...but the entire performance of my Triptych class on March 1st has been posted online!  Not sure who posted it -- the poster was named batsimprov -- but thank you, whoever you are.

I haven't watched it yet, as I've just found out about it, but the quality looks good, and it appears someone was actually manning the camera at the time.  So, without further adeiu (or pants pooping on my part), here it is.  If it's the whole thing, that's about 90 minutes, and Dave, my instructor who introduces us, said it takes about 45 seconds to load on broadband. 

Update:  In case you have any problems with this embedding, here's a link to the site itself.

This almost makes me want a WebCam.

Today was my second live improvisational long-form performance.  It was in the same format as my first, the Triptych (three stories, told in three acts, performed consecutively).  Our genres this time were Period Piece (think Jane Austen or E.M.Forster), a Western, and a Romantic Comedy.

The overall opinion was that this show was even better than the last one (yay).  It seemed that way to me as well.  There were some surprisingly grounded scenes, good audience reaction, and some honestly-won laughter.  Was I still scared? You bet.  Nervous as hell, but less debilitatingly.  Dave Dennison, my teacher for over a year now, talks about a sort of "zen space" (more of a satori, but you get the point) that you reach when you're listening to everything that's going on, and paying attention to everything that's happening onstage -- a crucial skill you need if you have any hope of improvising.  I need to get better at it, but once you're "there," you know it, and it's a calm place.

I was "there" a lot (though not as much as I could've been), and there's no room for fear or nerves there.  Beause fear is a loud voice.  Its "voice" is too loud to pay attention to while improv is happening; you can't listen to it while things are happening, because you'll miss them if you do.  Nonetheless, I think I held back more than last time.  At least at first.  Oddly, I felt most disconnected to the Period Piece, the one genre that I feel I had the most connection to during practice, and most connected to the Western, which I'd had more problems with during practice.  But:  that's improv.  You never know what's going to work or not until you do it.  Failure is an option, and we live in terror of it.

But on balance, I think our final show blew away every rehearsal we did prior.  This was a great group of actors; their enthusiasm was elevated and sustained for the whole course.  I'm genuinely happy to have worked with them, and I think I learned a lot.

I've got a brief video that Z-Man, bless him, took.  It's taken from his camera, so it's not high quality, but you can get the gist.  It's the final scene of the Western, titled "Six Feet Under."  You might not be able to hear the words so well either, so let me set the whole thing up (and cross your fingers that I can post it and embed it into the blog).

The Western genre has a simple outline (at least, for our purposes; they can be much more complex, but we're telling this story in 25 minutes):  a protagonist is introduced, along with his loved ones; an antagonist does something to the protagonist's loved ones, up to and including murder.  The protagonist has to claw his way out from whatever fallout from the violence resulted and exact justice and/or vengeance on the perpetrator, usually resulting in the death of the antagonist, and, sometimes, the protagonist.

Tonight's western involved a family on a wagon trail, heading to Oregon.  The father is away from the wagon, fetching water for his ill wife, son, and two daughters, who remain at the wagon.  The wagon is waylaid by the notorious Black Bart, a stereotypical Western villain:  amoral, violent, out for personal gain.  The son (me) runs away in terror, leaving the womenfolk at the mercy of Black Bart and his sidekick.  They are kidnapped and put into a box elsewhere.

In the next act, the father finds the empty wagon, and the distraught son finds the father.  The son is terrified and guilt-ridden for abandoning his family.  Meanwhile, Black Bart confronts his sidekick, who wants out.  Black Bart shoots his sidekick to prove a point.  The mother and daughters are terrified.  The mother begs and pleads for the life of her daughters.  Black Bart releases the children to hunt down the father, from whom he demands ransom.  Meanwhile, father and son acquire arms, preparing to find and rescue their family; the son's romantic notions of gunslinging have evaporated in the face of both the terror of the kidnapping, and his first attempts to fire a shotgun, which hurt like hell.

In the third act, the escaped daughters find the father and tell him their mother is being held at the Columbia river.  Father and son track down where the wife/mother is being held.  What follows is the scene Z-man caught on video.  Approximate dialogue follows the video ('cause it's hard to hear).  In the scene are me, the son (in brown, on left), the father (Rizh, in blue), the mother (Heather, in gray), and Black Bart (Danny, on right in light green).

JAY (THE SON):
I see him, Pa! (inaudible)

BENJAMIN (FATHER):
Be quiet, now.

JAY:
Better draw ahead of time, Pa.

BENJAMIN:
Good idea.

JAY (follows nervously)

BLACK BART:
Well, well.  So, you finally come for her, huh?

MOTHER:
(inaudible)

BLACK BART:
Took long enough.

MOTHER:
Listen, be careful! He already killed his sidekick, Billy! We'll all be six feet under!

BLACK BART:
That's right.  You will be six feet under, unless you got a heap o' money with ya.  So you can take her away and I can get my money.

BENJAMIN:
Boy, you sure talk a lot for someone who's got two guns pointed at'cha.

JAY (knees knocking, he tries to stiffen his nerve)

MOTHER:
Don't be scared now, Jay.

JAY (straightens up, terrified)

BLACK BART:
You mean one and a half guns (inaudible).  I wouldn't put him up to anybody.

BENJAMIN:
Now listen, mister, all I want is my wife, and my kids, and my life back.

BLACK BART:
All I want is my money!

JAY:
YOU NO GOOD GOD DAMNED SON OF A BITCH (fires shotgun) (inaudible) WHY DID YOU DO THIS? (fires shotgun) WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE? (fires shotgun, inaudible, fires shotgun, inaudible, you get the point)

As you can perhaps tell, it was not planned at all.  I just snapped.  The audience was as surprised as I was.  And, scene!!

Another great find from my latest guilty pleasure, the Bloggess.  A word map of my current RSS feed compliments Wordle.

Images of Wordles are licensed . Link  goes to the website and gallery

The absence of something is not, itself, a thing, but we need a way to refer to it, or we get really confused.  But naming an absence will often lead people to treat it as if it were, indeed, a thing.  So we're confused either way, which seems to be humanity's default state.  'Ignorance' itself may be thought of as a privative:  it's the absence of knowledge.

A difficult but stubborn feature of human thinking is involved in all this:  it's known as 'reifying': making real.  Imagine that because we have a word for something, then there must exist a 'thing' that corresponds to the word.  What about 'bravery' and 'cowardice'? Or 'tunnel'? Indeed, what about 'hole'?

Many scientific concepts refer to things that are not real in the everyday sense that they correspond to objects.  For instance, 'gravity' sounds like an explanation of planetary motion, and you vaguely wonder what it would look like if you found some, but actually it is only a word for an inverse square law attractive relationship.  Or more recently, thanks to Einstein, for a tendency of objects not to move in a straight line, which we can reify as 'curved space'.

For that matter, what about 'space'? Is that a thing, or an absence?

'Debt' and 'overdraft' are very familiar privatives, and the thinking problems they cause are quite difficult.  After, all, your overdraft pays your bank manager's salary, doesn't it? So how can it fail to be real? Today's derivatives market buys and sells debts and promises as if they were real -- and it reifies them as words and numbers on pieces of paper, or digits in a computer's memory.  The more you think about it, the more amazing the everyday world of human beings becomes:  most of it doesn't actually exist at all.

From The Science of the Discworld, emphasis mine.  The Buddhists are onto something.

I was introduced to his work back in 12th grade, via one of my all-time favorite teachers, John Kendall.  I haven't read nearly enough of him, but what I have, I really, really liked.

Via The Blogess.

 A couple of pictures of Z-Man's and my trip to Las Vegas over the holiday.  The last three are a triptych of sorts, since they spell out a summary of our Friday experience in Caesar's Palace.  See if you can guess what it spells.  Hint:  the headliners were Elton John, Cher, and Bette Midler (third picture). 

P.S. Sidebar video is working now.  Warner and YouTube got into a "pissing match" (Amanda's words), and YouTube took down all of Warner's videos.  Vimeo not only has them back up on their site, but the quality is superlative compared to what was on YouTube.

I won't write too much now, 'cause it's late.  But I had to post a successful completion of my first-ever improv show before a paying audience.  I didn't get any money, mind you, but I did it.

As the show got closer and closer to curtain, I got very scared.  Onstage, I was mostly able to work through it.  My brain performed haltingly at first, and in between scenes in which I was involved, I was trying to silence my inner editor and just let go.

That finally happened in the second act.  There was a "mistake" in which my naughty Lord Treaudeau was to kidnap a shoemaker's wife (long story).  The guard accidentally brought the wrong woman.  And then he brought the right woman.  As one of my fellow actors warned prior to the show:  after the mistakes actually happen, things get easier.  And they do:  the "worst" has already happened, you just have to keep going.  Putting out fires is easier than trying to start one without sparks.

After that, things got much easier, and I was able to enjoy what I was doing. 

The post-show notes Dave Dennison took were identical to my own inner criticisms, with the exception of one I'd been unaware of:  I was moving sort of unnecessarily and it telegraphed into nervous energy.  I wasn't really aware of that, but I'll have to watch out for it.

I am currently holding the belief that the next time will be easier.  Which, of course, implies that, despite my nerves, I'll do it again.  So, shut up, nerves! Hee. 

This past Thanksgiving, Z-man and I went to his friend's house for a non-traditional Italian-style Thanksgiving.  And given that four of the eight of us were vegetarian, it was extra-non-traditional.  I made a three mushroom risotto (porcini, morel, chanterelle), passion fruit sorbet, and a white bean and escarole soup.  The hostess provided me with the recipe of one she just happened to have, and let me tell you, this is one of the easiest, most delicious soups I've made.  So here is my version.  (Note:  her version had proscuitto, which I did not use, but if you like it and have used it, by all means add it in).

2 cups dried white beans (cannellini, borlotti, cranberry runners, whatever you like)
  OR 2 cans white beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup olive oil
1 medium onion, roughly chopped
2 bunches fresh sage
2 twigs fresh rosemary
1/4 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
4 cloves garlic, whole and peeled
3 quarts vegetable broth/stock
2 or 3 parmesan rinds (optional)
1 head escarole (chicory), shredded or chopped
Salt and pepper to taste

1) If you're using dried beans, let them soak, covered, for 24 hours in cold water. 

Canned vs Dried:  Canned beans are fine, although dried beans are cheaper and less wasteful in packaging.  Makes no difference taste-wise.

2) Heat up half of the oil on high-med-high heat in a large stock pot.

3) Sautée the onions until just translucent

4) Add the pepper flakes, rosemary, sage.  Sautée everything for about five to eight minutes to blend the aromatics.

5) Drain the beans and add to the mix.  Add also the three quarts of stock/broth.  Add parmesan rinds, if you have them.

Stock vs Broth:  I'm fortunate in that I can get both stock and broth easily at the store, although if you're especially enterprising, you can easily make your own.  That said, I use 1 quart veg stock and 2 quarts veg broth.

6) Bring to a boil and then reduce to a gentle simmer for about 90 minutes.  Give it a stir once in a while to prevent any sticking.

Covered vs Uncovered:  I partially cover the stock pot as it simmers.  Obviously, letting off steam releases excess water and concentrates the flavors.  I think the original recipe called for this to be uncovered the whole time.  If it looks to be losing too much liquid and boiling away to nothing,  I'll cover either partially or totally.  You can always taste it to check.

7) With a slotted spoon, remove the soilds from the soup.  Discard the rosemary twigs, the stage stems, and the parmesan rinds.  The garlic, onion, and beans are keepers and super soft.

8) Take about 1/2 of all the beans in the pot and transfer to a food processor with the remaining olive oil and purée.  If you can't extricate any garlic or onion chunks from the beans, oh well

9) Return the puréed beans to the stock pot and stir to mix and thicken the soup.

10) Add the shredded escarole to the pot and cook it down until it wilts.

Serve with garlic croutons and enjoy!