Our little improv troupe was dealt a heavy blow last week when we discovered that our leader who had stepped-up to direct temporarily, Suzi, had landed a full time part in an Improv Boston show about twisted superheroes. So we had been reduced from six, down already from eleven, and now down to five. The news was enough to shock the group into not practicing and try to rethink whether we had any chance of holding things together. Among the ideas were to start meeting other people to get fresher by going to Sunday Yes And practices, the Sgt. Culpepper’s Jamboree, keep taking classes outside of our group. I think I was terse with Suzi and didn’t properly congratulate her. I was happy to see her succeed but in turmoil from her leaving the group and the clear havoc it would wreak with the little team we were trying to bond together. So we walked over to the Inn now located in what was once the fire station at Kendall and shared a bottle of wine. We got a full detailed history of Joan’s life leading to her marriage and were generally chatting about marriage because Hillary had just gotten back from her wedding.

The result was that this week Mike and I went to the Improv Foundry audition instead of our usual group gathering. The room was brimming with improvisers, about forty in all. We started by doing a gesture wave around the room where each person would do the gesture and sound from an initiator around in a circle and then the next person would initiate. It was especially fun because we had such a large group that we had to go through it super fast. As usual I wasn’t very funny because it was an audition and I felt clumsy and clueless. On the audition sign-up sheet they asked for a haiku about how I felt. Mine was:

Try to be funny tonight
Big blister on lip
The baby is coming soon

I have no grand illusion that I’ll be called back for more of what I did in there. I had actually auditioned for them a year or two back and not gotten very far. I hope they don’t think I’m some freak who lives to be rejected by them. But that isn’t a bad freak to be.

The nice cheerful thing about the audition was that there was a long pause/break when the official improvisers were off chatting about how crappy the various new recruits looked. During this break I walked out into the hall of the Egg Atrium to find a ballroom dance class in session. The class included an uneven number of boys to girls with one girl as the extra so I offered my services as a ballroom dance student. I qualify because I have no idea how to ballroom dance. The girl was probably a Wellesly student and was excited to have someone to chat and dance with rather than look silly alone and pitiful on the sidelines while everyone else danced. Unfortunately she had missed the first two classes and this was the third so we were both horribly behind in our expertise and just stumbled about looking like idiots while the rest of the class glided, ungracefully, but in unison to the instructors command. After twenty minutes the opportunity came to switch partners and I worked hard to market my dance partner to a lucky man and quickly made my exit before I was assigned a new and more experienced dance partner that might not be so entertained that I was dance class crashing.

The depression that set-in last week in my own emotional crash after the Suzi breakdown and my two person attendance at my Bootstrap Boston monthly meeting crawled into me late last week. I got a bad illness inside from it or maybe from a passing flu that eventually condensed into a long, thin, and painful cold sore on my lip. I feel like sometimes I am a moron explorer who roams from place to place haphazardly planting flags into the ground to establish new territories that only I believe in. For a short time one or two insane people are willing to go along with my little flags and then sooner or later the few people around me leave and I am left alone looking cock-eyed and slumped over my own failure at this flag that I put into the ground to claim some key idea like PRM, smart organizer, improv practice troupe, bootstrap Boston, whatever.

It is depressing times when I get thoughts like these that I am ecstatic that my baby daughter is soon to be born. I can fail at everything else but my greatest ambition is to be a good father and to raise a generation of good children. While my own accomplishments will likely always be just crazy flag planting, recruiting, building, and breaking down, my hope is to find an enduring success with be produced from the love that I put into my own family.