This blog includes essays about life, aging, humor, inspiration and creativity. These things capture my attention and I hope are worthy of yours. Sandra Enos.
I was at a perfect age when I wrote my first eulogy, just a few months after I officiated at my first wedding. I was just sixty years old, the oldest in my family of three children, just old enough to understand my mother as a mature adult, beginning my own aging journey. For the first time in our shared history, I could see her life from a larger more generous perspective. If you are blessed with some wisdom, you understand that understanding your mother is not all about you. She has her own history, of which you are only a tiny part, perhaps. If I had been younger, I would have missed much of this and written a good enough eulogy, but not one so deeply felt. If she had lived longer, I might have done better.
I wrote that eulogy for my mother and conducted that marriage ceremony for two former students. For a brief period, it felt like I was doing so much officiating that I should look into becoming a minister. I had developed a nice demeanor and a warm appropriate manner, according to those attending these ceremonies. It is a lovely feeling to be of comfort or to be a handmaiden of joy and commitment.
My mother died soon after falling in her apartment: she never recovered. In a short two weeks, she was hospitalized and went to a nursing home where she picked up an aggressive infection. We were planning for her return to independent living, but things took a different turn. She failed fast, not eating, or communicating. I think she died of exhaustion, loneliness, loss, and fatigue. The moments in her life that felt full to her were dwindling, like they do for so many older people. She was tired of living. At my age now, mid-seventies, I completely understand that. I am losing my life-long friends, not because of betrayal or disinterest, but because their lives have ended. Somehow, I never expected that one of us would die before the other. And if I had imagined it all, I would have me dead first. That appealed to me as tragically just right.
I took on the assignment to write and deliver my mother’s eulogy by default and by design. I had grown to be the closest to my mother, seeing her every week, sometimes twice. My brother was busy with his family; my sister lived a thousand miles away. I was the writer in my family, although any of us could have done the deed, each in our own way. In fact, I believe that I could have written versions of what I would have imagined by brother and sister would have said about our mother. Siblings experience their parents quite differently and I presented my eulogy as my own, not speaking on behalf of the family, except to express our thanks to everyone in attendance who cared for her, as a friend, and a relative.
Her Mass was at the church near where she lived in an elderly high-rise. I accompanied her to Mass on holidays and special occasions so knew the pastor there. When we were arranging her funeral, I asked if I could share some remarks. He said that I could, after the end of Mass. I had three minutes no longer.
I loved doing that eulogy. It gave me an opportunity to set the record straight, to tell those gathered that snowy morning, how funny, how smart, how underestimated she’d always been. I got to claim some territory for her that she had ceded to us children. I don’t think I have ever met anyone who was as humble. Even after she raised three children on her own after my father died at fourteen, she was convinced that we raised ourselves. There is something about wanting to be nearly invisible because of anxiety that puts that person into a place where they can’t feel their impact on others. That was my Mom; it took me way too long to understand her. I sometimes think if she had been born a generation or two later, that she would have found some refuge and respite in therapy or maybe some better friends or a more accepting community.
Eleven years later, I delivered my second eulogy for a very close friend, Marion. She was dying of a terminal pulmonary disease, and I was visiting weekly. I asked if there was anything on her mind that I could attend to on her behalf.
“Well, I have to write my eulogy. Could you do that for me?”
I was stunned. She handed me this assignment which I said I’d be honored to do. I wasn’t really thinking that she was near death. We never talked about it again. But, it was the most that any friend had ever asked of me – the most important mission of my life as a friend. However, because of the error every living person makes – thinking we had more time together — I never asked the questions that I should have.
“Marion, my dear friend, how do you wish to be remembered? What would you like me to say? What quotations should I recite? What message would you like to pass along? Do you need to set the record straight? Is there a secret you’d like to reveal now? What would you like people to know about you that you haven’t quite gotten around to telling us yet?”
So, none of that got asked or answered. I didn’t even properly tell her how much I loved her. Over the course of our fifty-year friendship, we pledged our fidelity to our truth- and beauty-seeking over and over again. That intense interest in each other’s mind was our deep love. She was such a treasure in my life. I am always reading something or writing that I want to show her. I want to know what she’s reading and thinking. I want to be filled with all the love and attention she poured into me. If you know and love someone deeply enough, they simply can’t be replaced; there is no one else. We often forget that is true about our closest friends and family members is also true for us, as well. We will be missed when we pass on.
Of course, my heart was broken when she died so quickly but one’s pain in the loss doesn’t make for a real eulogy. The standard ritual of a funeral may serve as the perfect balm for some. The familiar cadence of the Mass. The prescribed readings from the Psalms and the Gospel. The final anointing and blessing of the soul to be reunited with God as he welcomes her in the everlasting glory of the chosen with Him. But that doesn’t serve all of us well. A eulogy begs for something different.
A eulogy is a tribute. My friend was a published writer and an English teacher at an all-girls high school. She was brilliant and beloved. The tributes that were posted about her were glorious.
She changed my life.
She opened me to literature.
I became a teacher because of her.
She really saw me., like no one else.
She helped me see the beauty of stories.
I so wanted to be just like her – smart and funny and kind.
My friend was a brilliant conversationalist. She found almost everything interesting, except small talk and narrow people. She wanted your mind to fly like hers did, so you could explore together and wonder and then wonder some more.
She had a hard childhood but she never wore that damage. It simply made her curious about families and love and attachment. Later in her life, she explored her roots and her father, especially in his service in the Canadian army.
When you spend all of your adult years with a friend, you watch them grow and change. If you are lucky, the qualities you loved about them are there for the duration. They don’t grow bitter or self-pitying. They allow you to grow with them. You see all the passions and interests that once absorbed you both float along like that Buddhist cloud that contains fleeting thoughts and feelings. You grew together step by step along a journey that you don’t realize until later in life is one we all take. I see this more and more clearly as I watch my elders and juniors all with their generationally-specific concerns and anxieties and challenges. We change so much over a lifetime that we are barely recognizable to ourselves when we look back and wonder how we raised three kids under the age of six or got our Ph.D. part-time over ten years or hitchhiked across the country or drove too fast one night and nearly killed our little brother. It is all in the memory; it is just hard to see that it is us sometimes.
So when you are writing a eulogy, you are also writing your own history, as you consider what your life would have been like without this friend. And often that is unimaginable, not because the imagined emptiness is so sad but instead because your mind has been so shaped by this individual, your ideas so intertwined with hers, that you really can’t separate them. It would be like observing just the water in the brook, trying to block out the rocks, the movement of the water, the sand at the bottom, the banks at the side. It is just impossible; it is all of one piece.
I think this is what makes writing a eulogy so challenging. I consulted with Marion’s friends about what made her so special to them. These were a handful of people who visited with her during her last months of life. Long-term friends. Work colleagues. Former students. Several themes surfaced but it was clear that Marion was not just a treasure to me. She was a treasure to many people. We were caught up in a circle of her love but didn’t know each other, like planets governed by gravitational pull and not aware of that force. I wanted to write a eulogy that would be unmistakably hers. No one in the audience could say, “Oh yes! That sounds just like my friend, Margaret” if I did my job correctly. I wanted to plot out exactly the size, dimension, character, and nature of my loss. Something impossible to fill; someone impossible to replace.
Writing a eulogy is the very start of facing your undeniable loss. Your entry into a lifelong process of missing your friend, remembering at so many turns of their absence. Sitting down to write them a letter and aching for the notes they used to send along. Because their place in your world was so unique, there is no filling that void. It remains a hole in your heart. And the eulogy delivered with tears and grace reminds you as well that others are feeling the same or even greater loss than yours. And that you are connected with all of those who have suffered similar losses. I walk once a week through the cemetery just off the bike path and I pay more attention to the names and dates on the graves, marking all those lives that have come before, loved and buried, with some memories still echoing. Each tombstone its own sliver of a eulogy.
I took this series of photographs after finding this Barbie-like doll washed up in the surf at high tide. She was lying face down in the sand. I picked up and looked about for a little girl who made have left her but the beach was abandoned by then. I took her home, washed her up and put her to bed. I took her back to the beach the next day to take some more photographs, trying to tell a story of this girl who fell on hard times and was saved by some friends. I posed her on the lifeguard chair just after sunrise. This chair is usually populated by two young female lifeguards and thinking they could use some company, I left her with them.
In my mid-forties, I had a career crisis. I was bored to death at my state job reviewing applications for asbestos abatement assistance. The paperwork to get a grant for abatement was so onerous that we disbursed much more aggravation than we did money. I am not proud of that fact, but I could do could little about it. My supervisor was the sort of man who divided the world into two groups — the criminal and the pre-criminal. No one was above suspicion. He put rules and procedures in place to assure that no sneaky citizen would ever ever pull off a scam under his watch. I was his unwilling lieutenant repeating to applicants stupidly bureaucratic excuses for why their applications were turned down. I took a lot of appropriate abuse from perfectly eligible grantees. It was soul- and mind-deadening. I imagined myself, retiring at 90 or so, never having approved a single grant, and receiving an outstanding public service award from him for The Exercise of Frugal Excellence. He would be 110, still railing against incompetence and corruption, everywhere, everyplace, all the time.
I was located in a brand-new state of the art building laid out in a chessboard of cubicles. Our manager was very excited about this new office design, promising us that we would be more creative, and team-like. In truth, we felt like rats in a maze. With so little privacy and so much overcrowding, our union steward warned our overlords that we would most likely get aggressive and first turn on our supervisors, and then on each other. The workers wouldn’t be responsible. Instead, our bosses would have blood on their hands and it could be theirs, literally.
My little four cubicle pod penned up me and three other low-level bureaucrats. On one side was a young man divorcing from his wife and spending much of the day heaping abuse on her on the phone. On another, a woman constantly snapped gum and by the smell of nail polish and the sound of fingernails being filed, she was clearly running a manicure salon while pretending to meet with other employees. She was the busiest of us. In cubicle #3 was another man who played talk radio all day, muttered all day to himself and was full of bad ideas and half-baked theories. I saw myself as an abandoned soul in the land of troubled and troubling souls.
This new office landscape did not lead to our being more innovative and community spirited at work. It did the opposite. I hadn’t realized until I was trapped with them, how much I disliked each of them. I would sit at my desk with earphones, a face mask, and sunglasses, hoping not to be recognized. It was a perfect place to be a member of a witness protection program. Not one person ever came to look for me. It felt like Kafka may have been the genius behind all of this, like a revenge architect.
I came home each night wondering how much longer I could last. The good news was that this mind-numbing job gave me plenty of energy to dream about other possibilities. I settled on two. The first was to pursue a doctorate in Sociology so I could teach at the college level. I had been doing this for nearly a decade as an adjunct professor. Students liked the way I taught, and I loved the excitement of teaching challenging material in creative ways. This part-time job was like a lifeline to more engaging and stimulating world.
My second option was to become a standup comic. A friend and I ran “How to Be Funny” workshops at women’s conferences and those were really well received. I got several humorous pieces published in magazines. People thought I was funny; I could tell a good story. However, I was nearly fifty years old. Comedy hadn’t really hit the big time in the early 90s and there were few women comics that I really liked and admired. But undeterred by any facts at hand, I decided to explore being a stand-up comic. I connected with a middle-aged man who was a social worker during the day and an aspiring standup comic at night. I went with him to some of his shows. These were located in dismal, smoky bars, late at night, perilous to any woman in these places without a male attached to her arm. I got plenty of offers but none that would advance my career in comedy, except maybe to share truly clumsy pickup lines.
After visits to the clubs watching this guy suffer, I opted to pursue the more conventional route – pursing a PhD in sociology in my late forties, hoping to graduate when I was fifty. A colleague cautioned me that there were already 10,000 unemployed PhDs in sociology and that dreaming that I would land a teaching job was a fool’s errand. Having been on many fool’s errands and enjoyed them, I hopped on board and went to graduate school. I earned a PhD at fifty – the best learning experience of my life – and enjoyed teaching for a few decades before I retired. I was never properly a sociology professor, not a great fit for an academic role, but I did my best to carve out my own special practice as a uniquely weird professor.
Fast forward, twenty-five years after that PhD. and I was a retired sociology professor, ready to explore some new interests and revive others that I had ignored for way too long. During the second year of the pandemic, I decided to try out some new activities — to engage in some classes or activities I had sworn off, telling myself that I didn’t do these sorts of things. I wanted to step out of my comfort and competence zone. I was provoked by Emerson’s quote, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” I loved that idea because I was sorely feeling that I needed new dimensions. I wanted my older years to be about expanding, not narrowing, my interests, activities, and friendships. I wanted to move down some new avenues while my health was still good and my energy abundant. I was looking forward to changing some things, to exploring what could happen.
Dan Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, has done research about the end of history illusion. It refers to the ways in which we discount how much we will change in the future. We imagine that we have changed a great deal over the past ten years, let’s say, but assume that we will not change much in the future. What is even more interesting is that this illusion happens in the same way for people from all age groups. Neither the young nor the old nor the middle-age are any better at understanding how much change is ahead of us.
I was intrigued by this image is from a 2022 article in the New York Times[1]where author Tim Urban discusses how we use time and how we might consider our futures. At any point in our lives, we have arrived a place which is the result of multiple narrowing paths. We went to art school, instead of medical school. Or we didn’t apply for that promotion and instead changed jobs. Or we chose one partner over the other. On and on it goes. Each of these decisions leads to other opportunities; you foreclose on some possible opportunities at every turn. We can’t all the lives we might have lived. The only paths closed to us are the ones in the past.
However, ahead of us are many possibilities. We can be easily overwhelmed if we really take this to heart but if we really consider the many paths ahead, it is life-affirming, even in our later life. This is not to say that all of us are blessed with resources, time, and talent to move ahead and follow any dream that we can conjure. That is certainly not the case, especially in mid-life and later years when caretaking our elders, our partners, our grandchildren, and ourselves makes many demands on us. But there was enough truth here to make an impression on me. No matter what the constraints are, there are still plenty of possibilities and choices.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have put many obstacles in the path of exploring possibilities. Before I start anything new, I had to plow through a heavy thicket of objections. Why do this? Why now? What would I learn? Why didn’t I pursue music or language lessons when I was young? Am I too old? Can I really do it? Suppose I fail. Who would I meet? Would I like them? Suppose they don’t like me? What makes me think this is interesting? Am I having a late-life crisis? Is there such a thing? I would entertain doubts for so long that they got comfortable.
These were exhausting enough but not completely discouraging. So, gathering up my courage, I signed up for my very first 5K run. The race was a 5K over the Pell Bridge which spans Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. The race started just before sunrise with three thousand participants on a beautiful October day At the peak of span, you can see Newport to the east, with a magnificent view of teh East and West Bays. I did very well in that race, finishing in the top quarter of my age class. I felt completely alive, like I did before the pandemic, with the world full of possibilities. And full of people enjoying their lives with each other, embracing the gifts we bring each other. A man proposed to his fiancé at the top of the bridge. Love (of life) was in the air.
That summer, I also signed up for an Improv course, at OLLI,[2] hosted at the local university. The Improv class was a wonderful entry into the world of improvisational theatre. It re-awakened my interest in comedy. The students were at least 65 years old, drawn by an interest in Improv but with no big dreams or pretenses of appearing someday on the Comedy Channel. We were all simply curious and willing to be silly in the company of complete strangers. After years of pandemic isolation, we met in person in class, and it was delightful to be in the company of people I’d never met before; that felt like a completely new experience. I made two wonderful friends in that class. That course led me to another one at our local community theatre where the students were much younger, faster, and sharper[3]. That eight-week course was an engaging and challenging experience. I would leave these classes completely spent and energized. Soon I took another course in Musical Improv which tapped into another of my lifelong interests, singing and dancing and harmonizing—all of these re-ignited my sense of joy in playing with others. This led me to join the chorus catchers at my local theatre, where I am still learning the magic and structure of improv.
The Improv courses have been among the best learning experiences of my life. I say that in light of the fact that I was a very good student and a pretty good professor. I can perform pretty well in the structure, hierarchy, and predictability of traditional education but I really came alive as a learner in the improv environment and believe that almost anyone would benefit from a similar experience. What follows are my observations from improv classes. So, with less than one year of improv under my belt, I am ready to offer some summary observations and reflections. I call this LifeLessons from Improv or Everything I Learned for Real I Learned in Improv.
What happens in improv doesn’t stay in improv.
In improv, there are no set scripts. Improv classes are a series of games and exercises that teach some of the skills and orientations you would need in improv theatre. These exercises are fast. You are obliged to think on your feet. Not to overthink. Not to try to be funny or clever. To tell a story in improv, you rely on the other actors to create that story together. No one is really in charge. You are simply connected to each other in a contrived space and social situation. No experience is necessary. No basis of knowledge will help you more than another. In fact, it seems to me that the great variety of stories we all carry is the great fuel for improv. These serve as a great reserve for plots and characters and the flow of the stories told.
The key to improv is being in tune with your fellow actors and learning how to be in tune with a great variety of people and personalities in a short time. In music improv, you are not only telling a story, but you are also creating songs and choruses and dances sometimes. It calls on different skills, but you are still co-creating a story right on the spot.
For example, a typical improv musical runs in two acts about ninety minutes long. There may be four or five actors in the cast. The host of the show will ask the audience for the name of a musical that has never been done before. The audience may suggest, such as, Floating Down the River, A Town Called Fortune, or Dancing with the Cows. The actors choose one of these and then are challenged to pitch their idea of what the story will be. The audience claps to indicate their favorite among the options and the show begins. The actors will take their places on stage and the director sets the scene with a time and place. A conversation will ensue among the actors who begin to introduce their characters. Soon, someone says something, like “the trees look so big in this forest” or “I just had a crazy dream” and motion to the pianist that this phrase will form the first song. Music begins to play, and the actor begins to sing the words to the chorus. This is repeated until it seems set. The rest of the actors join and add verses that begin to develop a plot, the characters, the scene, and some interesting possible developments. The director may add challenges (“Ask her to marry you, Gary.”) or ask an actor to change her mood (“You are really really angry about this, Alice.”). The story line and characters develop, and chaos ensues. The magic of all this is how each show unfolds. It is very often a complete surprise to everyone who is on stage. The skills to do this work (or play) depending on your perspective are considerable. I will argue below that these are not just critical for improv, but that they instead broad lessons that could benefit all of us.
Since I have been taking improv classes, my friends have been asking me, if it is improv, why do you need to take a class? Or why does the cast need to go to a rehearsal for an improv show? Very simply, there is lots of learn. Acting is one thing. Bringing life to the written word, putting your voice to words a character may say is hard enough. That takes years of training. However, telling a compelling, maybe hilarious, maybe poignant story from scratch, a story that has never existed and will never exist again is another thing entirely. There has to be some sort of structure or protocols or rules of the stage in place for anything of value to happen.
Your fellow actors are at least as interesting, amazing, curious, and complicated as you.
Because you are a member of a troupe, there is great relief to know the success of the enterprise doesn’t rely completely on you. The success of the performance depends on everyone. You bring what you have and what you are to the stage, as do the other actors, and some magic may happen. Just the discovery of what may be cooked up is interesting in and of itself. Things happen. Personalities are revealed. Stories are shared. Connections are made. You can rely on each other’s passion, curiosity, sense of humor and connection to create the story and move it ahead. No matter how old or young we are and independent of what we do for work or play, we have plenty of share. Recognizing that depth and breadth in others is a real blessing in improv.
All of us has a superpower weirdness.
I have taken improv classes in two settings, at a university and at the local theater. All those classes brought together people who were strangers to me. With COVID, retirement and a busy professional life before retirement, I hardly ever found myself in a room full of strangers who were so diverse in terms of age, occupations, race and ethnicity and experience in the theater. Yet, after just a few exercises, people’s personalities would begin to surface. They would say something that was completely off the wall, surprising themselves and all of us. We would regularly crack each other up, based not on our native wit, but instead on the structure of the exercises, which pushed us to free association and creative expression. That occasion for weirdness opens an opportunity to pull something from your mind quickly and in some instances, crazily. That superpower can lie dormant your whole life. We actively suppress it in most settings, unless we have a reputation as a good storyteller among our friends. But that superpower is our very good friend in improv because it presents premises and oddball ideas and characters to work with and around.
Anything can happen.
Improv creates and rests on the premise that anything can happen. This hearkens back to chart we looked at above, where the paths ahead are multiple and unknown. An improv performance takes one of those paths and plays with it, exercising imagination and flexibility as the scenes develop, step by step. In an improv scene, you may be a Scottish farmer, a collector of goldfish, a mad pharmacist, or a grower of artisanal marijuana. You can sing a soulful ballad or belt out the blues. Anything can happen. You simply need to commit to it, to understand the context, and to incorporate both the development of the story and your relationship with the other actors on stage.
All the world’s a stage: All the stages are little worlds.
Improv is great stage for understanding human behavior, misunderstandings, status, culture and more. Real life provides the fodder for improv. In an improv performance what shines through is the character of human beings in social situations as they try to figure out what is going in the world. We can watch as individuals learn about each other, violate social norms, try to vanquish an opponent, fall in and out of love and much more. As much as we may feel on occasions that we are just cogs in some big wheel, we see the actors on an improv stage, learning from each other, as vulnerable, powerful, and very human beings.
The best plans are made by other people.
Improv pushes you to show up, to be fully present, but not to be in charge. As the story evolves, the actors are giving each other room and openings to develop ideas together. Possibilities surface in what are called, offers. An actor suggests an idea, “Hey, Bob. I know your wife has just left you. Why don’t go down to our favorite soak our sorrows in some gin. Who knows maybe you’ll meet a new girl?” Bob has some choices here. He can say, “Hell, no. What are you thinking?” or he can agree, “Hell, yes! And maybe, we will finally find a girl too after all these years?” or go a completely other way. These offers can pivot a story, adding complications, and filling in the characters.
You can stretch a lot and not break.
As I wrote earlier, I am new to improv, less than one year into the practice. I like to study things I get involved with and like to jump in with both feet. Every improv class I have taken has challenged me in some way to move out of my comfort zone.
You realize talents that you have kept under wraps, undeveloped and untested. I can now sing loud enough to offer my sense of harmony and timing. I can initiate a dance line. I can offer plot lines. I can move ahead with ideas. There have been several instances where I thought of opting out of performances until I was legitimately ready and prepared. I held some unproductive rule about readiness in my mind which held me back more than my lack of ability. Because I learned, you can’t feel the talent until you try to employ it and then it may appear or not. The truth of this is that no matter what we do, we are never fully prepared for what happens. We just need to trust ourselves a bit more but that takes practice and self-compassion. We need to defeat self-defeating ideas.
This story will never happen again.
Some periods of your life are packed with stuff; so much happens. In one month on the improv stage, I was a fortune teller in a wild west town in cowboy times, and was a little kid caught adrift on a pirate ship in an awful storm. Later in the month, as an inebriated sheriff, I welcomed two sisters who were prospecting for gold to California in the 1840’s. As a hungry wolf, I terrorized two little girls lost in a forest at night. The girls put a magic leash on me, turning me into Steve the Dog, their friend and protector. Most recently, I joined a chorus line of cows and a crew of French mice and their sexy tormenting cats. All of this happened while our cast was singing and dancing and acting out our destinies which we had just made up. These adventures prime you for more because they engage the best and brightest parts of you, selves you may never be in context but in spirit and emotion, this is you. Not only do you walk in someone else’s shoes, you walk into someone else’s world. And like so many of our encounters in real life, we are not just playing a role, we are creating the story of our lives.
And wonderfully, what happens on stage, whatever song you create on the spot, however brilliant the dialogue, will never happen again. Improv is like a Tibetan sand painting, beautiful and ephemeral. The doing is the essence. And, once again, it is like life. We have one pass through it; today can be practice for the future, we are wiser, less judgmental, more fun to be with, a better listener, someone who is completely present, especially for the people who depend upon us and for the ones that don’t as well.
What skills are needed to succeed in life (and improv)
You can study improv for many years and take lots of improv courses before you will really get it, I believe. Well-done, improv classes are a wonderful way to learn about communication. So much is about connecting with the other actors in the exercise, maintaining eye contact, fully listening to what they are saying, appreciating the emotional feeling of scenes, bringing yourself there, and both being present and in the moment. It is wonderful to see improv shows as they are put together, to fully appreciate how much is left to the actors. Based on my one year of experience, I believe that among the skills you need to succeed at improv is confidence, believing in your bones that you can be on stage as a problem solver. You have something to offer that is creative or possible, something that will either develop the story or fill out a character. To me to be good at improv means that the other actors can rely on you to stand up and stand down, to be there for them, just like being a good member of any community. To this well in improv, you need practice that develops your improv muscle memory.
Important in Improv is the understanding that not every moment will be a brilliant one. You are never always at your best. Your attempts at humor or pathos may fail. You can die on stage, but others will have your back.They have energy at the moment when yours fail. Your obligation here is to be aware and open and ready and prepared to help others when they are lost for a moment.
We are always both living and creating our life stories
There are plenty of challenges to capturing the essence of improv. I think of it as “brain to fable.” In some ways, it is like writing a novel or play, laying out the plot, developing the characters, creating and resolving tension, and making it worth the reader’s time to turn the next page or stay in their seat. That takes lots of drafts and reworking. Many authors can write a novel in about a year but there’s lot of variation here. William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six months, but it took Tolkien sixteen years to write The Lord of Rings. At one end of the writing process continuum, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in about a year, JK Rowling spent six years writing Harry Potters and the Sorcerer’s Stone. In improv all of this happens in a very compressed time period. It happens almost at once. On stage, the actors are deeply present, aware of the recent past, and looking forward to the future, but not too much because that future is so tied up with the future of other actors.
There is also the great blessing of having a brain and heart full of stories, yours, and others, that can be called upon as goofy, exquisite, and captivating slices and tidbits of live to offer to the actors and audience.
Balancing comfort and commitment
As my friend, Elisabetta says, we all need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Improv certainly affords that opportunity. The more improv I do, the more I discover the talent, skills, awareness, and emotional openness on the parts of the actors that makes a performance great for the audience. There is a palpable discomfort to making up an entire story on the spot but like life itself, it evolves in every sentence said, every gesture expressed, every choice made, and every breath taken. There is a sweet spot between that discomfort and being completely in the experience. Giving it all you’ve got. Showing up. Raising your voice and pushing to be heard.
In improv, there is a practice that pushes you to be committed – to your character, to the story, to the other actors, to the belief in the magic of pretending – in the moment and comfortable with the unknown and along for the adventure of whatever comes next.
Summary
Running a road race and being so engaged with improv were never on my bucket list; neither were they on my F(explitive)-it list. They were simply off my radar, out of my orbit. It wasn’t until I was searching for something new that I discover what have been some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Is this some late-in-life epiphany of what could-have-been? Career paths untaken? I don’t think so. What I am convinced of is that we all need to do things we’d never imagine ourselves doing, things that our of character. Who knows? We may find that we are many more characters that we would have imagined in our small worlds (like Parisian mice, and wolves, and sheriffs).
[1] Here’s a link to the article How Covid Stole Our Time and How We Can Get it Back by Tim Urban. He is the author and illustrator of the Wait but Why blog (@waitbutwhy) where he explores topics ranging from aliens to marriage to A.I., and its accompanying newsletter.
[2] OLLI stands for OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute. This is a network of over 120 programs located at colleges and universities in the U.S. that offer courses for older adults, taught by community members.
[3] The Contemporary Theatre Company (CTC) in located in Wakefield RI, the downtown area of the small town of South Kingstown, RI with a population of 30,000. The CTC offers scripted shows as well as improv theatre, live music, classes, campus for children. It has been located in a newly renovated space for about 10 years. It is a wonderful and welcoming community organization, vital to our lively downtown.
In our present culture, we seem oriented to believe that our children are special. Maybe that is a biological imperative. We want them to feel special all the time for everything they do. But I think children see through that pretense. They feel the deep fake in it. They are embarrassed when their parents present them as gifted and talented and better than their peers. On some level, children know differently. They know the difference between careless praise and really accomplishing something for themselves.
Although I think a brief study of the history of parenting would lead us to the discovery that our ideas about what children need from us are very much the product of this cultural moment. The history of childhood is a fascinating tale of the history of ourselves as a species. Even a generational change can make an enormous difference in the expectations for parents and children. This may be my nostalgia for my rosy-colored baby boomer childhood, but I am feeling very grateful for my mother’s parenting of us. She did a lot of this as a widow when my father died in an auto accident leaving her with three children – me, the oldest, at fourteen, my younger sister at twelve and my little brother at eight. My mother had no suspicion that any of her children were special in any way. It caused her not one sleepless night that we were perfectly average. And, she might argue that since no one is perfect, we were all actually averagely average. She would have found the idea that you are special just because you are you to be completely insane and especially wrongheaded when it came to raising children. I am inclined to be completely in her corner here.
My mother and me
If no one tells you that you are special, that you are musical or artistic or beautiful or funny or smart or just really talented in any way, you are left to discover those things through your own exploration. Without those early and (perhaps) misleading observations about you from your parents and relatives and whomever wants to make such a comment, you are on your own to discover your people, your interests, and talents. You play guitar or basketball and go on long bikes, and you discover things about yourself without much parental support. My mother never attended one of my basketball games. I never sought her advice about pursuing a degree in college because she never had any sense that I would be particularly good at anything. When I did go to college, my mother bet the lady next door ten dollars that I wouldn’t last a semester. I never resented that wager when I learned about at the end of my freshmen year. Given her experience of not knowing anyone personally who had gone to college, she was imagining that college students were very smart, and that I certainly wasn’t.
I worked in a series of factory jobs during the summers, many of which she was familiar with. She had worked in rubber and jewelry factories and knew very well the tedium of those jobs. She had friends who worked in these places, sometimes they were my bosses. I am pretty certain they told her I wasn’t showing much promise cutting huge pieces in rubber into rectangles to be glued onto to the bottoms of welcome mats; I might as well go to college. They may have also shared that the thing I was best at was reading a book. During coffee breaks and lunch, I found some refuge alone outdoors on a picnic bench to escape harassment and bullying as “college girl.” I didn’t feel so special there, either.
When I was elected class president in the ninth grade and rushed home to tell my mother, she responded. “Well, that’s nice. I am sure everyone in class will get their turn.” When I brought home good grades, she would nod and say, “That is good. You are doing your job studying. I think you could be studying more.” Or when I was the star of the senior play, she was proud enough but wondered why it was I had to play the role of a man. (In my defense, I would have to say here that I attended an all-girls school and not just anyone in class could have made a convincing man by simply painting on a mustache.) In fact, to toot my own horn here, I played the role of Sakini, the Okinawan interpreter, in Teahouse of the August Moon. The great Marlon Brando played that role in the movie of the same name to his great embarrassment I would imagine. Here he is. I am very glad I didn’t see the movie before I played that role.
Marlon Brando as Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon
When I was in the 10th grade, I saw an advertisement in thelocal newspaper for the Famous Writers School and sent away for the aptitude test. The premise here was that America needed a lot of writers and that by working with distinguished writers like Rod Serling, Faith Baldwin, Bennett Cerf and Phyllis McGinley, you could learn to write and make a big success of yourself. There is an interesting video on You Tube featuring Serling in a promotional piece. I figured if I get into that correspondence school, maybe I could be a famous writer. But more importantly, maybe I could see if I had any talent. I did very well on the test which I recall asked the applicant to describe a scene prompted by a photo, write some complete some items that tested grammar and vocabulary. I don’t know how it happened, maybe it was because of my excellent test results, but a man came to our house and told my mother and me that I was indeed a very talented young person and could be a famous writer. I was so excited. My mother not only doubted the test’s validity, she also zeroed in on true scheme behind his discovery of me as a young talent.
I learned recently The Famous Writers School was actually a cover for a giant fraud. Most students did very well on the test and many signed contracts that they couldn’t escape from. If my Mom had any faith in all in my talent, we would have all been bamboozled. I can imagine many parents falling for such schemes today where their children’s TikTok videos may be used by some random “talent agent” as a key to swindle them out of their savings. Instead, my mother said to me and the salesman that we wouldn’t sign up for Famous Writers School. Rather, I would study harder and learn to learn to write at school where I was studying this every day away. No special talent to coddle here. Soon after he left, she wondered out loud, “what sort of people make a living by writing? What kind of work is that anyway?”
I would also come home with dreams to be something I had heard about in school. One of my classmate’s fathers was a lawyer and that was her dream, too. I asked her about that, and it seemed like a very interesting job to my seventh-grade self. When I told my mother, I thought I would like to a lawyer, she suggested I think of something else. “Don’t get your hopes up too high”, she would caution. I came slowly to understand the source of this dissuasion. With the Great Depression and the Second World War, a difficult childhood and maybe a challenging marriage, she’d had plenty of dreams that went nowhere. Her possibilities were so constrained. My most successful relative was a foreman in a factory. I don’t think she could imagine the possibilities I might have. I didn’t realize those myself until my third year of college.
My mother kept my self-image within tiny bounds, safely trimmed from getting in the way of others. And even though I attended Catholic school, her parenting set me for a Buddhist orientation to life. I have never thought I was exceptional in any way. I think many of us set a goal or attach our hopes to a dream, like writing a book, or earning a PhD. Then, when you do, you learn that lots of average people do these things all the time. That is not to diminish the achievement, it is just to put it all in context.
The gift of those lessons from my mother was that suffered no heartbreak later in life when I recognized that I wasn’t so special after all. I wasn’t as smart as many of my classmates. I was never a great beauty. I was never one to stand out in a photograph or to turn heads when I entered a room. The great gift here is that you have to discover those talents by yourself. You can carve your own path which certainly will be a winding one. You find that in your seventies that great passion is music or theatre and that your long career and several paged resume hardly matters any longer. It is mental furniture for another time and place. You find your specialness in the network of friends you have built around you, all indicators of who you really are. Maybe more self-aware. Maybe more aware of the natural world and the connections. Maybe appreciating your tiny place in the universe.
I have hit that time in my life when I less production-focused and more aligned with delivering the summary report. I have fewer things to do that are connected to larger purpose and complex organizations more to do with observing that the spit at the beach extends a little farther to the north today because of yesterday’s storm and rip currents. I do the later as part of my daily walk at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean on Narragansett Bay, which reminds me of a story. That is another artifact of this life as an elder. Much of what happens reminds you of another thing that happened a while ago. I don’t think I have ever heard a twelve-year old say, “Oh, yes. That reminds me of a story? Have I told you about walking home from school in a blizzard and nearly dying of frostbite?”
Back to that story. A few ago, I served on the board of an organization whose mission was to provide job training and employment for refugees. I was speaking to a middle-aged woman called Maria whose husband was killed in during the Iraqi war. She was left to care for her four children and because of her dead husband’s work, she needed to leave Iraq as soon as possible. She spent years in a refugee camp in Jordan with her extended family. Many of them were eventually sent to Germany but for some unknowable reason, she and her children were to be sent to Rhode Island. She asked a fellow passenger on the flight to New York City about this place called Rhode Island. He asked her if she ever saw the movie Titanic. She replied that she had. He then said, “Well, if you remember, the Titanic sank when an iceberg hit it. That was the Atlantic Ocean. Rhode Island is at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean where the Titanic sank. Right at the edge.” Marie would refer to that orientation point for years when as she told people of the Iraqi diaspora where she lived – here on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean where the Titanic sank. As I look out from the water, I imagine the Titanic and Marie and much more. I can hardly see the horizon without a memory, allusion or poem flooding to the surface. That amazing neural networked, hyperlinked three-pound brain, sitting at the top of seventy-two years of lived experience.
On a recent holiday, I brought my iPad along so that I could do some writing. I have been writing all my life without much synthesis. It is a good thing there is no editor in our Word programs that would remark in a little bubble “You are repeating yourself. Please don’t write this again!” And then it would refer you to a document or many documents from decades ago where you surfaced the same complaint or delivered the same brilliant insight. I suppose we cannot help but echo the same themes that pass through our lives; they are defining. Mary Catherine Bateson writes that our lives are not so much linear progressions as the re-circling and development of themes we live out and through. However, in this encounter with my iPad, I decided to do some digging and exploring. Instead of writing something new (Ha!), I thought to explore files I hadn’t looked at in a while — essays, poetry, observations, drawings from years ago. I found ideas I had abandoned, essays I really loved to read, stories I swear I have no recollection of and more. It was better writing than I remembered creating. I found a beautiful memoir from a painful time in Chicago. I found humorous essays that made me laugh out loud. I was gathering bits and pieces of who I was decades ago and what remained just now. I was trying to reassemble myself the way an archeologist might put together artifacts of a vanished species. I wanted to get a clearer view of who I was with less of a reconstructed pre-formed narrative story. As researchers have established, none of our memories are pure. All are constructed in the way we would write a movie script. We edit out the parts that don’t fit the story we wish to tell. I wanted to confront these former lives in another way.
And there is so much of this writing. Some are like the ones I find on my computer files. Others rest in repose in my large rattan chest of journals. Others in scraps of paper here and there. I have to remind myself that is somewhat unusual. I don’t know anyone else except maybe a friend who was a high school English teacher who has kept a journal for so long. And what would one do with all of this, this enormous collection of a lifetime? It is an amazing record, I imagine of something, of a single surprising and completely average life. If I were a researcher writing my biography, (let’s put aside the question of why anyone would), what would I find? Would my writings be an accurate and telling account of what was on my mind? Would I be disturbed by this telling by another’s hand? Just writing that sentence taps into my defensive nature. I am already primed to argue. Or maybe, that blessed biographer would be gentle and put things in warm perspective.
At the same time that I am collecting these writings wherever they lay and hide, I am reading The Practice by Seth Godin about sharing your work with an audience that will or may care, comforting myself in the knowledge that my writing is not for everyone but that doesn’t matter much. I just need to find a following that is large enough to feel worthwhile for me and them. So, reacquainting myself with all of this work has put some wind under my sails. I just need to get into a completion habit. I can’t really just put things in a TO DO file and imagine they will get done by themselves. That is probably my first and deepest resolution, the result of a life-long bad habit. I see it all over my office and in cabinets. And it weighs on me more than I think.
So returning to the archeology idea, one finds at the end stage of a life, having evolved good and bad habits. If we had archeologists of our personalities, they could assay your long life and conclude, “Well, that lifelong optimism worked for the first five decades but after that, this was a failure.” Or “On balance, the making of new friends all your life made sense, but you lost more than you made. You were careless there.” And then maybe a medical archeologist as well, to say, “Well your chronological age is 72 but you have a 62-year-old heart, 86-year-old hair, 90-year-old hearing and a liver that is over 100. This will all get complicated very soon.”
Delight/ Awe and other things 