My Schoolin > Your Schoolin

It really set in for me this week that while most of ya’ll are struggling to stay awake in regular college lectures day after day, I am constantly witnessing, participating in, and loving a variety of ridiculous activities during all of my classes.

Sort of in response to Emily and Chrissy’s repeated comments attempting to compare and contrast what I’m doing out here with what we endured under the reign of FDG in 1400, I just want to clarify that when I talk about my experiences here and I use the word “ridiculous,” I mean it in a positive sense.

I will admit that not all of the exercises we do out here are fun, and we have been doing some of the same, weird-ass warm-ups here as we did in 1400, including the send-the-hand-squeeze-around-the-circle bullshit. We’ve actually done a lot of other exercises that I would say are much stranger than that one, but they have still been relatively enjoyable for me simply because one of our instructors used the phrase “totally gay-balls” to describe an exercise she was having us do on the first day, and I can’t help but think of that and chuckle every time we are told to imagine we are walking through a cave or whatever.

Anyways, back to the reason I started writing this entry in the first place, it would be impossible for me to explain most of the stuff we’ve been doing so far, so, what follows are just a few examples of things I did in classes/for homework this week.

- The scene I mentioned having to write in the last post ended up revolving around a hospital bedpan and its possibly magical contents. The reading yesterday went alright; could have been better, could have been worse. I’m pretty aware now of some things I need to improve on when writing my next sketch, which is due next Thursday, so that’s good.

- In our improv class Monday, I did a scene with Jacob and Adam that had to begin right after something bad had happened that would make it difficult for us to talk. We were told to predetermine what that occurrence was and then improvise the rest. I felt that it went pretty well.

We decided that our characters had just watched “2 girls, 1 cup” together. Parents/anyone else who has been fortunate enough to miss this video, in all seriousness, do not go looking. You don’t really need to have seen it to understand the details I’m about to provide. Just know that it’s easily one of the most disgusting things ever.

Pretentiousness alert: I’m about to do that thing I always see actors doing where they say “my character” instead of taking personal responsibility for the things that are said or done during a performance (most brilliantly parodied in the Flight of the Conchords episode where they meet a wannabe actor who causes a lot of problems for them and blames it all on the characters he was playing). Anyways, this is just another step I’m taking towards becoming a bigger tool.

After fighting off vomit and/or tears for a while, my character expressed a great deal of anger towards Jacob’s, who was seated at the computer, for exposing us to such a horrible video. Things quickly escalated between all three in the scene. My character complained that pudding had been ruined forever for him. Someone else stated that one of the girls looked like my character’s sister, who my character quickly reminded them had been abducted a few years prior. Jacob’s character replied by conceding that if the girl in the video was actually my character’s abducted sister, the video would have been called “2 Girls, 1 Milk Carton.”

- Also in improv Monday, we did another something-terrible-just-happened scene, only this time, we started by showing the action and not just the aftermath. In this scene, my character was caught pleasuring himself by two characters being played by two of my actual roommates, Michael and Jordan.

I would hate to be thought of as a cheater, so I hope our teacher doesn’t find out that we had (unintentionally) rehearsed this scene already. Three times. Because people can’t seem to figure out how to knock.

That, people, would just be what you call a cheap joke.

Speaking seriously, the scene was a lot of fun, even though I needed a good deal of side coaching to take it where it needed to go. For the record, “my character” really enjoyed the Golden Girls. And I’m not talking about the Mizzou dance team.

- Also for improv, I made a puppet out of a coffee filter and named it Jeff the Jellyfish. This coming Monday, he’ll be appearing in a scene with a makeup-wearing wet floor sign named Sueno Piso. Should be interesting.

Thanks for reading. I'll talk at ya'll next week.