Only of interest to some

I was in Chicago this weekend and saw, for the first time, a couple shows at the I.O. (née Improv Olympic) Theater in Wrigleyville. This was highly amusing to me because, even though years later I took improv classes in New York, I had never once set foot in the I.O. when I lived right around the corner from it back in 2001-02. When I lived in Chicago, my theater experience of choice was the Neo-Futurists’ show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 plays in 60 minutes), which I saw at least once every few weeks.  The Neo-Futurists opened a New York outpost roughly the same time I got here, first in Park Slope and now in the East Village, putting on a version of Too Much Light in the same building where tons of indie improv teams now perform on weekends.  So it was with great delight that when I went to see the show here in New York a couple months ago, I got pulled on stage to be in one of the plays.  My part was a to-the-death-competitive spelling bee contestant, which I handled with brief aplomb, albeit hopping with laughter during one of the funny bits (as I sometimes do from the backline in improv when a teammate makes a particularly tickling move).  Then, due to legitimate nervousness driving from the pressure of time — an average of about two minutes being allocated to each play — I misspelled a word I’ve typed a thousand times (although I can’t remember what it was now).

This was quite a personal disgrace; if any of you ever commit a crime of moderate violence and, addled with numbing boredom during a stretch of your home confinement sentence, find yourself tracking back through all the missives you have ever received from me, I do believe you will find it very difficult to locate a single spelling error.  I pride myself on being as orthographically accurate as a situation can possibly allow; as a practice, I do not even abbreviate or miscapitalize my text messages.  After the play, one of the New York Neo-Futurists graciously thanked me for participating, although, feeling self-chastened, I dumbly did not reply.  It was still fun to be a part of it, though.

One thing that I did NOT enjoy at my recent visit to the I.O, however, was the fact that there was a piano player (!) who provided supposedly matching musical accompaniment to the improv.  It was horrendous — muddling the actors’ dramatic developments and transitions, and being a generally unnecessary distraction.  We were sitting right next to the pianist, and all throughout the show I had to work diligently to sublimate the urge to yank him off the bench, throw a cup of water on his face and scold him for getting in the way of the funny.