     | september 10, 2010
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| september 10, 2010
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I've Got Game Catherine Price -- 02/03/2006  It took me thirteen months to work up the nerve to sign up for an introductory improvisational comedy course at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater, and upon arriving to the first class, I felt like I was going to vomit. I had a moment of relief when I slipped into a front-row seat next to a particularly friendly-looking young woman, who introduced herself as Andrea and said that she was eighteen years old. But then Andrea told me that her mother ran an improvisational theater troupe and that she, Andrea, loved being on stage, and was so excited to take the class, and had acted since she was five years old. I decided not to talk with any other classmates. A minute before class was scheduled to start, our teacher bounced into the room, clutching a cup of coffee and a clipboard, and introduced herself as Betsy. Betsy was in her late twenties with long brown hair twisted into a braid, and was wearing tortoise shell glasses, black Capri pants, pink flip-flops, and a magenta t-shirt with a picture of a doll’s head on it. After setting her coffee cup down on the floor, she burped loudly and took attendance. “Awesome,” she said. “Let’s get started. Everybody, out of your seats.” This was the moment I’d been dreading. Betsy arranged us into a circle on a foam-tiled “performance area,” and had us play a name game where, as a group, we gave each other rhyming/alliterative nicknames and an accompanying physical gesture. Based on her t-shirt, Betsy became “Baby-head Betsy,” and we went around the circle one by one saying “Betsy!” and then shaking our heads between our hands as if we’d been decapitated. On a scale of potential humiliation, having to stand in a circle and do the same thing as everyone else might not seem to rank too high. But the existence of a group does not necessarily negate embarrassment—case in point, those feminist groups in the 1970s where women got together, held mirrors between their legs, and introduced themselves to their vaginas. As a child, I consistently sat out of “Old McDonald Had a Farm” because I didn’t want to moo. So pretending to devour an imaginary pumpkin whenever I mentioned “Pumpkin-Eater Peter” was an exercise in humiliation even before Betsy laughed and told me I looked like I was going down on a rhinoceros. When it was my turn, my classmates discovered, as I already knew, that nothing rhymes with Catherine. Pumpkin Eater Peter suggested “Bathroom Catherine” and I envisioned a horrifying charade involving me squatting over an imaginary toilet, but Betsy took pity on me. I became Catty Catherine instead, my name accompanied by an aggressive “Rowr!” As I clawed the air in what I hoped was a feline manner, I tried to be enthusiastic, keeping in mind Betsey’s admonition that “Half-assed means you’re going to suck.” * * * When I signed up for Betsy’s class, part of me harbored a hope that I was going to tap into an improvisational genius within myself that I didn’t know existed. I imagined leaping on stage, dazzling myself and my audience by assuming authentic Welsh and Iranian accents, free-style rapping clever and ironic rhymes, and referencing works of literature I’d never actually read. end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ][ 3 ][ 4 ][ 5 ][ 6 ] |
