Poop Shute

Those who can...

For a brief time I was a teacher of sorts. I was the makeshift authority figure of an afterschool improvisational comedy troupe at my old high school.

I graduated from Mountain Pointe in May of 1998. The drama teacher during my time there was Mr Jodi Reppert. Excellent teacher, and like a father to me. At the end of my freshman year at ASU Mr Reppert came to me and told me he was retiring and that the new guy that he was grooming to take over for him had mentioned that he wouldn't have time to run the extra-curriculur improv troupe. Mr Reppert remembered that I was big into that when I was there and knew that I had gone to the Chicago Improv festival that year as a student (by the way, if you're an actor and you've never been to that thing, you HAVE to go. I took workshops from Matt Walsh of The Upright Citizens Brigade, and Mick Napier, Charna Halpern, etc. AMAZING stuff) ...so he asked me to take the improv helm while the new guy, J. Rollins settled in.

Over the course of the fall semester I taught them A LOT. I started with the basics; the three "rules" of improvisational comedy, which I am sure some of you already know some variation on them, but here they are as I learned them:

1 Don't deny what your scene partner gives you.
2 Don't ask too many questions because that puts ALL the pressure on your partner.
3 Don't tell stories, DO things.

The first time we met we spent a little time naming our little troupe. We all agreed on the perfect name: "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Improv." The kids loved it, and that was it. I went on to teach basic warm-up games like Rope and ABCD. I went over short form crowd-pleaser games like Party Quirks and World's Worst and I even got into showing them a little long form.

We had a show once a month, and if I remember right it was generally the first Thursday night of every month. Over the course of the semester our attendance grew until the little small stage room was packed with excited comedy fans. I knew that they were there to see the kids and not me, but it still gave me a great sense of accomplishment.

Unfortunately for me... and the kids, Rollins brought in another guy to be my "co-director." Mr. Quinn. He didn't know the first thing about improv or comedy for that matter, but he was on staff. He was an english teacher, and I was just an afterschool volunteer, so I had no say in the matter. At first I thought he would be cool, because he let me do things the way I saw fit. That all changed in January. The first week after Christmas break he decided to take the reigns away from me. Before we met with the kids that day I went over some new games with Quinn that I had discovered that I wanted to teach the kids. First thing he did that day for rehearsal was insist that the kids write a sketch to open the first show of the semester. A sketch?!? For an improv show?!?
Okay, yes, we did that a time or two as an intro if one of them happened to have written and brought in something that they all liked, but it was not a standard thing. And he was doing it on my time. We only got two hours a week with these kids and he had them squander it on brainstorming SKETCH ideas. I was livid. If it were productive, or even structured for that matter, I wouldn't have been so mad, but he just had them all sitting around chatting about it. An hour into their brainstorming session I just quietly slipped out the back. I knew some of the seniors from when I was still a student there, so I figured if they missed me they would call.

I never got a call. That was the end of my tenure at MP.