in the upstairs Cabaret theater. I missed a few minutes at the beginning but they did a great job of coming back to it, so it all made sense. After them were The Murderers which was a really fun show as well that had making love to jellyfish in it. Whenever you think you've seen everything that improv can offer, someone fucks a jellyfish in front of you and the world is illuminated once again.

Collin's Second City Experience

So I've made the leap and moved to Chicago. I'm going to be studying improvisational comedy at the Second City Conservatory. I had my first class on Wednesday and loved it. My instructor is Norm Holly, who is really nice and laid back. I hear that he really doesn't give feedback on what you need to work on. But just taking the one class from him makes me feel like he doesn't have to, because he gets you to a point where you can do it for yourself. Our first "warm up" consists of us walking around the classroom, making eye contact and saying "hi", or some variation. Something that we've all done. But we continued on with it adding a series of questions that Norm would ask us. Such as: 1.) Finish the sentence "You know you're a hipster if... and mine was ... when you tattoo your own skinny jeans on your legs. 2.) Who's the one got away? 3.) Who's the one you should have never been with? 4.) What's the worst place to go for a first day? etc. When we had our answer, we would come downstage and say it, then melt back into the walk. We did that for about 30 minutes or so, and then we did freeze tag which only had the clapping and saying freeze element in it. We didn't have to take the position of the previous player. I felt that our scenes were really good because we had that time to sort of get to know each other while answering the questions. After that we split up into teams of 3 and and did a 5 minute scene in a predetermined environment where our character needed to be informed by a subject that we knew really well. Mine was "movies" (surprised gasp). I won't go into the details of the scene, but it felt really good. The other players in the scene (Brenden and Jessica) were super cool and very funny. The next set of 3 person scenes we did were based on not knowing each other and having a few predetermined objects with us that would inform our characters. I had an abacus and a signed picture of my Mom. That scene went really well too. The last one we did was to get together in a 3 person group and plan out a "blackout" which is a scene that's over on the first beat. Good scene there too. My class is really good and everyone in it is super nice and committed to doing their best. I can't wait to see what other stuff we get into. Waiting an entire week is murder on me. I'd like to thank everyone at Dallas Comedy House and all my friends in Texas. I'd also like to thank Marcus Hall for letting me couch surf with him until I'm big enough to fly away from the nest. I really appreciate you all. Sappy shit.

Mar. 23 Crepes of Wrath DCF show 8:00pm

The Crepes of Wrath show that we put up for the Dallas Comedy Festival was fantastic in my opinion. It was clever without meaning to be clever, it was physical, we played emotions very high and had a lot of fun. I keep feeling better and better about the mono scene after each time we do one. The Crepes show before this one was not stellar, but still interesting and good to learn from. We did a few short mono scenes in the back before the show to kind of get our footing, and warm up at the same time. I think it was successful in getting us in the right frame of mind for doing a 30 minute show without stopping. The scene itself was between a father and a son on the day of the son's wedding. The father was let out of prison to attend the wedding, after which he would have to go back inside. Marc is the reason all of that information got out at the top of the scene, and none of it felt invented or heavy handed. That's where I feel our partnership has it's dynamic, cause he's great at initiating, and I'm great at going with initiations. I do feel bad though because he mentioned I had an ankle bracelet on that tracks all of my movements, but in the next couple of lines I changed it to being in shackles so that I could jump around the stage with my feet together to make a physical joke that we could go back to. I suppose you can have the bracelet and the shackles, but why would you? It was a minor thing and we used it for what it was and didn't make the scene about that, thankfully. We actually grabbed on to the relationship between the father and son early on. Making the father disappointed in the son that he had never shanked a man before. The fact that his son had become an upstanding member of society made him feel ashamed, and the son knew this. We introduced such things as a "toothbrush shank" as a wedding present, the father offering to murder one of his future daughter in-law's boyfriends at the wedding, and finally revealing that the father of the bride was the lawyer that put prison dad in prison. We had a lot of good details and I don't feel we overpowered the scene with useless information. We made it about the father and son the whole time, and when Marc, as the son, finally snapped and started to take on his old man in a role playing/teaching scene within the scene, it really brought it to a different level where I felt neither one of us were thinking about where it was going, it was just going. I would crawl around on the ground playing the part of the lawyer about to get shanked. The show ended on a humorous line instead of any catharsis between the two characters, but i'd like to think we put them on the right path, and their problems were hashed out by the two of them shortly after we'd left the stage.

Feb. 26th Crepes of Wrath 8pm Show

Marc and I decided early in the day that we wanted to try a mono-scene for our Crepes show. I was hesitant at first because we'd never really tried or practiced anything like that. And in the past, we've tried new things at the last second, and fell victim to their pitfalls because we were ill-prepared. But I turned my opinion around and agreed we should go for it. It was a great show. We both had highly interesting, meaty characters with a great relationship to one another. Marc was a southern father who was very patriotic and had strong feels for his hound dog that had recently passed away. The dog was buried next to his wife/my mother. My character was disconnected from his father because of the way he could show love for his dog, but not to his wife or son. So I was the complete opposite of my father, because I loved writing poetry and was in love with an Ethiopian girl who I worked with a Suncoast Video store. Marc's character equated that drinking Coor's Light was the same as being a homosexual. It was really fun to play with that dynamic, and I felt that catharsis was within our grasp until one of the breakers on the lights were tripped, and our show was ended on a weird out.

Feb. 25th Sweater Off Dead 10pm Show

Sweater Off Dead started our new format last night where we stand at the front of the stage after we get the suggestion and one by one perform a small solo monologue about the given suggestion. Last night we got the suggestion of "monkey", greatly influenced I believe by Clay Barton asking the audience beforehand to sound like 75 monkeys. It reminded me of Four Day Weekend's slide show at their theater where they say that the suggestion they get most often is monkey. So we all did our monologues, and I can't really remember anyone's but my own (I'll have to get better at that). So Darek and Carley started off with a scene about a scientist and a super intelligent monkey who he would ask for life coaching. The scene after that was with Kenna and I playing a body builder and a coach who tries to convince the body builder that what they're judging is on the inside. So instead of flexing my muscles, I start to blow up balloon animals. It was a fun silly scene. There was also a great initiation by Darek where he was asked to pick up his toys and he said "How else do you expected me to prepare for my mission to outer space". I loved that. Then it went to the SpaceDMV for him to get his license, and I played an annoyed patron behind him who was in a hurry. So much so that we got our pictures taken together with the warning that their photographic technology could only recognize one face. So we had this Space license for both of us where his face was the only one that showed up, so I couldn't get into clubs, and was harshly questioned when stopped by police. I did a horrible Irish accent in a scene which I felt bad about because I didn't fully commit to it. I was too concerned with looking stupid. Need to work on that. In the final scene, I got labeled as a cat and played it to the hilt with balls of yarn, going ape shit over a laser pointer, and sipping a saucer of milk. I did some physical stuff with it that I was proud of. With all things considered, it was a pretty good show. We're starting to get back to being comfortable again, and I'm really glad, because the shows towards the end of the year were kind of awkward.