The Free Tryptophan

I had two days of free food.  I was full of free soul food from a grateful patient/restaurateur, chicken, potatoes, mixing in my stomach with Double-Stuf OREOs, birthday cupcakes from the next day littering my digestive system with a whole galaxy of sugars and fats dotting the night sky of my own personal food pyramid like some astronomer's wild nightly dream.  Also, a bunch of sausages, croissants, 2% milk, and a whole mess of tryptophan.  But the only thing that worried me was the tryptophan.  There is nothing in my world more helpless and irresponsible than myself in the depths of a tryptophan binge...

 

Tuesday seems to be the day I start a new book, lately.  The previous evening, I went to the Hollywood library to finish my blog and head off to class.  I didn't have enough time to peruse the shelves in search of some bus distraction.  I had to get to class.

 

This was the week of our mid-session evaluations, so I felt pretty confident.  I felt like I was doing much better this session than the previous one.  Last time I felt like I was the example in class.  Anytime I went up, I felt like I screwed up and was often stopped in the middle, at which point, my teacher would explain what I did wrong.  Here, I made bolder choices, held on to them with much more consistency, and often made connections with my scene in a Harold and another one.  I found myself tying together threads of plot, usually not at the expense of the character development developed so far.

 

That was something I liked about this class, that we did Harolds every week.  It was great practice to do these Harolds.  It was the most surprising, and my favorite, thing I found out about this particular teacher when filling in that one day in Level 2.

 

He prefaced his conversation with me by saying that he'd talk to me later about my thoughts on my progress later, but that in order to get through them, he'd just give everyone his notes.

 

He said that I had great ideas, but that I should build well off of my partner, need to respond more to them in personal and specific ways, that I should illustrate (physically) my points, and be more affected emotionally.

 

He also said I was very smart, perhaps too smart.  There that is again.  When someone is telling you you're too smart, that's not literally what they're saying, but if you get told that, you probably already know that.  My interpretation of that is that it's one or more of the following problems:

 

* I'm too in my head

* I'm going for the joke too much, trying to say something that's too witty at the expense of the scene

* I'm sitting in judgment of the other players

* I'm ignoring the other players

* I'm focusing too much on plot and making connections between scenes

 

I'll have to ask what he meant by that in this instance, but I'll take this as a much more positive review than the previous mid-session review.

 

Since I was among the first half of class to get their evaluations, we would perform a Harold while the other half got their evaluations.  So we operated without the benefit of a coach, but I felt pretty good about my performance in the Harold.  The only problem came in the second beat when I was trying to have a conversation with my scene partner and there were a bunch of walk-ons that added nothing to the scene.  My scene partner saw this as well as asked me, the relatively higher status character, to get rid of them.  It didn't work.

 

On the other Harold I noticed one of the scenes featured food that doubled as furniture.  I jotted in my notebook, "Crate & Cracker Barrel" realizing it probably wasn't the first time someone thought of that.

 

It was Tuesday and I hadn't picked a book.  I looked around my apartment and grabbed something quickly, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  It was a gift from my aunt a few years ago, bundled with Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors.  I took it on the bus and decided I'd be done with it by the end of the week.  It was, after all, only two hundred pages, and that's including illustrations and blank pages between chapters.  Unfortunately, I found myself distracted while reading it.  The book was slow going.  I liked the movie, and I think I like Hunter Thompson, but I couldn't manage to break into this.

 

To make matters worse, as the week wore on, I grew drowsier.  I'll blame the free food.  It was stupifyingly ironic: I couldn't read a book about excessive drug use because I was on a tryptophan high.

 

To add to my fictional self-destruction, my hands and arms had more paper cuts than usual.  I looked like I listened to Evanescence.

 

Friday at the internship was a series of firsts for the performers.  The two eight o'clock shows were veteran performers who had never performed together as these particular teams.  The first nine o'clock team was a trio of women who were downright hilarious.  Each was very smart and witty, the only drawback was that they weren't always on the same page, so sometimes a scene would become a little unhinged.  The second half of the hour featured a team comprised of members of my previous Level 3 class.  They were definitely the stronger performers in class, but it was clear they were still pretty new as a team.

 

The last show of the night was another edition of EJ Scott's show in which he, and two others perform one half-hour scene at a bar table drinking real beer.  It was quite impressive actually, and it also featured another first.  Jeff Hawkins' improv partner, Brian O'Connell performed the show for the first time, in its more than three years.

 

This was a slightly unusual version of the show because there was a lot more movement than there usually is.  Brian was the only one sitting for most of the show, and he found a character and found great new, and inventive, ways of speaking through it.  He and I are fans of naturalistic dialogue in improv; one of my biggest pet peeves is when performers speak like they're Shakespearean actors when they don't really know how to speak like Shakespearean actors.  The fake theatrical English accent is the worst, followed closely by Southern accents, speaking like a mad scientist or witch (usually also in that same type of English accent), and acting like a pirate or a robot (I'd like to be a robot in a scene that's so advanced they act just like a human a quick-thinking, stronger human).

 

The show built nicely too.  My previous Level 3 teacher talked about a concept he called, "Grown ups that get along" because he wanted to see scenes that didn't go straight to conflict.  This seemed to be the case here.

 

It looked as though the people who booked the show for the second half-hour wouldn't show, but I didn't know the plan for this one. 

 

I thought I forgot.

 

Some time between 11:30 and 11:35 I saw our host checking his watch and I checked mine.  I tried to get his attention to ask if he was calling the show or if I was.  It seemed a bit late since at the beginning of the hour he billed it as a half-hour show even though it didn't look like the other team was going to show.  I couldn't get his attention without disrupting the show, so I waited a little while longer, putting my hands at the ready to pull the lights and hit the music.  I wondered if he was checking his watch because I hadn't yet called the show.  At around this point EJ pulled out a gun he had talked about throughout the show and aimed it at one of his character's two best friends.  The getting-along was fading, but in an entertaining, organic way.  There was some discussion as to how many bullets were in his revolver and he finally pulled the trigger.  An imaginary bullet flew towards its target sending the character recoiling backward.  At that moment I pulled my own trigger.

 

After the show ended, I waited a moment and approached the stage after our host spoke to them to let them know what happened.  I was prepared to apologize, if I had indeed acted improperly.  Instead I got compliments for my impeccable timing and everyone was in the mood to hang out for a while.  I returned compliments the way of the performers, and thanked my friend, but went home because I was tired.  I guess had too much free tryptophan.

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.