Tonight was improv night. I participated in the March Madness competition at the Staircase. Colette, Gary Reid and I formed the team “Axis of Evil” and competed against two other teams. The winners were determined by audience voting. We came in second place by one vote! It was a lot of fun. We each got two 15-minute sets to do whatever we wanted with. In the first set, we did a basic longform set, based on the suggestions “sex” and “corn.” Some weird things came from that, let me tell ya. For our second set, we did a Hyperlinks set, which means the audience could yell out “click” at any time and force us to start a new scene based on whatever we happened to be doing at the time. That was very fast paced, as the audience really enjoyed yelling “click” every 10 seconds, or so it seemed.

The highlight for the night for me was definitely the solo improv set I did during The Experiment, and hour-long show at 10PM that let various improvisors try things they’d never done before. I was very nervous at first, but concentrating on multiple characters at once took me completely out of my head. I’ve never lived in the moment as much as in this set. I was reacting purely emotionally to the things I was saying to myself. I had no clue what I was going to say or how I was going to react until the words came out of my mouth. I was glad for the training I did with Andrew Eninger, who’s the master of this format. Here’s a photo of Andrew I took at the Toronto Improv Festival.

Anyway, I’m feeling good, but totally drained, as I do after a really challenging improv set. I think it’s time for sleep. 🙂