Nerd Herding

I'm bad at it. Twice last weekend I was asked to help round up groups, and I failed in interesting ways both times, including by mis-hearing responses that were in the affirmative.

One of the aspects of

Camp Nerdly

that I appreciated for the first time this go, my third go (see also

5/12/08

,

4/11/08

,

5/8/07

and

5/7/07

) were the many cultural overlaps between stereotypical nerd culture and stereotypical camping culture. Both require an enthusiasm for making life a greater challenge, amongst other specific conditions that supposedly "normal" people would fear or disdain. Both involve improvisation, moderated with a healthy dose of research and acquired knowledge. Both generally associate with high-calorie foods. Both environments typically eschew the strictures of social norms such as fashion and strict codes of hygiene. So yes, camp is an excellent place for fellow nerds to gather, and be unabashedly nerdish.

I am one such nerd. In point of fact, I don't think of myself as a nerd per se; not because I find the term derogatory, either. Rather, I think specifically of a "nerd" as someone very intelligent and good with details. I am not

very

intelligent, at least not in that way, so consider myself something more along the lines of a geek, or dork. Spaz, too -- which I have fortunately parlayed into a rewarding career as a physical comedian. At least, it's philosophically rewarding, when in no way else.

Despite my self-imposed sub-nerd status, I am allowed (nay: encouraged) to ally myself with other nerds on an annual basis at Camp Nerdly. I just did so last weekend, getting my yearly dose of straight-edge, pure gaming. "Gaming" in this context, by the way, refers to just about any actively challenging effort that is endeavored largely for the sake of fun and entertainment. It was a special occasion in several respects, owing to the fact that

Expatriate Younce

was in attendance, all the way from Leeds. (That's in England.) I have a funny sort of response to gaming. Expatriate Younce actively encourages it, as do other friends of my hometown, while

Wife Megan

and many of her circle, at best, do not understand its appeal. So I have some strong influences on either side of the debate as to the relative value and appeal of gaming. Then I get to the actual gaming, and have a response similar to when I've been away from a rehearsal process for over a month: "Oh crap. I have no clue what I'm doing here." Of course, I gamely (see what I did there?) fake it until I catch up again. And how do I feel about gaming? Well.

The first game I played on arrival this year was a collaborative board game called

Pandemic

, and I have only good things to say about it.

Clinton R. Nixon

was the gamer who introduced it to me and my fellow novices, and we had a great time discussing strategy in trying to clear the world of four rampaging diseases. We also got our butts handed to us by the game, which only serves to make you want to play it more. Sadly, I never found another opportunity. It's way more interesting to play a board game that is both collaborative and difficult to beat than it is to play something like Monopoly, wherein a winner is guaranteed and somebody's going to regret buying real estate.

Next that night was a session of

A Taste for Murder

, run by another favorite gamer of mine,

Jason Morningstar

(perhaps cool names are indicators of future nerdom...?). We gathered at "The Castle," de facto cabin for any games likely to involve more adult themes, and we possibly made those themes more adult than they were intended to be.

A Taste for Murder

seems meant to be a story-telling game with a fairly strong and regular dice element, where the "winner" of scenes is determined by competitive rolls. The setting is like an Agatha Christie novel, and you choose your characters based on family and estate relationships, trying for a broad range of class/status. In the first act of play, the relationships are built up and controversy well-established. It culminates in

MURDER

. In act the second, the player of the murdered character plays the detective on the scene, and the back-stabbing begins. We played it a bit grotesque, I'm afraid, for the genre. Not enough class warring. I played the rebellious son of the estate, and all audio was recorded for the game's creator. Well, some. We kept running down batteries. It was a good game. If I ever play it again, I'll focus less on winning the game, more on building my character.

Saturday morning started out with a game called

Sons of Liberty

, a role-playing game that used playing cards to drive the game function. Essentially, playing chosen patriotic figures both real and imagined (much of the imagination having something to do with steampunkiness), I and two others played a card game against the house ("the house" in this game represented by one Mr. Jeff Hosmer), using our hand at a given moment and the resulting win or loss to narrate how that particular struggle against the Tories went down. In most cases, it went down to the ground, and Hosmer trounced our sorry, albe-they rebellious, butts. I played a saucy cross-dressing Frenchman, hungry for rebellion (non-historical, btw). It was a fun game, and collaborative in its own way. The balance between card play and role-play landed heavily on the card side, but this created a very urgent dynamic that was also fun. Imagine playing Spit, and having to make up a whole team-written fiction, simultaneously.

The early afternoon was my most undecided slot, yet ended up being the most overall satisfying experience of the weekend in terms of gaming.

Kagematsu

is a unique role-playing game in many ways. The game has most of the players playing the women of a feudal Japanese village, trying to woo and/or seduce a ronin who has wandered into their town, in the hopes of finding love and saving the village from some great threat. The history of the game itself is unique; dreamed up by a male-to-female transsexual who was contemplating female identities, and since carried through a fairly extensive development by her friend -- and Nerdly attendee --

Danielle Lewon

. In our game, a woman played the samurai, and I and three other women (including Danielle) played the women of the village. My character was a very young, innocent girl who loved the nearby mountains and cultivating bonsai. We conceived it all as taking place in a fishing village, one haunted by the spirits of the men lost at sea, and the story ended up being

amazing

. To make a long story short(er), this young ronin, out to prove himself, was variously wooed by very different women, none of whom wanted to tell him the problem of the village for fear of scaring him off. He eventually does confront the ghosts . . . and fails. Throughout this game, this growing story, we were moved. Some of us to tears. It was amazing. It was magic, nothing short of it.

My follow-up was similarly strong in narrative, although less of it was created out of thin air.

Montsegur 1244

takes a very cool, tiny section of history and makes a game of it. You are given a very specific setting, choice of two characters (a primary and secondary) and play through the story of about a year within a community that now-a-days we might be inclined to call a religious cult. Your church, town, stronghold has broken off from the church and set up a rather different set of beliefs, principal among them that earth, life, is in fact a kind of testing hell. It can be transcended, and those who do are religious leaders known as "perfects," who try to guide their people out of the cycle of imperfect, passionate living, into true existence. With pre-established characters, setting and scenarios, the game really takes a lot of the burden of narrative structure away from the players (something we appreciate in Zuppa del Giorno when trying to build a play from improvisation) but there's plenty of room to play in the cracks. I played a quasi-heretical patriarch and a young orphan boy, and the highlight for me was a scene played out with Mr. Jason Morningstar, who was once again running the game. We had a negotiation scene that crackled like good theatre for me; he may have missed his calling, that one.

Finally that day, after dinner, was a

Jeepform

free-for-all, run by Jason (people will say we're in love),

Remi Trauer

and

Emily Boss

. I wrote a bit about Jeepform last year after my first experience with it, and it still intrigues me. Essentially, it is a very interesting hybrid of improvisatory theatre and role-playing gaming. It has its own philosophy, and makes efforts to stand apart from both forms (as any self-respecting hybrid ought). This year was a somewhat more technical exploration of the methods and tactics -- as opposed to last year's straight gaming -- and one which eventually descended into Absurdist madness. Each of the leaders led us through a different Jeepform trope, all three in the context of superhero fiction. This was, perhaps, a contributing factor to the eventual eruption of silliness, as people (read: nerds) had a ton of clever ideas about how to riff on comicbooks. They tried to tell us: The best choice is an obvious one. And we tried to listen, but by the time we got around to the fourth section -- a trial held in a strange,

WH40K

-inspired universe -- the gaggy gloves were decidedly off. I was as guilt as any, and it was a little too much fun to stop. Yet the surprising virtues I observed about Jeepform held true. People were taking turns, not interrupting, and a story was gradually developing on its own.

There was much discussion after that, rather late into the night (late by fresh-air standards, anyway), about gaming and improvisation and story-telling. There's something about people being excited to talk about that which is oddly fulfilling for me. I went to sleep feeling quite sated.

Sunday mornings at Camp Nerdly are often hungover affairs, but not the usual variety. People are bushed from all the thinking and playing of the day before, and many elect not to play anything at all, but there is a slot for gaming between eating and cleaning up the site.

Mark Causey

filled my slot (hey now) with a little game called

GHOST/ECHO

. It was reminiscent of my first year and Nerdly, when I discovered just how much fun it could be to create a whole fictitious world from the ground up. Of course, as an improviser and writer, I do this all the time, but I take it for granted somewhat. It's a means to an end. Putting it as the primary purpose makes for some lovely synchronicity, especially when its collaborative, and thereby synergistic.

GHOST/ECHO

offers nothing but variables, an idea for context ("aetherpunk," says the ad) and a device for conflict resolution and lets the players make the rest up. It would be a tricky terrain for someone unused to working without rules, but for someone like me who knows roughly what to expect, and just wants to run free imaginatively -- a lovely way to spend a Sunday morning.

And like that, it was over. Some mopping, some laughing codas, a bus ride for me and the next day Expatriate Younce was bound homeward as well. My annual alliance with 50+ smart, creative thinkers done for the year.

When I was too young to fully appreciate the sentiment, someone mentioned to me the following axiom: When you are young, you love someone because you need them; once you have lived, you find true love when you need someone because you love them. I knew I was too young at the time I heard it to fully appreciate it, but there's nothing to be done about that. We all grow in our own time, and can only listen to the advice we are ready to hear. Yet I remembered it, and whereas it concerned me, made me worry about the nature of this or that relationship, when I was younger, now it is a comfort to me in all of my loves. When I was a kid, and started gaming, I loved it, and I really needed it -- for interaction, to work out my own fears and ambitions and to feel accomplished. And now, I love it. It wakes me up, engages me, gives me ideas and allows me to make the big picture the priority. I'm made happier by having it a part of who I am and what I do. And that's a great feeling.

1 2 3 SPRING

This weekend I went down to northern Virginia to celebrate a friend's birthday and Easter, and to meet my new niece-in-law, Hannah. It was a very fast trip, and a car was rented, which makes for a great deal more ease of travel, in spite of involving a great deal more effort on my part. It also allowed me to skip out on my own early Saturday morning for that birthday's adventures. The lucky birthday boy's wife arranged for a group of his friends to experience

Inner Quest

as adults. This was a popular field trip for all of us as children but, I must admit, it is

so much way better

as an adult. For one, nobody makes snide comments about one's athletic prowess, or lack thereof.

Well, it's done with a better sense of humor, anyway.

It was a fairly fascinating experience for me on many levels. As a youth, I only ever went to Inner Quest in my overweight phase (ages 5-16, this "phase" was) and I certainly didn't have a lot of background on the sorts of things they ask you to do there. I was a Boy Scout, and we do some challenging things in the Scouts, but rarely anything so singular as a zip wire, or climbing a 35-foot ladder (somehow that's more frightening than rock climbing). So perhaps needless to say, I was far better equipped to handle its challenges--physical and emotional--as a 31-year-old circus enthusiast. I didn't so much get a feeling of redemption from this experience, as I felt a strong need to make up for lost time. I wanted to run through, do everything, and do it all twice if I possibly could.

We did a zip wire (coast across a valley on a pulley attached to an airline cable), the "trapeze" (climb 30-or-so feet up a tree and jump from a platform to catch a trapeze), the "squirrel" (you're tied to a rope that runs up to a pulley very high in the air, and your friends are on the other end; at "go," you run in one direction and they, the other) and a "woozle" (two tightropes that wedge apart; you and a partner put your hands together and try to stay on them as far out in the widening wedge as possible). Of all of these, the trapeze was definitely my favorite. It was an awfully Batman-ish sort of challenge, and the terror I felt on that platform was unexpectedly strong. Pushing through that was an exhilarating reminder that there's a lot of new stuff I can still tackle physically, whether it's making up for lost time or finding all-new challenges.

Wife Megan

and I are, in fact, planning to take our first aerial class this week.

The other way in which this adventure was fascinating, though, was a quieter, less-terror-inducing one. Inner Quest is principally a team-building course, and they host school, church and corporate groups for day-long bouts of group challenges. This day was a bit like watching my own workshop curriculum writ large, stretched across valleys and up oak trees. Whether I'm teaching acrobalance or commedia dell'arte, there's always an emphasis on group work, on creating a sense of ensemble. That priority even ties back into the times I was first experiencing Inner Quest; growing up, I felt a very strong connection to the groups I was in that worked well together, theatre-oriented or otherwise. For me, there's a synergy to collaboration that simply has no match in individual efforts (if in fact any effort can be said to be purely individual). So I find the work of leading such inner-quests fascinating.

Our guides in this day, known to me only as Kate and Corey, were very accustomed to one another and seemed to be genuinely enthusiastic about the work. It was a miserable day weather-wise, rain-soaked and chilly, which made for mud, but they made sure we knew that by showing up on such a day we had impressed them. The emphasis was on fun, this being an adult birthday party, yet they kept up with their leadership techniques from what I could tell. I was struck in particular by how Kate dealt with an especially terrified friend on the trapeze platform. She just talked to her, but underlying the conversation was an awareness that she needed to balance distracting the jumper from the terror while focusing her on the task at hand. It's a delicate technique, and one that's impressed me ever since someone used it on me when I was a boy, to get me unfrozen from climbing up a couple of airline cables to the zip-wire platform.

I have had a few incidences of having to coax people into attempting the activities and/or challenges my workshops present. Some have gone better than

others

, of course, but it's an interesting and essential aspect of teaching. Everyone is accustomed to the idea of "requirements" for a given class or workshop, but requiring something is in my opinion antithetical to the learning process. The first step of learning is choice; take that away, and even when students accomplish something it is fleeting, personally unimportant or even ultimately resented. Inviting someone to challenge themselves, doing so in a compelling way, is a precious ability to cultivate in both teaching and other forms of leadership. It allows for progress and individuality. I'll be thinking about this a lot, no doubt, during

my workshop at Swarthmore tomorrow

.

There's only one thing better than springtime in NoVa, and that's autumn. But spring is pretty wonderful too, with its cherry blossoms and budding deciduous trees. I'm glad I got down there for our short weekend, and played outdoors a bit while there. On Sunday, in fact, Megan and her dad built Nephew James a new playground in the backyard. I slept in and missed most of the build, but selfishly scooped up a great deal of the payoff by playing with young James upon his first discovery of the fantastic addition to the yard. It was chilly. I definitely wished for it to be warmer as we romped around the castle, but kind of relished the youth of the season along with the youth of my companion. Before we know it, he'll be springing off platforms and hurtling through space. Eager as I am for warmer weather and more activity, the present moment is pretty wonderful, too.

Head Shots

I recently ordered a good batch of prints of my headshots -- a little over fifty, of mixed variety. I easily could have ordered 100, and put them all to good use, but as it's coming up on tax time, I hesitated to make the investment just yet. The turn-around on the order was surprisingly quick. Placed late in the day last Wednesday, they were ready for pick-up Thursday midday. Now there are two fat envelopes of photos featuring my face sitting next to my desk, just waiting for newly printed resumes to be cropped to 8x10 and adhered. What with all my open calls lately, and the need to get myself out there more, I see many unsolicited mailings in my future.

That was a good thing to get done last week, and this weekend I had an incredible series of merely entertaining activities. Not that entertainment is a waste for me -- far from it. It's just that the occasions when it has nothing to do with theatre or my fellow theatre artists are rare, and I just had a whole weekend's worth. It started with an easy evening at home Friday night, and progressed into Saturday, which started with a spa day with

Wife Megan

. An abnormal luxury for us, to be sure, and we owe big thanks to the groomsmen for it. From there it was a vegan lunch out, a movie, drinks at Friend Geoff's bar and another evening at home (our budget having been busted for the day by all that follow-up to the spa). Then, Sunday, I indulged in one of my most indulgent of entertainments with

Friend Adam

for four hours or so, and met up with

Friend Ken

for drinks. All in all, an incredibly rewarding weekend.

I feel depressed today.

The most indulgent entertainment I know of, ladies and gentlemen, is video games. Yes.

Video games.

Especially now, because they have come a long way since I was thirteen, plugged into my PC in the basement of my parents' house, listening to Nirvana on the ol' single-speaker, tabletop tape recorder. This is why I do not own an Xbox, or PlayStation, or what you will. Time will literally flow by like an endless river. Video games threaten dehydration for yours truly, I kid you not. So I engage in them rarely, as I did yesterday with Friend Adam. We played the demo of

Resident Evil 5

, and continued a game of

Left 4 Dead

we played a week before, and playing video games twice in two weeks is the most I have in years. Both games, for the uninitiated, are zombie scenarios, with much shooting and running about.

Friend Patrick

has often theorized that I'm a little obsessive (see also the comments on the above link), maybe even a little masochistic about certain things. Certainly my ability in the realm of video games emphasizes my obsessive qualities, as I am largely

terrible

at them, and nonetheless enraptured by them. What strikes me today, though, is not how obsessed I am with that little entertainment, but how slavishly my emotions are subordinate to the work (or lack thereof) I'm trying to do. In other words, I don't think I'm feeling depressed today because I played video games or had a scalp treatment or because of anything I did this weekend past. I don't even believe it's because now those activities are over, and the work week returns. Rather, it's because of what I didn't do last weekend.

As anyone who presents themselves to be even remotely geeky knows, zombies are guiltless kills. Part of the fantasy is that a zombie hoard gives otherwise moral people ample excuse for depraved violence against their fellow humans. It's an outlet for all the sublimated aggression that's kept us, as a race, alive and killing one another for centuries (and that lives on in more outspoken acts in

certain of our pets

). Different zombie stories carry different emphases, drawing parallels between the shambolic creatures and drug-users, religious and other fanatics, and even shopping-mall-goers, but what remains consistent is that the zombies can only be stopped by utter destruction. Perhaps significantly, this is traditionally achieved by destroying the head. It makes sense (insofar as zombies make sense) as an act which destroys the brain, home for any animating urges, be they natural or no. But on a psychological level, a metaphoric one, it often signifies erasing someone's face, or identity. The classic zombie crisis is that one's best friend, or spouse, or parent, has been transformed into one of these demons, and it's up to the hero of the story to overcome his or her previous connections and emotions, and do what needs to be done, face-to-face.

Now I wish I had spent at least some small part of the weekend doing something that wasn't irrelevant to my career. This impulse can be confusing to those who relish leaving their jobs far behind at Friday's end, but for those of us who are pursuing an alternate career, our "free time" has a different tang to it. Trimming paper edges and printing mailing labels is not a heck of a good time, but afterward one feels as though he's put something in its proper place, vindicated the time spent doing work he doesn't appreciate by balancing it out, just a little. Ever since I was really young, I've better appreciated my recreation when it caps off a period of good work. That seems like a noble perspective when you put it that way but, turning it slightly, the dark side of it is covered with feelings of guilt and anxiety about personal time that's come and gone. It's spilt milk (to distend the imagery) and it's stupid to regret. It's also tough to let go of. Not the milk, but the time, and . . . oh, cock it. The weekend was fun while it lasted, and I needed some of that "irrelevant" satisfaction.

My mom, she once asked me what in the world I got out of video games. I told her it gave me a sense of accomplishment and control, two things I didn't feel I had a lot of at the time. I'm glad she asked me, because realizing that made me realize how people can get their priorities mixed up and spend half their lives just trying to entertain themselves. Having a sense of purpose is important. You can supplant it for a bit with entertainments; heck, you can do that your whole life these days, if you rearrange here and there. Maybe getting a high score or finishing a level on a game isn't all that different from a pay raise, or finishing a successful project, really. So long as we can look back at it all and feel good about it, good about where we've been and how we got there. Sometimes I get awfully frustrated with where I am and what I'm doing, and nothing seems more gratifying than busting out and mowing down anything and one that gets in my way. So I'm glad there's a virtual environment for this, because it's a terrible emotion to use in everyday life. Everyday life responds better to focused, incisive work, to balanced point-by-point goals and well-aimed means.

Everyday life responds better to headshots.

Re Cap

Hwaet:

So I journeyed to my parent's place in Hagerstown, MD, on the world's crappiest "Chinatown bus" on the 23rd of last month. It was the 24th by the time I got there, jangling Chinese karaoke still resonant in my head. The next day

Wife Megan

drives up from her parents' in NoVa and we attend my mom's Christmas Eve service. That night we celebrate Christmas with my parents.

Christmas Day we drive down to NoVa to spend it with her family, and there is much present-opening and nephew-adoring.

The day after that I spend largely at Friend Mark's, with Friends Davey, Steve and Adam, pretending to slay things with our mighty weaponry, there being no mightier weapon that our imaginations.

The next day it was back to Maryland for me to get a little more time with the 'rents and help them with their open house, New Year's buffet the next day. Much food was made, quite a bit (not nearly enough) consumed, and I felt well-fed to return to New York.

Return to New York for a few days and New Year's proper, whereupon Megan and I stay out way too late with Friend Geoff, then have to leap into a cab (pre-packed) for JFK.

Wake in sunny San Juan, January 1, 2009. We burn as we wait to be able to check in to our hotel, cunningly soothed off our guard by the cool breezes and sound of the waves.

The next day, Megan's friends get married on the beach and we bear witness, and dance barefoot on a plywood stage.

In the days that follow we enjoy the luxury of our beachfront hotel, do some sightseeing, then move into our more bohemian quarters in Old San Juan. More sightseeing, more friends, some good alone time too. And then it's back to New York.

A couple of days there to acclimate, unpack, do laundry repack, and then I'm off to rather-less-than-sunny Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Where I have been ever since, working to bring to life an entirely new interpretation of

Romeo & Juliet

to life with commedia dell'arte, clown and classical work, using poetry, Italian, and improvised dialogue. But more on that anon, now that we're all caught up.

North Pocono High: Day 5

It is done. Our five-day residency at

North Pocono High School

under the auspices of the

NEIU

wrapped today, and I must admit that it has been even more of a learning experience for me than I had anticipated. It's a good policy the NEIU has, of ensuring at least an initial five days' work for new rostered artists. It was coincidence that

ETC

had an association with

Geri Featherby

, and she snatched us up for these free (for the school, that is) introductory days. It may have a made things easier on us, ultimately, to be supported and endorsed by a teacher who knew so well what kind of work we had created, and what we could offer the school. I still feel that we learned an incredibly useful lesson or two about curriculum-building and teaching within a high school setting. Going in, I felt fairly prepared, backed up by years of experience teaching workshops to all manner of groups. Now I know how wrong I had been, and how much I've not only learned, but have yet to learn.

Wherever possible, we wanted to make today about pulling together the various experiences of the week into unified, practical application. The approach we took in the Shakespeare class was to put a lot of control into the students' hands. We began warming up before the period began, and spent very little time with it in the actual class period, in order to maximize class time for scene work. We divided them into their groups for their assigned scenes for

Taming of the Shrew

, then split them in two halves for Heather and I to work amongst. For approximately half an hour we moved from group to group, offering suggestions for the work they would present to their peers at the end of the period, emphasizing the lessons in specificity, improvisation and character-building that we taught throughout the week. I had three groups, and had to move rapidly between them. If it hadn't been so busy, it would have been frustrating, to have so little time. However, we saw progress, and at the end every group performed a part of a scene to good improvement. I watched and enjoyed, bitter-sweet with the desire to continue working with them, excited to think of

Zuppa del Giorno

's approaching foray into Shakespeare's world. At the end, we thanked them, and they thanked us back, all like fellow collaborators. I hope to see them again before too long.

The gym classes, of course, didn't have the same daily consistency of our other courses, so there was very little emotional context to our work for those two periods. We learned some good lessons on how to wrangle massive groups for acrobalance yesterday, and applied them to good effect. Both yesterday and today I used squat-thrusts for the initial warm-up, and noticed that these worked well if you didn't warn the students what they'd be doing. I asked them to squat, then go into a plank (or push-up position), then squat again and stand. Then I just did the same thing all together with a four count, and everyone quickly got the idea with a minimum of commentary. It helps with such exercises to be a little competitive with the teenagers. (Helps, that is, until the next morning.) Aptly enough, both classes were disrupted in one way or another. The first lost their seniors for a group picture, nearly halving our group size. Something of a relief, frankly, for at least my voice. At the end of the second class, a fire drill went off. Still, we got good training squeezed in there. Even if we didn't get to know our students much in these classes, we did become pretty friendly with the teachers, and that was very rewarding. I really feel there was a progress in which they were skeptical of us to begin with -- having very little information as to what to expect from us -- and ultimately came to be satisfied with what we had to teach and how effectively we did it. We discussed teaching techniques for such bizarre circumstances as only a P.E. class can offer, and a couple of the teachers even volunteered that they'd love to get a group to see

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

.

Exactly how to culminate our work in the acting class, our last class of the whole experience, was a subject of much discussion betwixt Heather and I. Ultimately, we agreed that it would be good to structure it as much as possible, but to hand the actual creation of a scene or scenes over to the students. We began them with another game, then worked on group counting up to 20 (in which they succeeded). Then we did some "Yes, and..." storytelling in a circle, in which each person contributes a line to a developing story. This ended up being a little superfluous to what they created, but it was our idea that they could use whatever story was told there for source material for their assignment. The assignment was to, within assigned groups ("assigned" because even by the end of the week clear divisions were visible in the class social dynamic), create a scene with a beginning, middle and end, incorporating one rhythm of three, one pratfall and specific first and last lines of spoken dialogue that would be the same for all groups. The topper was that they had only one minute to discuss this scene -- enough to sketch an outline, not enough to avoid improvisation. We did a couple of rounds of this. It was effective insofar as it got the students working together with a minimum of fuss and put an emphasis on improvisation as an acting tool. I still wanted to take them a little farther out of their safety zones, somehow, but have to concede that for many of them this is an ambitious goal for five days' work. I smiled a lot in their presentations, thinking of how much they had to offer to this work, how real they are when they are (however momentarily) focused on the problem at hand more so than their own insecurity. At the class' close, we thanked one another, and a couple of the students who had peeped maybe twice during the whole week went out of their way to say goodbye. I respect my teachers so much more today than I had before this experience.

I don't know what the future holds for the relationship between Zuppa del Giorno and the NEIU. It had been our hope that this partnership would allow us to enhance our presence in a community at large, and compensate us to a degree that made a full-time commitment to that outreach sustainable. However, the NEIU paid us for this initial contract as though Heather and I were a single artist, under the heading "Zuppa del Giorno." The pay is still decent (which just goes to show what a generous organization they are), but won't quite justify my continuous participation when weighed against the time spent away from employment in New York. So, unless we can reach a different understanding, Heather may be in large part taking over the practice of this particular branch of Zuppa del Giorno. I hope not, though. I hope not, because through this experience I can see the tremendous potential for taking our work to another environment and integrating it and ourselves. I hope not because this week has been tremendous for all involved, I believe, and I also believe it will only get better with more experiences. Most of all, it's simply wonderful to participate in discovery.