Hopeful About What Comes Next

I miss doing improv theatre.

Starting in 2017, I regularly performed in improv shows. Every Friday by the end of it. The end of what?

In 2021, I left State College, Pennsylvania. Moved to Iowa City. I’ve only performed improv in front of an audience a handful of times since I left Happy Valley.

A local improv group held auditions last week. 8:00pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays? Talk about late. That’s near my bedtime!

I didn’t try out. And I never really followed up with the improvisers I reached out to when I first moved to Iowa City. Why not? If I miss improv so much, why not go audition for a group?

Here’s a statement Solomon and Samson asked me too many times to remember in my Happy Valley Improv days: “Daddy, do you have improv tonight?”

Teaching classes. Leading workshops. Performing in shows. My answer was often yes. And it always made me sad to say that to them. They’d wave at me from our kitchen window as I drove down our long driveway in beautiful Pennsylvania Furnace. A town that looked nothing like a furnace. And then I wouldn’t get home until they were asleep. I didn’t like that.

Since as long as I can remember, I’ve been involved in one creative project or another. Directing plays. Being in plays. Creative writing. Comedy. Working on my PhD. Leading workshops about this, that, and the other. My day job has never been my only job. And I don’t want to keep living like that. Making more time for my family and myself was one of my intentions when I first set out to Iowa City.

***

As a child, I was often told how creative I was. I came to think of myself as creative early on and that’s never really gone away.

Now, as an adult, after having spent a career teaching creative subjects to creative students, I’m convinced everybody is creative. I used the word creative three times in one sentence. Now that’s writing!

I’m convinced that creativity is stifled, repressed, and stamped out by much of what happens to us as we get older. And that’s why people often say they aren’t creative even though, in my humble opinion, they are. Holding onto a creative spark deep into adulthood takes real discipline. Real chutzpah.

Incidentally, these silly blogs are one of the ways I hold onto that creative spark. Did I say discipline and chutzpah? I’ve published hundreds of these things. I write weekly with very little in the way of compensation or validation. Creativity can’t be about compensation or validation. That never lasts. Creativity has to be about the determination to practice creating and to keep creating, come what may. There’s vitality and life in creativity, to be sure, but you have to cultivate that life.

Talk about a preachy paragraph.

Anyway, improv has always been one of the genres I’ve used to express my creativity. To channel the good, bad, and ugly things inside my soul. It’s good for me to do this, to be creative. It’s one of the ways I work with the torment that comes from being alive. Kurt Vonnegut joked that life is no way to treat an animal. I don’t think we can deny that being alive is hard. Creating things, for me, has always proved helpful in coping with existential dread. I suggest that creating things, for you, serves similar purposes. Humans are creating beings.

I think I’m worse off for not having an improv stage to play on weekly. And I also think it’s good for me to be home with my family on Friday night. Both things can be true. Life is complex, no matter how you might try and deny that complexity.

My writing, my teaching, and my improv have all been ways for me to work out the traumatic, beautiful, and mundane things that have happened to me during my short time here. They have also been ways for me to escape encountering the traumatic, beautiful, and mundane things that have happened to me during my short time here. Again, both things can be true.

So I’m in a strange place where, despite the challenges of my new job and living in a new place, I also have a quiet space to encounter things about myself I often avoided due to my hectic, creative, and busy schedule. Sounds like a recipe for a mid-life crisis if you ask me. A recipe for blood pressure medication, to be sure.

All of this is to say that it is both good and bad that I’m not performing improv weekly right now. Both things can be true.

***

There’s a small group of people I’ve connected with in the College of Education at Iowa. We connected last spring. Scheduled weekly afternoon meetings to get together and do improv. I’ve been able to attend one session so far this fall. Like I said, my schedule is busy. Still, it was fun. I couldn’t help myself, so I offered to lead us. Taught us some long-form improv.

I’m always going to need outlets for my creativity. Blogs, improv, classrooms, writing projects, whatever. But I also need some space to not always be working on something. Some space to slow down, find some peace, and settle into my forties. And then my fifties. And my sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, one-hundred-and-sixties, my eternities, etc. I plan on living a long time.

So I miss improv, yes. But I also feel at peace with missing improv. And hopeful about what comes next.