Last night, March 20, was the opening night for Off the Shallow End. Our next performance will be on April 3rd, which is also opening day for the Red Sox. It was a great success for a first performance of a bunch of students. I had hung up my improvisational glove and cleats when I finished with MIT and made a mad rush to become an entrepreneur at 930 Mass Ave. I was inspired by the Roadkill Buffet and set out to become an improvatreuneur, a person that passes through life to become whoever I needed to be to fill the role needed. I could be a CEO, a VP of Sales, venture capitalist, marketing, engineering, QA, scientist, writer, graphic artist. What difference does it make who you are if you are going to end up playing a role anyways.

The show was funnier than I had expected us to be. We had been flat during the practice on Tuesday night with three people missing due to extreme illness and half the group moaning about fevers high enough on the FM dial to cause amnesia. I had needed the practice as a learning experience on the microphones and got chewed-out by Sharon for making knocking sounds when nobody was knocking and getting into a pushing match with Aaron while trying to pretend to be little kids but ignoring the scene itself in the foreground.

The audience was a big help. I could see as we stepped out that a lot of people were there to see me. My parents had come, with my dad sitting like he normally did to watch my baseball games as a kid out in the park behind our house, on the road during lights games for the All star team, Babe Ruth games at Albemarle, and varsity games at Newton North when I didn’t really play much. My mom was happy to have come. This morning she wrote me an email about how much we made her giggle and to keep having more gigs. Sarah had brought a big crew including her mom, Lynne, her sister, and Nick. Lisa was in the front row with Dave and Robert. Hattie had found a seat but not next to Kate and Matt. Bringing in the full ChannelWave team were Ron, Jenn, Stephanie, and James. So out of the 90 people in the audience I had 15 ringers. Thanks to all of you who came. It was good to have a full roster rooting for me.

I recall a bunch of things from the show. I had been a gardener posing for a pair of old ladies that liked to look at the sexy young gardener and I was hosing myself down and rubbing my chest hand hair with the hose used for watering the rose bush. Joan and Mike got into a funny little fight in a scene. Joan is eight months pregnant and Mike called her fat. So she retorted that he was going very bald for a seven year old. Joan also did her Juan Carlos impression while Suzy played a knocked-up wife not interested in having a baby. The crowd was great because whenever they laughed it was clear how to make them laugh again by making whatever we were doing bigger. I also managed to play my typical role from home – a man in love with his computer to the point where he neglects his wife. In one scene we had multiple people picketing with signs in Mike’s living room trying to convince him to sign petitions. We had let ourselves in by sneaking through the window and unlocking the door.

I did a monologue about growing up in Watertown and having the fire department stop Aaron Dushku and me from lighting snakes and firecrackers on the curb in front of his house. Aaron Dushku's name is familiar because his sister is Aliza Dushku, a sexy actress from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I remember the last time that I met her it was Aaron's turn to change her diaper in we took turns making farting sounds with our lips on her stomach. So I can say I kissed Aliza Dushku although she would deny it.

Following my little monologue about the fire department Gadi, Aaron, and Mike were in a scene on a roof and threatening to jump off. I got to play the police officer telling them to jump off the roof. At first I just wanted them to jump into my untested police net but then I started to threaten to shoot them with snipers if they didn’t jump. We finished the show with a Scrabble battle royale where Marlena needed to find a word with both Q and Z in it. She came up with Quazar and then all hell broke loose as we had planned at the beginning.

After the show we celebrated with relief and awe that we had been funny drinking a bottle of Veuve Cliquot that Gadi had procured along with a bottle of champagne Mike had brought. Sharon gave us good kudos. After the show for Improv Foundry we went back up to participate in the Improv jam. Schmelzer was absolutely amazing in a flashback sketch he did where he played four or five roles including a photographer asking for ridiculous looks from a girl who did an amazing job of creating the looks he asked for, a tsunami vacationer, and a chinese restaurant co-ordinator who barked out numbers for everything. After that we all went to Bukowskis and had some food and beers to celebrate. What fun! It is good to be alive on nights like that.

So that was opening night. Tonight I watched Mr. 3000 with Sarah. With all of the baseball hearings last week about steroids I had it on my mind. I am still kicking myself for believing that the reason for homeruns in the 90s was that the balls soak in a different type of mud each year and that changes the dynamic of how bouncy the ball is. I remember pondering and feeling amazed at how such a little thing as rubbing a baseball in some mud could make such a huge difference in the performance of the balls and the outcome of the game. The real answer turns out to be steroids. This is the perfect example of why you shouldn’t jump to conclusions to get behind a good theory as a scientist until it has been proven. The mud theory of homerun balls is just plain stupid.

Mr. 3000 is not that great with regards to continuity but it had a lot of levels for me. The story was of an aging former star who had been selfish his whole career and was now back to achieve the last three hits he never reached. It is a universal theme to try to return to something that you left behind and whether they did a good job of it in the movie I could relate after just having done my performance after ten years of staying away from an audience other than the rare karaoke night out.

As I was watching Mr. 3000 one of the main characters, a homerun hitting star, looked familiar to me. I guessed that T-Rex might be someone who had been on my baseball teams when I was a kid. He looked like Brian White. Now I didn’t play baseball until I was about 9 but I immediately tried out for little league when I was 10 and I was put on the Phillies. We weren’t the best team in the league but we had one of the best athletes because we had Brian White, the son of Jo Jo White, on our team. He was the cockiest little ten year old anyone could ever meet but he was incredibly charismatic and was sexually about five years ahead of me when we were both 11. Brian wasn’t just on the Phillies. He was also on the traveling all star team and later joined the same Babe Ruth team as me, the Oak Hill Cubs.

So I had played about eight years of baseball with Brian White and while I thought Bernie Mac’s swing looked like an actor’s. T-Rex had a real baseball swing. As I watched the credits roll by at the end I saw what I had been guessing throughout the movie. T-Rex, a baseball star, was being played by Brian White, my former team-mate and baseball equal. I think I batted third and he batted fourth.

I haven’t played baseball in a long time. In high school when I hurt my back it started to become hard for me to bend over to pick the grounders off the ground in the outfield. I probably didn’t help myself by needing glasses either since I was misjudging fly balls and not hitting too well. I had done well in practice at times. One afternoon during batting practice I hit three balls from the backstop over the fence in a row at the Newton North field while we were keeping score of the number of bases our hits would be worth. At the end I ran around the bases for a victory lap and Joe Blanchard whispered something intimidating, nasty, and bullying in my ear. My lack of playing time also could have been that the coach had a grudge against Jews since Scott Mazur and I spent a disproportionate amount of time on the bench together throwing little rocks into overturned helmets. The last time I remember playing we had a ChannelWave outing at Thompson’s Island when the company was at it’s biggest and Charles Chu had just gotten a $5000 referral bonus for bringing a business development team member into the company that was all spent after the retreat in a frenzied drinking party at Tia's.

The right field fence for the softball field at Thompson Island is really just a pile of bushes. It made a short porch. I hit the first pitch so far into those bushes that nobody could find the ball.