Take a Breather, My Heart

A preface: Over the summer I grew a little obsessed with an idea that I've harbored for some years now. Namely, getting a tattoo. I've known what I want for a while now, though don't have a specific design yet (damn but I should have stuck with my art classes) and over the summer I figured out where I would get it. That, combined with a certain rediscovered penchant for irresponsible decisions very nearly drove me into tattoo parlors in both Florence and Scranton. Now, anyone who knows me knows that:

tattoo : me :: lace apron : Godzilla

That was part of the appeal, to be honest.

Cut to now (

the ever-glorious now, the ever-present...now,

to quote the late, great Mark Sandman) and my first doctor's visit on the new health insurance. It had been a little over a year since meeting with Ellen Mellow, M.D (and my first meeting [during the second day of last year's subway strike] was my first insured doctor's appointment of my adult life), and we had a lot of ground to cover (see Dec. 2 entry for details). Doctor M. specializes in heart health, and during my check-up she spent a good deal of time listening with her stethoscope. This seemed a little odd to me, but I told myself to relax and let time slip by. Then she asked me to lie down while she did more of the same, listening to my heart from multiple angles. That request put me even more in a "huh?" place. Then she terrified me.

"You have the most amazing arrhythmic heart variations."

Actually, she said a lot more, all in indecipherable medical jargon, but that's the dumbed-down version. As I came to understand, I have what Dr. Mellow considers to be a rarefied variety of regularly changing heart rhythms. She even went so far as to say that it could simply be due to my being an actor, due to emotional versatility/extremism, but that we'd better take an echo scan just to be sure.

And like in a bizarre old movie, she opened a side door from the examining room and there was a darker room with a big machine in it being operated by a man of Asiatic heritage who wasn't much for bedside manner. In the tersest terms he instructed me to lie on my side, close to him and the machine, and rest my left arm under my head. As I maintained my reclining-Venus pose, he attached three disposable electrodes to my chest, triangulating signals on my heart, then smeared a glob of teal gel on what looked like a bladeless electric razor and pressed it into my lower left pectoral muscle.

Bing! Just like that on the computer screen was a grainy, black-and-white image of my beating heart. I saw valve. And for the rest of the examination, at least ten minutes, I was rapt. He pushed the not-an-electric-razor with its not-entirely-warm gel in all different angles off my torso, and I saw live images of my heart switching from cha-cha to two-step, to waltz, to west-coast swing. I thought, as I lay there being prodded, how remarkable it was that we got something so right in ancient times as associating emotion with our hearts. They're not the source, nor a depository, but damned if they don't tie together the whole experience in a visceral way.

It makes perfect sense to me that my heart doesn't, and may never have, kept metronomic time. I don't know if I'll ever get that inking of a great black bird in mid-flap over my left breast. But if I do, it will have good company. Something wild, something of a scavenger, an improviser, itself.

Merry Christmas, Baby

I know, I know. I referenced one of those most obnoxious yuletide (Look out! The yule tide is coming in! Kids, get away from your fruitcake castle!) songs. I like the Boss, I really do. But damn. Enough already. Between that and "Feliz Navidad," it's miraculous we don't have a few more cases of holiday homicide...at least amongst the disc jockey set.

I am typing this up on my Mom's computer, which is cobbled together from various archaic components (the CPU isn't so old, really, but the monitor weighs enough to bow the hardwood shelf it squats on) and dialed up to the interwebz via something called a "phone line." I don't know why phones need a "line." I think it has something to do with the Nixon administration. At any rate, I am home for the holidays. And no, the appended picture is not of me drunkenly shrinking because I drank from Santa's special reserve of champagne, though I inevitably feel just that gluttonous after our family's Christmas dinner. (It's a photo of my performance of Lloyd Schlemiel, a silent-film style improvisatory clown, from dear Melissa's benefit for her dance company: Kinesis Project.)

So: I have survived another season (assuming that ham wasn't cured with strychnine). It was a highly successful one, if but a bit lonely for yours truly. But lonliness is easily overcome when people appreciate the gifts you give. I swear there's few greater pleasures I get than watching someone open a gift I've prepared for them. Don't think it's like I'm naturally beneficent or anything, either. It's like performance art for me. It's manipulative, actually. I love to toy with people's perceptions and expectations. As an example, one year I was dating a girl who was, shall we say, used to the finer things. I was young(er) and madly in love (it's the only way to do it, really), but also aware of how this girl (let's call her "Bertha") had learned not to get her expectations up too high for me, at least as far as material rewards go. We had an ongoing debate about why we should/n't get a cat, with me taking the typical male perspective, i.e., Cats Are Evil. So for Christmas, I bought her a pure white cat puppet. "Surprise, honey! It's a compromise for Christmas!" She was, shall we say...nonplussed. So I continued, "Oh, but it's not just a stuffed cat. Look! A puppet! Try it out!" The sweet kid, she played along, barely containing a rage I'm glad I didn't have to confront. At that point, at any rate. And wouldn't you know it, when she pulled out her hand, there was a Tiffany's box with a pair of platinum earrings within.

(This kind of game can backfire terribly. For one of Bertha's birthdays, I set her on a sort of scavenger hunt about different spots we had shared in the city. But I made the clues too hard, and received a tearful phone call whilst I sat at the end of the labyrinth. Poor Bertha. She played that through, too, inspite of my ridiculous gaff.)

These plans we draw, they can go in any direction at any time, and perhaps this is the resonance I find in performing improvisatory theatre. Even from a botched scene (or entire play), we can say we learned a new thing or two. Interestingly enough, one of the activities my family enjoyed for the New York segment of our holy daze was to see a Moliere play, School for Wives. Now, as any self-respecting BFA recipient will tell you, Moliere was heavily influenced by the Commedia dell'arte traditions, and most of his plays are drawn directly from such scenarios, or at least such stock characters. School for Wives is a brilliant example of this, and a value pack of Kudos(r) to the good people at The Pearl Theatre Company for including a "Commedia Coach" (Christopher Bayes) in their roster of hard-working artists. The entire cast was solid--one of the best overall casts I have ever seen, anywhere. Not a weak link among them. (I particularly want to note Hana Moon and Bradford Cover as exceptional actors [willfully acknowledging that such notice is easier to achieve the funnier the character is written] and T.J. Edwards as well, who demonstrated a stylistic ease between two supporting characters.) The play was performed in nearly pure commedia style (only masking the Pantalone and Dotore characters would have topped it [and no doubt scared the shit out of the audience in the process]) including some improvised dialogue and much direct address and asiding.

{I aside; you aside; we aside; they aside; we have asided; you are asiding...?}

{Here we go a'wasailing, a'wasailing are we..."}

Particularly when we are with our families, I think the ability to improvise is a valuable skill. Having only lived this experience from the aspect of son (and brother), I am remarkably narrow in my view. Nevertheless, I think most of us can agree that reuniting with any group with whom we once--and now no longer--spent our daily lives is an exercise in subconscious revisitation of our former selves. That is to say, you can take the overpriviledged kid out of the suburbs, but you can't take the suburbs out of the now-rather-less-overpriviledged kid. We return to the group, and there is a natural tendency for everyone to resume where they left off. In this context, there is no better refreshment than being able to really listen...and maybe throw in a curve ball when your loved ones are least expecting it.

But just drinking a lot of eggnog is another option. I'm off to frolic in the yule tide. The water is unseasonably warm...

Three is funny.

There are quite a few axioms in Comedy. (I choose here to make a distinction between "comedy" and "Comedy"; comedy is when you pay $10.75 for the privilege of seeing the other half of the jokes, those

not

exposed in the trailers, and Comedy is the process of making the funny sans benefit of editing and CGI [I briefly considered making the distinction between the terms the way we {read: Americans} do with theater/theatre, but "comedye" looks too much like an emo band name.]) Some axioms that spring readily to mind:

• Three is funny. Generally speaking, there's something about repetition in threes that just works.
• It's all in the timing. Both an axiom and a warning akin to "Starve a cold, feed a fever." Some people think the funny relies on volume and energy, and these so-called people should be dragged into the street and shot.
• Never work with children or animals. They will always upstage you.
• Always work with children and/or animals. They are often unpredictable, hence always funny. This is a producer's rule, and, therefore, inherently flawed.
• Wear a funny hat. Ridiculous? Cheap? What are you, Richelieu?

So we have these "rules," wheresoever they may spring from. Some are fond of saying they definitively come from the vaudeville tradition but, frankly, I think vaudeville is more likely responsible for developing them into one-liner phrasing. Chances are that these ideas stretch about as far back as any oral tradition. My opinion in this is, of course, biased by the fact that I have devoted a certain percentage of my adult (HA!) career (HA-HA!) studying

Commedia dell'arte

and adapting it into a contemporary context. So I have become a little concrete in my views of evolving performance traditions, at least insofar as my belief that everything-steals-from-everything goes.

As a result of my associations, I began to wonder yesterday (yesterday's when I thought in actual language, the idea's been floating about in me for sometime in the form of a mental, "Huh...") if a particular axiom of comedy and a certain law of improvisation weren't existing in conflict to one another.

(Interestingly enough [to me, anyway], yesterday I also impulse-bought a movie,

Imagine Me and You

, that I had impulse-seen about a year ago. One of the cleverer bits of dialogue involves a paradox: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? This leads me to be more willing to accept that the question I'm about to pose is unanswerable, which, in turn, leads me to question how much credence romantic comedies bear in my worldview.)

So here they are:

In improvisation, the players must say "yes" to one another in all things.

and/but

In comedy, contradiction and reversal of expectation are funny.

Sew. Perhaps it isn't an omnipotence paradox, but if you've ever been on stage and trying to make a scene fly, it sure as hell can feel omni-important. I'd be curious to hear anyone's comments on this. I'm aware that it's not directly contradictory. In a given improvisation, you can introduce elements that defy expectation, and your scene partner(s) can support that choice, and/or supplement it with more surprises. The contradiction humor, however, is virtually impossible to incorporate into free-form improv. As an (admittedly stilted) example of what I mean:

"Konstantine, we've got to get to Moscow."

"Da."

"I've got the perfect solution."

"Da?"

"You know how you've always been good at yodelling?"

"Da..."

"And I've always been an excellent knitter?"

"Da..."

"And we are descended from the Czars, and our favorite band is The Exploding Yurts, and we can seduce any woman so long as Saturn is in retrograde?"

"Da, da and da!"

"Then all we have to do is invent a knitted iPod that fits into a woman's hiking pack and comes preloaded with The Exploding Yurts covering 'Styurgenburginfjordinhewt-yay-hee-hoo,' stamp it with the royal seal, and we'll make enough to finally, finally get to Moscow. Whadaya say?"

"Nyet."

"What? For God's sake, why not?"

"You never say 'please' anymore."

I wish I had enough of a grasp of Russian vernacular to translate "whadaya."

Okay, admittedly, the dialogue sucks. But I assure you the structure is classic. And in a free-form improvisation, you can't use it. Why? Because negation of ideas in an improvised scene that has no underlying structure almost guarantees that you'll send the scene into a dizzying downward spiral of bickery and waffling (sounds like excellent UK cuisine, but terrible to happen on stage). Now, sure, if you have pre-agreement that the scene will end in a particular way or something will be accomplished by the end (structured improvisation, see Commedia dell'arte) you can certainly bicker, because your characters are nice and established, and the goal is imminent and agreed. Creating all on the fly, however, is another matter.

Normally, what happens in this scenario is the "yes" law trumps the "contradiction" axiom. The object continues to exist. And that's fine. But I find it fascinating that rules of comedy and rules of improvisation may be in conflict. In this sense, we prioritize of necessity the scene above the laugh. That's as well as may be (theatre teachers from my past are bristling with potential indignation) but are we, in some cases, gypping our audiences? Is there one among us who is not guilty of breaking that cardinal rule once (or twice) because s/he could practically precognate the uproariousness of their audience?

Another rule of comedy is:

• Defy all rules.

That one rather speaks for itself.