Author: mullaney

Yesterday I published my first podcast and added it to iTunes. It’s called the Improv Resource Center Podcast and it will live over on my other website (the Improv Resource Center).

I’ve been wanting to create a podcast for some time, but I wasn’t sure what shape it would take until a few weeks ago. I decided to make it very focused and relatively short, in the hope that it becomes a very practical resource for myself and others. I’m going to interview improvisors–teachers, coaches, directors, performers–and ask them to describe exercises and techniques that they are using in their rehearsals and classes. The interviews will be between 5 and 15 minutes, and their purpose will be to spread exercises around and inspire people to come up with new techniques.

For my pilot episode, I asked Rich Talarico from Dasariski to help me out. I called him up and he shared two exercises that he uses in his classes. I’ve already got a few more friends lined up.

I’d like to get all kinds of people on this podcast, not just my friends and not just those who share a similar improv background, but people from all kinds of improv theaters and groups across the country and beyond, veteran teachers and new coaches alike. If you are interested in sharing an exercise, email me at [email protected].

By the way, this was inspired by a thread on my website where people will describe improv exercises that they use in their rehearsals.

If by chance you are looking at this blog via a phone or other mobile device like an iPhone, you should notice something different. I have installed a new theme and plugin for WordPress called WPtouch. Basically it is a theme to make the site look good on mobile devices. It’s also includes the behind-the-scenes code that automatically switches your view if you access the blog using a small screen. If you notice any problems viewing this site on your phone, let me know. It looks pretty good on my iPod Touch.

Also, I’ve been working on the pilot episode of a podcast. I think it’s ready to go, but I want to wait to see how it looks through the iTunes store before I start plugging it. Come back tomorrow if you want to hear it. It should be ready by then.

I just finished The End of Overeating by David Kessler, former head of the FDA in the first Bush and Clinton administrations. In it he argues that the primary driver of our current obesity epidemic is the ubiquitous availability of large portions of hyperpalatable foods. What are hyperpalatable foods? Open a Chili’s menu or visit your local Panda Express or Cinnabon and you will see plenty of examples. These are highly processed foods with layers of suger, simple carbs, fats, salts and flavoring designed to be irresistible to consumers. They are foods that we crave, that we have become accustomed to eating in huge portions, that are dense in calories and often have strong flavors. The food and restaurant industries have become very good at making foods that we want to eat and the result has been millions of people essentially addicted to fattening foods.

For anyone old enough to remember when a Quarter Pounder was the biggest hamburger available at a fast food restaurant, this won’t really feel like news. We’ve watched the food industry evolve over the last 30 years first hand. Portions have grown, foods have become more indulgent, more flavorful, with more textures. Comfort food is everywhere, and eating it feels great, at least it does for the two minutes it takes to shovel it down our throats. What might seem like news is the extent to which the food industry knows and understands what they are doing. Just as cigarette companies want more people to smoke and people to smoke more, restaurant chains want us to eat more meals out and buy more food when we do go out. And they go to great lengths to reverse engineer precisely the kind of foods that we will crave and overeat. Many more of us are getting fatter than we used to, and it’s because this hyperpalatable food is available nearly everywhere we go.

Is it a good book? I think it has something important to say, but I have a few qualms. Kessler makes his case a little too well in the beginning of the book. I found myself salivating over his descriptions of food items. I craved the appetizers he was describing and felt my tummy rumble. I skipped over about 10 chapters because of it (they are quite short), and still he was describing the techniques the food industry used to make food delectable. I think I may have gained 10 pounds just by reading that part of the book. I would say read just enough of this part of the book to be convinced that he is right and then skip ahead to the chapters on what you can do.

Eventually he starts talking about his solution. He takes a lot of ideas from the world of addiction counseling and has some good strategies to avoiding the worst kinds of foods and dealing with it when you are faced with it. He believes we should embrace the concept of Food Rehab. He does implicitly encourage us to prepare our own food. But here is where I think he kind of ignores an obvious point.

I think we should all be unprocessing our food, or rather we should do as little processing as possible when we cook for ourselves. I’ve heard it said before that it’s healthier to make your own food at home from fresh whole ingredients than it is to buy prepackaged, processed foods. This point has been made many times by many people. But it seems like we can take this much farther. If the food industry makes food into the equivalent of addictive drugs by adding layers of fat, sugar, salt and flavorings to foods, perhaps we should do the opposite.

My new plan

We should start with simple whole foods that are as close to unprocessed as possible: Meat, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruit, legumes and nuts. We should buy them in their completely unprocessed forms. Fresh if possible, frozen in some cases, but certainly without any added flavor, fat, sugar or salt. Then we should prepare these foods as simply as possible without adding any of these things ourselves. Don’t add any oil when you grill that meat. Don’t mix in butter with your brown rice. Put away your salt shaker, all your sauces and spices. And lastly, don’t even combine foods together. Make discrete portions of spinach, grilled chicken and fish, poached eggs and steamed veggies. Eat them separately. Don’t mix them together or add a little sauce of any kind. Don’t do anything to make the food more palatable except cook it. If you have an urge to make something taste better by adding or combining, don’t do it! My theory is that if you confine yourself, as much as you can, to food like this, you will not overeat and you will lose weight.

Now of course, there are some drawbacks here. The ubiquitous nature of these hyperpalatable foods is hard to avoid. They are everywhere, so unless you work at home and are a hermit, you will be exposed to these foods and they will be hard to resist. I know… put a free pizza in front of me and you can kiss it good bye. Kessler has a lot of good ideas of how to deal with some of these issues. And it’s worth reading the book to look over his suggestions.

But some of you might also be screaming, “But Kevin, I can’t eat plain steamed vegetables and poached eggs with no cheese or sauce. That will taste bad!” Well, I hear you. I think that is true to a degree. But I don’t think food tastes bad when it’s prepared like this, it just doesn’t taste awesome! But that is the point, you won’t have cravings for this simple unprocessed food, like you might for chicken nachos dripping with cheese or the latest crazy ice cream combination from Ben and Jerry’s. I have been trying this for the last week and it feels like it’s working. I am feeling a bit of withdrawal at the moment, and I’m still indulging some of my cravings. I had a nice hot cocoa last night, for instance. But I do think I might be finally losing a little weight after months of running four times a week.

For instance, here is what I ate and drank yesterday (except where noted, I added no salt, butter, oil or anything else to the food):

• A few glasses of water
• Coffee (milk and sweetener)
• Steamed asparagus
• Steamed spinach
• Brown rice
• Grilled chicken (twice)
• Two poached eggs
• Cup of flavored yogurt – not in the plan
• Four pieces of whole wheat bread with butter

Now, I did feel hungry through most of the day, or rather I felt a little like an addict who wanted something I wasn’t getting. It reminded me of those first few days of quitting smoking. As I drove home, I thought it would be good to eat some toast with butter. And I think I might keep that as a way to really shut off my hunger. By the way, I’m talking about actual real whole wheat bread, not the brown wonderbread that companies try to pass off as whole wheat. If the bread squishes when you squeeze it and feels soft, it ain’t whole wheat bread in my book. The stuff I’m eating is that sprouted grain Ezekial Bread from Food For Life. Four pieces was definitely too much. It extinguished any feeling of still wanting to eat, and made me feel a little sick actually. My new rule will be this, if I feel unsatisfied after eating, I’ll toast one piece of bread add some butter and wait 20 or 30 minutes, and repeat until I don’t want another piece. This morning I had one piece with some coffee and I still feel full three hours later.

I don’t expect anyone to only eat like this forever. I’ll still be going out to eat with friends, but as much as I can, I want to prepare my own food in this way.

Today I weighed in at 190. My goal weight is somewhere between 165 and 155 (I’ll know when I get there). I’ll try to update this to let you know how it goes.

Lately I’ve been listening to some improv podcasts from New York and enjoying them quite a bit. I’ve sampled two so far, the UCB Theatre Podcast and Improvised New York. Both are available through iTunes.

The UCB Theatre Podcast is the official podcast promoting the Upright Citizens Brigade’s New York theater. The hosts are John Frusciante and Will Hines, who are teachers at the school, performers and work on the administrative side as well. Their weekly show follows a straightforward format in three parts. The first part is a discussion of some of the shows that will be playing that week at the at theater. The second part is an interview of a performer whose show is up that week. And the third part is a discussion between John and Will about some facet of improvisation.

I’m enjoying this podcast a lot, but then I’m biased. I worked for the UCBT in New York, so I know John and Will well. They are both terrific guys who are very fun to talk with, so hearing the two of them discuss current shows and improv is a delight for me. The discussions about the shows so far have been fun. It’s interesting to hear what is going on at the theater and many of the guests so far are also friends. I hope they keep this podcast up, because I think it provides me with a great way to keep abreast of what is going on back there. For anyone involved at UCBT, it should be required weekly listening.

The last third of the show where they talk about improv has been especially interesting for me. John and Will take a up subject, sometimes at the suggestion of a listener and then talk about it until they have examined every angle, often arguing every viewpoint they can think of. I’m finding little interesting nuggets in each discussion, but this one from November 23rd, 2009, stood out when I heard it [it’s about 38 minutes in]. Will and John were talking about notes and how helpful they are to learning improv. This is Will speaking:

My intent a lot of times (when I’m teaching) is that I’m just trying to get people to success. Like if you just experience a good scene on stage, that does more I think than a lot of analysis after the fact. A lot of students want individual notes, and there’s an insatiable demand for individual notes. “Be harder on us.” Or, “Be harder on these other people. They need someone to tell them the truth.” And I get that, and to some degree that’s true. I don’t see that ultimately making people better. What makes people better… winning begets winning. Be in a good scene. We try to design exercises that just make you know what it feels like to do a funny scene. I feel like having that in your muscle memory is what is going to make you better later.

It’s a good point about teaching, one I learned years ago and one I talked about in a similar way in my recent post about avoiding criticism. I like to create exercises that students can succeed at. They learn by doing the right thing and feeling the reward of doing good work.

Performers have a tricky relationship with notes. Notes from peers sometimes can have a terrible souring effect, a bit like giving someone criticism in the middle of sex. But sometimes we crave notes, the more critical the better, as if being told negative things will somehow teach us to not do those things, instead of robbing us of our confidence. Many of Del Close’s former students like me, speak reverently of him, even though he had a knack for giving notes that could make a student wither under it’s harshness. He was not above kicking a student out of his class and it was a right he exercised frequently over the years. He was brilliant, and yet I think perhaps I learned much of what he had to teach me from other teachers who learned from him but had a softer touch.

Anyway, this tangent of thinking is just the kind of thing that I’m experiencing from listening to these podcasts. Hearing these discussions are tickling a part of my brain that hasn’t had enough stimulation in the last few years.

The other one I listened to was called Improvised New York. The format of this show is perhaps a little looser. Most, but not all, of the episodes are long, unedited interviews with improvisors. The hosts are Elizabeth Quinn and Justin Zell who are both performers at the The Peoples Improv Theater. I’ve listened to three so far and I’m eager to listen to more.

The first one I tackled was a two hour interview with Gary Austin, founder of The Groundlings. I feel like there is a ton to say about this one, probably far more than will fit in this blog post. In the beginning of the interview I found myself having some negative reactions to what Austin what saying. He has spent many years working on improvisation in a way that sounds significantly different than I have, and he has certain ideas will sometimes produce a defensive reflex in me. For instance, at the beginning he talked about the difference between improv and improvisation which irritated my sensibility.

I kept listening and I’m very glad I did. Austin had a lot of interesting things to say in those two hours. His stories about Del Close during his days with the Committee were illuminating and his discussion of his methods of working and the kinds of shows he does definitely tickled my brain and got me eager to get back in a workshop/rehearsal mode. At some point I will listen to that episode again, and given the opportunity, I’d love to take some workshops with Austin, since he seems to be interested in the same bridge between improvisation and scripted theatre that I am. I’d also like to see his new company perform, Austin’s Dog Bread.

The other two episodes I listened to were interviews with friends of mine, Matt Donnelly and Ptolemy Slocum. I loved both episodes quite a bit. Ptolemy’s interview was preoccupied with the fact that they had done an hour of interviewing before discovering that the equipment was not recording. It became an extended metaphor for what makes improvisation maddening to some, and what makes it particular moving to me, that it happens once and disappears except for those who there to witness and participate. In Matt’s interview, he shared some stories about the Neutrino Video Project and how that has spread throughout the country and beyond. He talked about traveling to Columbia teaching a group via interpreters. It was good stuff.

If you know of other improv related podcasts, especially ones from places other than New York, please let me know. I’d love to hear them.

It’s been a quiet week for me on the blog, but a lot of things are bubbling just under the surface. I’ve been working on a number of posts, but they aren’t quite ready. I’m working on a new audio clip that I hope to make into a limited series of podcasts. I have a couple of different versions of follow ups to my Dale Carnegie post. And I’m working on a post about improv podcasts. I’m trying to finish another book on diet and it’s giving me a new idea about how I could be losing weight, which I may eventually write about.

In the mean time, I’ve been working on the IRC Improv Wiki. I wanted to get a few more pages going. I realized last week that there were no articles on Tina Fey, Jack McBrayer and Inside Vladimir. I have written a cursory entry for each and hope I can get some other people to chip in and expand them.

There is also a lot of stuff going on which is taking a higher priority right now. In the last couple of weeks, we have lost some of our staff that helps us take care of my mom, so we have been busy finding and training new people. That is somewhat stressful. Our longest standing worker gave notice two weeks ago. Today was her last day. She worked first shift with me and did a terrific job with my mom. It made things much easier for me to have her working first shift. We have found a good replacement, but it will take time getting her up to speed. I will be spending more time here at my mom’s in the interim, and that may translate into some more posts since I do most of my writing here.

I have been running again for the last couple of months, and I’m ready for some 5K races. As soon as the weather warms up a little bit, I’ll be out running different events on the weekend. I hope to run a dozen or more races this summer including some 10Ks and perhaps even a half marathon. Also, I picked up guitar last fall and I’ve been practicing a few times a week. I started a group class with the park district in Peoria. My goals with guitar are simply to keep it up, learn as many useful chords as I can so I can play a few songs. Both of these things are competing with my desire to write more. However, next week I will likely be able to complete a few of the posts I’ve been working on.

Recently, I finished a fascinating book called, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
by Geoffrey Miller. In it, Miller makes the case that many of the things that make us human are the result of sexual selection, not natural selection. Our capacity for language, music, art, kindness, intelligence and charity are all traits or abilities that made us more attractive to the opposite sex. They did not evolve because they helped us survive better, instead they evolved because they are ways for us to display how fit our genes are. Our minds evolved to be an entertainment center for potential mates. The better we could sing, or tell stories, or make other people laugh, the more attractive we were. This meant we could attract fitter mates and especially in the case of men, have more offspring, ensuring that the next generation would be even better at singing, telling stories and making other people laugh.

It’s an interesting idea. If you are like me and interested in evolution, but haven’t read much about Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, you should take a look. But I’ll leave it Miller to actually lay out the argument. He does a much better job than I could.

Near the end of the book came the following passage. As an artist, this passage jumped off the page.

Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. (Psychologist Dean Keith) Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers—they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. Hans Eysenck became a famous psychologist not because all of his papers were excellent, but because he wrote over a hundred books and a thousand papers, and some of them happened to be excellent. Those who write only ten papers are much less likely to strike gold with any of them. Likewise with Picasso: if you paint 14,000 paintings in your lifetime, some of them are likely to be pretty good, even if most are mediocre. Simonton’s results are surprising. The constant probability of success idea sounds counterintuitive and of course there are exceptions to this generalization. Yet Simonton’s data on creative achievement are the most comprehensive ever collected and in every domain that he studied, creative achievement was a good indicator of the energy, time, and motivation invested in creative activity.

Let that sink in a little bit. No really. Let that sink in. Ponder it for a little bit before you read on.

I think most creative people I know would think something similar to this. If you want to be good at something, do it as much as you can. But I think we all tend to temper this by thinking that there is such a thing as talent, and talent is what separates the great from the good. Of course there is some truth to that. We have all met people who seem to have some special innate talent for music or art or comedy. We think they are great, just because they have a great talent.

In my field of comedy, I’ve often heard it said that some people are just funny. You can’t teach it. There have been a number of people I’ve met who were hilarious in their first improv class. I met Tina Fey and Jack McBrayer (of 30 Rock) years ago, when they were just starting out in improv, long before they were famous. They both seemed amazingly talented right from the beginning. Comedy seemed natural for both of them, and their success is no surprise to anyone who knew them years ago.

But maybe even then, they were simply more prolific than the rest of us. Perhaps they spent a lot more time when they were kids making people laugh or telling stories to their friends. By the time I met them in their early 20s, they had already spent much more time and effort developing their sense of humor than the average competent improvisor, as a natural part of their daily interactions.

Of course, we are talking about a correlation here, not necessarily a causation. It may simply be that those who are great at something are driven to be prolific. Perhaps those who are merely good are just naturally less prolific. In fact, that thing we call talent might not be what we think it is. Instead of talent being this innate ability to create, maybe talent is simply the drive to devote lots of time and energy to the things we feel passionate about. But I don’t that is the right conclusion. That’s not what Simonton is saying. He is saying that as long as you have reached a certain competence the chance of any one piece of work being great is generally about the same. Since we can’t really know if there is a causation either way, it’s reasonable to suppose that being prolific has a good chance of resulting in greatness.

I’ve always thought that determination and perseverance are much more important than talent. Writing is a great example. I’ve known lots of people who dabbled in writing and seemed competent at it. I’ve also known people who are great writers. What is the difference between the two? The great writers have spent much more time and energy writing. If you are competent at writing and think you can’t be great, you are wrong. The only thing that separates you from being great is time and energy.

Want to be a great actor? Act in a lot of plays, the more the better. Want to be a great playwright? Write lots of plays, hundreds of them if you can. Want to be a great songwriter? Write a new song every day. Eventually you will write some great ones.

After being in Central Illinois for over two years, I finally hosted my first poker game last week. It was a lot of fun. I got a group of relative newcomers together and taught them how to play a Texas hold’em tournament. We had an hour long class where I went over the basics, pretty much following the plan I previously blogged about. Then I had them each chip in a couple bucks and I dealt them their first tournament (I didn’t play).

One hand came up that reminded me of something that happened when I still lived in New York. The hand was pretty straightforward. A few people played the hand, two of them played until the end. There wasn’t much betting, but I remember one player made a small but significant bet on the end. Another player called him. He turned over his two cards to show that he had a pair of sevens, one in his hand, one on the board.

Since this was more or less a practice hand, the other player turned her hand over and said, “Oh damn, I thought you were bluffing.” Her hand consisted of an eight and a three. She did not have a pair. She should not have called. Her hand was too weak to call.

However, she was partially right. He didn’t have a strong hand. It was a pretty weak hand too. I probably wouldn’t have bet on the end with his hand, unless I was trying to bluff. Perhaps she picked up on the fact that his hand was weak and therefore called. But it’s not enough to know someone is bluffing. In order to call their bet, you have to be able to beat their bluff.

If she had a small pair, or even an ace or a king, she could have made that call, thinking that since he is bluffing, her pair or high card will beat his junk hand. Still, she could have done something to win the hand, if she thought he was bluffing. She could have rebluffed. If instead of calling, she had raised his bet by a significant amount, he might have thrown his pair away, certain that she had a bigger hand. A rebluff is a pretty sophisticated move for someone playing hold’em for the first time, however.

As a player, I rarely rebluff, especially at the end of a hand when the pot is large. It’s a play that can require a lot of guts, and I think I’ve only recently acquired the courage to do it at all. I have learned to do it a lot more frequently at the beginning of a hand. If you are playing against someone and realize that they raise quite often, a good reraise with any two cards can often make them fold and win you a small but profitable pot. In tournaments, a few well timed reraises can easily mean the difference between winning and losing.

Anyway, like I mentioned above, this hand reminded me of a hand that I played in New York. I used to be a part of a weekly tournament among friends. We each threw in $5 or $10 and played a tournament that might last a couple of hours. At it’s peak, we had 30+ people showing up each week, so when you won the tourney, you could go home with a nice pot.

One night I was playing a hand against a friend. He was playing to my left and new to our tournament, and to hold’em in general. Everyone folded to me. I was on the button and I had an interesting hand, something like an eight and nine of hearts. It wasn’t a great hand, but in order to be unpredictable, you have to sometimes raise with interesting hands, rather than just great hands.

Anyway, my friend called. The next three cards on the board helped me, I think I had a straight or a flush draw, but I still didn’t have a pair. He checked and I pushed the rest of my chips in the middle, hoping he would fold. He called quite quickly. He turned over his two cards, a jack and maybe a nine. He didn’t have a pair or much of a draw. He had called my bluff, without a hand that could beat a bluff.

The last two cards didn’t help me and his jack high, beat my nine high. The reason I remember the hand is not because of the unique play, but because I handled it so badly. Instead of smiling and saying, “Good call,” I harangued him. “How could you make that call?” I said, frustrated.

“I knew you didn’t have much,” he responded, clearly confused as to why I was upset.

“But you had jack high! You couldn’t beat a bluff.”

And yet, clearly he could. His junk hand was better than mine. I walked out of the room and sat in the office next door for a while. I had to hang out until the game was over and lock up the place. I hope that I apologized for my behavior that night. I know that I did at a later date. I don’t think it affected our friendship, but I don’t remember him coming back to play in our tournament again either.

Since then, I think I’ve gained a lot of perspective, at least when it comes to poker. I’ve lost hands against strangers that were far larger and more important than the one against my friend. I’m sure that given the right circumstances I could still lose my cool at a poker table, but now it’s much more rare. I think that makes me a better poker player, and I’m sure that it makes me a better friend.

And now when I’m playing in a friendly game for a few bucks and a know-it-all player exclaims in agony after a hand, “How could you call me with that?” I know enough to sit back calmly and smile and think to myself how glad I am that it’s not me saying that.

Last week a friend of mine called. He was someone I used to coach in Chicago. He now lives in Minneapolis and wanted some advice about coaching a group who wanted to learn the Invocation. It’s an improv exercise that is sometimes used as an opening for improv forms like Harold. We talked for an hour about the Invocation, about Del Close (the guy who came up with the exercise) and about other similar exercises.

I thought it might make a good journal entry to write down a lot of the things that we went over in the conversation. But before I got too far into the entry, I decided to look it up on the IRC Improv Wiki to see if anyone had written anything about it. It turns out I had already written a pretty comprehensive explanation of the exercise there.

So instead of rewriting that, I’ll first show you this video I found on youtube. It’s an animation by Shaun Clayton of a song writtend and performed by Michelle Edwards. I think they did a great job of capturing the spirit of what Del what was after. If you want to learn more about them after you watch the video, go over to the IRC Improv Wiki and read about the Invocation there.

UPDATE 8:10PM – There is obviously more to the story, many of these fees are being waved. I’m sifting through what information I can. There is some information on these donations on the Consumerist and Consumer Reports.

Perhaps you have seen this making the rounds on Facebook status updates:

Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to American Red Cross relief for Haiti.

It seems like a great idea, right? I’ve seen these before for other non-profits, namely various public radio fundraisers. It would seem like a great way to get people to donate. It’s fast and easy, allowing people to give precisely at the moment when their impulse to give is strongest. They don’t have to fire up their computer, find the website, fill out a form with their credit card, etc.

If you have an unlimited texting plan, and want to do this, go for it! But if you pay for each text message you send, keep reading before you donate.

I’m a skeptic by nature and when I see something like this, I become a little concerned. First off, you want to make sure it’s not a hoax. You want to make sure the money is actually going to where it should be and not that some radio station somewhere is getting 1000 texts an hour that say, “HAITI”. That seems unlikely since this meme has been picked up by the news media and by the White House.

The other thing that concerns me is whether the phone company keeps a percentage of the money donated and how much. If you donate to a charity using Master Card or Visa, a percentage of that (probably around 2%-3%) is skimmed off as a processing fee. Is that what is happening? According to snopes.com, it is not:

Callers should note that the $10 donations will be charged to their cell phone bills… It is not true that phone companies keep half the monies donated in this manner — the full amount of each $10 donation is passed through to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.

So that is good news.

However, for some people there could be a big processing cost. Why? Because “Msg&Data rates may apply.” When I donated today using this method, the entire transaction took seven texts:

1. Me: HAITI
2. 90999: To confirm your $10 donation to Red Cross Int’l Response Fund reply with YES. Reply with HELP for help or visit RedCross.org
3. Me: YES
4. 90999: Thanks! $10 charged to your phone bill for Red Cross Int’l Relief. Reply HELP for help or Visit RedCross.org. Reply STOP to cancel. Msg&Data Rates May Apply
5. 90999: Reply YES to receive the latest news about Red Cross Int’l Relief! Up to 4 msgs/mo. Info? Txt HELP, to end txt STOP. Msg&data rates may apply
6. Me: Stop
7. 90999: You will not receive addl msgs or further charges from Haiti Relief $10 donations. Info? Visit mGive.com/a or contact 888-316-2506. Msg&Data Rates May Apply

I have an unlimited texting plan, so it didn’t cost me anything extra to give that $10. For me, it’s probably the most efficient way for me to give. If I were to use a credit card on a website, a small part of that $10 donation would be eaten in fees.

However, if I didn’t have a texting plan, the effective processing fee would be enormous. On a basic Verizon plan, text messages cost $0.20 for both sent and received messages. It would have cost me an additional $1.40 to give $10. This is effectively a processing fee of 12.3%, much higher than a credit card. Notice too that if you don’t stop the texts you will get 4 more messages a month, with more text charges.

If you are going to be charged extra for these texts, I highly recommend that instead you go directly to the Red Cross site and donate there. I wonder also if it would be possible to get some figures about just how much the cell phone companies are making off this and if pressure could be brought to bear on them to donate all extra fees they collect as well.

If you are interested in donating to a charity that is helping with the Haiti Earthquake Relief efforts, you might try one of these:

Mercy Corps

Doctors Without Borders

American Red Cross

The Chris Gethard Show is a talk show featuring some of my friends in New York. It runs once a month, Saturday at midnight at the UCB Theatre. I don’t know much about it, but it penetrated my brain this week when I noticed a link that Chris posted on facebook.

I next heard a little bit about it on the January 4th UCBTNY Podcast featuring John Frusciante and Will Hines. Anyway, I thought I would just post something to plug the show and share the video. It’s quite fun. Enjoy.

I like teaching and I like poker, although I’ve rarely tried to combine the two. This week, I’m going to give it a shot. I run a meetup group here in Peoria for single people. I have wanted to host some poker games for the group for some time. I finally decided to go ahead and host one this week. It wouldn’t simply be a poker tournament, it would first be a one hour lesson in the basics of Texas Hold’em tournaments. And then we would do an actual one table tournament with me dealing.

I’ve always thought teaching poker to beginners would be a fun thing to do. My goal with the class portion is simple, demonstrate the basics of the game like how the cards are dealt, how betting works, and how the winner is determined for each hand (and for the tournament). I also want them to understand the rules of betting, and various quirks of how poker is typically dealt, so that if they ever want to play in a casino run tournament, they will be able to sit down and play without asking too many questions. If we have time we will also go over some basic strategy ideas.

As a way to prepare, I thought I would write down here a plan for how I might approach the lesson.

I’m assuming that the people who are going to come will be familiar with card games in general, and the 52 card deck. Most if not all, will have a basic understanding of poker. Most will probably need a cheat sheet to keep track of what hands beat what. I’m pretty sure none of them will have played any hold’em tournaments.

I think the way to begin is probably at the end of a hand. The first thing I would do is deal out two cards to each person and deal the five cards in the middle and show each person how they would determine their hand (and who would win). I think it’s good to start here, so that people can see where the hand will end up. We will do this a few times, at least until a few of the bigger hands like flushes or straights show up. I’ll stress how important it is for the cards in your hand to match up with the board. I’ll also stress how important it is to look at the board and know what the best possible hands would be.

At this point I would talk about two very important rules that some players may not know if they have only played casual poker:

• Cards speak – the player with the best hand wins. If they turn over their hand at the end, they do not have to declare what they have. It doesn’t matter if they know what they have, as long as someone at the table sees the cards and recognizes what hand they have (this is the dealer’s job primarily).
• You must show both cards to claim the pot.

Next we will go through the betting rounds to get to that point. First I’ll deal everyone two cards face up, we will talk about which hands have some value and which hands do not. We will speculate who might stay in with the two cards they are dealt and who might drop out. Then we will deal the flop (the first three cards on the board) and talk about how the flop matches their hole cards. Again we will speculate (without betting) who might stick around and who might not. Then we will do the turn and the river. Again we will determine who won. I’ll want to do this a few times too, to show that sometimes hands that drop out might have won.

After they get a feel for that, we will break out the chips. We will start with the dealer button and the blinds and show how that first round of betting works. Then we will work our way through a few hands. I’ll talk a bit about pot size and the purpose of betting and raising. I’ll explain why it’s important to put your chips in front of you, but not into the pot during the betting round. Also, it’s important to not make change until the betting is over. If there is a dealer, let the dealer handle it.

Next we will talk about what table stakes means and what it means to go all in. I’ll set up some examples, first with one player allin against another player. Then another hand with a side pot (1 player allin but two other players still competing for the side pot). And finally I’ll show them a situation with more than one side pot.

I think that poker like many things is taught by starting at the beginning. Everyone is dealt two cards and then they talk about the blinds and what might be a good hand to start with. But I have a hunch that this will work better. I’ll start at the end of the hand and show them where they will end up. It might be easier to understand what’s happening in the early rounds when they can see the end game.

I suspect this must be true for improv too. It’s easier to teach a Harold to someone who has seen one.

I recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie for the first time. It’s the kind of book that I’ve avoided most of my life. Self help books, especially ones with a strong slant towards the business world, usually don’t excite me. However, it had been recommended to me by a couple of people, and I realized that it might be of some use for me.

As I read the book, I wondered about how it might apply to the life of improvisation. On one level, it’s pretty straight forward. The way you build relationships in the worlds of theater and comedy are not that different from the business world. The advice translates pretty directly to how you should treat your fellow improvisors off stage. The advice seems especially well suited for sales, and while many of us in the theatre world loath selling ourselves, it is something that definitely helps us be successful.

But I also began to wonder how it might apply to other areas. For instance, some of the advice is tricky to follow if you are a coach, director or teacher. For instance, the first principle discussed in the book is don’t criticize, condemn or complain. Obviously critiquing a student or performers work is exactly what they need (and sometimes crave). So can one follow Carnegie’s advice and still be an effective instructor? I think so. The last section of the book addresses this head on, so some of what I’m thinking won’t show up until a later blog post.

It also occurred to me that some of these principles might be applied in interesting ways on stage. For instance, it might be fun to use some of the principles as negative templates for characters. In other words, you might want to follow Carnegie’s advice off stage, but on stage, you might want to create characters who would sorely need to read his book.

With all this in mind, lets dig into Carnegie’s book. The first section of the book is titled “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People” and the first principle is “Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.”

Don’t criticize, condemn or complain

As an improv student, you should remind yourself of this principle before every class and practice, until it becomes second nature. Criticizing your fellow students work is unlikely to do anything except annoy them. But this should probably extend to the teacher, the theatre and the class itself. People who spend a lot of time complaining are unpleasant to be around, no matter what they are complaining about. This is important, because you are in class to learn and to practice. But you can’t forget that you are also there to network and to make friends. If you go to make a career in comedy, some of the people you meet in your classes may end up being your friend for decades. Don’t be the jackass who spends their time in class complaining about exercises, condemning techniques and criticizing their fellow students.

Like any guideline there are going to be exceptions. As a teacher, occasionally I’ve run into students whose behavior is disruptive to the rest of the class. Sometimes it’s a behavior that I see, but sometimes I haven’t seen it. I think it’s fine for a student to complain to their instructor about a serious problem, but I would wait until a discreet moment, at break or after class. Also, there have been some rare occasions that I’ve heard of where a teacher is conducting his or her class in an inappropriate manner. An example might be a teacher who shows up drunk or consistently late. In this case, you have every right to complain to the school administrator.

What you probably don’t want to do is whine and bitch about a teacher’s style, their exercises or their teaching philosophy. There are going to be some teachers who you don’t gel with. Some instructors might ask you to do an exercise which you don’t understand or might hold an opinion about improv with which you don’t agree. These are not good reasons to have a tantrum. If faced with a situation like this, I would suggest that you suck it up, try your best to do the exercises and thoughtfully consider what the instructor has to say. If after the class, you don’t think you learned anything of value and you didn’t enjoy the class, avoid that instructor in the future. Whining about it in class will likely just turn people off to you.

Your attitude as part of a team or show should be similar. You want to be the kind of performer who other people like to be around. Sure it’s important that you have talent and that you are funny and skilled as a performer, but people have a lot of choices when they are putting together a show or a group. Most improvisors would prefer to perform with an optimistic, fun player with a positive attitude, not someone who spends their time bitterly complaining about their teammates or the theater where they perform.

Now as a coach, a director or a teacher, you have to criticize people you are working with. There is an implicit agreement when someone comes to your rehearsal or class. They know you might criticize them, and they have agreed to listen to your notes and consider them, and to at least try to do what you ask. However, I think there has to be some balance here.

For instance, you are coaching a team and they have a performance which is significantly below their capability. You could go backstage after the show and rip them a new one. You could give them two hours of notes picking apart everything they did wrong (in their 30 minute set). What effect do you think this will have? Will your performers be able to implement every last little note you gave them in future shows? Will they even remember them? Will they spend the rest of the night feeling like crap because their coach made them feel like they suck at improv? Will that help them that much in future shows? I don’t think it will. Don’t get me wrong, you need to critique your performers, but an onslaught of negative notes may not be your best approach if your goal is to truly motivate them to do better.

I guess I would say that as a coach or teacher, don’t complain, don’t condemn, and be careful how you criticize. I’m sure I’m going to expand on this as we go along. The last part of the book has a lot of ideas that should work well in a teaching or directing scenario.

How about the characters you create on stage? Is it alright if they are complainers? Of course! I can think of a lot ways that a character who complains can work on stage. There are some pitfalls to avoid though. For instance, you don’t want the critical nature of your character to stop him or her from doing something in the scene. Let’s say you are playing a husband who complains about his wife’s cooking. If your wife has cooked a seven course meal for you, it’s going to be better for you to go ahead and try each course and find things to criticize, than it would be to refuse to eat anything. I remember Susan Messing often pointing out how behavior that you should avoid off stage, often is great behavior to indulge in on stage.

A common concept in improvised scene work is that at the top of the scene, we should be trying to discover the first unusual thing about the situation or relationship and then use that to create a game for the scene. A few questions were recently posed on my message board about the first unusual thing and here was my response:

The first unusual thing has a lot to do with how our brain works. We remember and are delighted by novelty in general. Lets say you shook hands with 20 people today, and 19 of them shook your hand in a way you expect. If the 20th person shook your hand and then pulled you in close and licked your neck, you would remember it long after you forgot the other 19 people.

The best stories and songs and memories all have something unique and unusual about them. Some of these unusual things are just slightly out of the ordinary, some are huge strange things. I would go so far to say that all great theatre is about unusual things. Plays are not about the days where everything mirrors ordinary life exactly and everything happens just as we would expect. It’s about the days when things go wrong or unravel in unexpected ways or about characters whose ordinary days seem strange to us.

So perhaps we can agree that scenes should be about unusual characters or circumstances, but why does an improvised scene have to be about the first unusual thing? Well it should be about the first unusual thing because if you wait until there are two or three different unusual things, the scene can be too hard to manage. The scene will often lack clarity because the players will bounce from one thing to another each stressing different unusual things. I’ve seen advanced players juggle several unusual things and it can be done especially in longer scenes, but in most situations, one unusual thing in a scene is plenty.

Why can’t the scene be about the first thing or anything? Well, it can be about the first thing, but if nothing unusual happens, then the scene could likely be boring and it’s unlikely to be funny. Comedy depends especially on novelty and surprise. Given that, I think it’s fine to just let the scene be whatever it wants to be and not to push an unusual thing into it. The great thing is that small strange things happen all the time, it doesn’t have to be a big huge weird thing, it can be a subtle thing about how one of the characters behave or how the two characters interact. If you simply play the scene in a way that you would expect that situation to play out, novel things will happen. Your job is to notice them and use them.

Can the first line be the unusual thing if the characters act like it’s unusual? Yes of course. This happens all the time where the initiation contains the first unusual thing. Often the initiation also establishes some of the who, what and where too, and you usually need this. For instance, certain behavior is strange in some circumstances and not strange in others. Ballroom dancing is perfectly normal in a dance studio or a wedding reception. However if you are ballroom dancing during a job interview or in an army barracks, it’s novel behavior.

Also, the characters don’t have to treat it as unusual. This is REALLY important actually. Often, the characters should be treating the unusual thing as NORMAL and that is is part of what makes it unusual. Let’s use the ballroom dancing example. The scene might work best if neither character ever treats what they are doing as unusual. It might be very interesting for them to continue the job interview while dancing and never really mention that it’s strange for them to dance while doing the interview. If they were to call it out, it might actually break the spell. One way to think of this is that you shouldn’t be treating the first unusual thing as unusual, what’s fun is when you specifically treat the first unusual thing as a normal everyday occurrence for these characters. You keep doing the unusual thing, expand it and find variations. This is where the concept of “if this, then what else?” comes into play.

Let’s take the example of the person being licked during a handshake. If you get licked and then lick the other person’s neck back and then carry on as if this is your usual greeting and not strange at all, that becomes part of the unusual behavior. As the scene continues, you may exhibit similar strange behavior without ever calling it out. The fact that you treat it as normal is really what is strange, not that you are licking in the first place.

Can the scene just be two interesting characters doing and/or saying interesting stuff? Sure they can. But what is going to make the characters interesting? They become interesting when there is something about them that makes them unusual or unique. And it will it be a stronger scene if the character has 1 thing that makes them strange or 20? In most cases it’s best if the character has one unusual thing about them from which all their interesting behavior flows.

How does ‘the first unusual thing’ affect your performance and understanding of improv and how it works? For me it’s a critical core concept, but a very flexible and broad concept too. It also affects everything in our lives, not just improv scenes.

For instance, this past weekend I saw a concert and what am I going to remember about that concert years from now? I’ll remember all the things that made it unusual. I’ll remember the song that the lead singer played alone on stage with an acoustic guitar with no amplification at all (something I don’t remember ever seeing before in a venue that size). I’ll remember how he had one of the guys in his band play a song by himself on stage on violin. I’ll remember how they brought the opening act back during the encore, not for a duet, but for her to sing a song that almost no one in the audience knew and for the main act to simply back her up. I’ll remember the lead singer’s guitar because it’s an acoustic guitar with a hole worn into it from playing it for so many years.

We remember what is different, the things that are unusual. Those are the things that make us laugh and smile.

This is a revised and expanded version of a post I made in response to a question on the Improv Resource Center. Follow the link if you wish to see a the original discussion.

I wonder how many people out there keep personal daily checklists. I’m thinking of developing one. There are quite a few things I’d like to do on a daily or weekly basis. I tend to be someone who likes seeing progress in some chartable form and this ability to chart progress definitely motivates me.

For instance, I have long wanted to be a runner. I have many times started exercise programs and incorporated running or walking into the program. Last winter, when I was working out at the gym I realized that I especially like walking or running for long distances. Once I was on the treadmill, I preferred going for 45 minutes rather than just doing 20 and being done with it. But what I really wanted was to run and walk longer distances outside. I tried a few times to run outdoors in winter and I couldn’t stand it. The cold was simply too much.

Later in the summer, I decided once again to give it a try. This time I was walking and running outside and I was enjoying it, but what really got me hooked I think was when I started using Nike+ with my iPod. To use it, you need a small chip which you put in your shoe (or put inside a little pouch that attaches to your shoelaces). The chip acts like a pedometer, transmitting a signal, presumably whenever you take a step. You have several choices for a receiver to keep track of your progress. iPod Touches and iPhones have an app built into it that you can use to track your runs. You can also buy an attachment for other iPods or you can buy a separate bracelet to track your runs.

The Nike+ system will keep track of your distance, time, and even calories spent. Every time you sync your iPod, your data will be uploaded to the Nike website where you can graphically see your progress, set goals, and participate in challenges with other runners. It does need some calibration, but it’s accurate enough to at least tell you when you are making progress. For me, it’s just the kind of nudge I need to keep going. So far, I’ve run or walked over 200 miles with Nike+ and my goal is to do another 700 – 1000 miles this year with it. In part because of the Nike+ system, this fall I ran my first 5K and 10K races.

Anyway, there are a number of things that I’m working on that I’d like to keep at it, things that if I did every day, I would see significant progress in the next year. I’d like to practice playing guitar each day (a new hobby I took up in the fall). I’d like to keep up better with my online business, making sure to do a few key tasks each day. I’d also like to keep this blog up (I’ll refrain from stating a goal, since I think it will be doomed as soon as I choose to make such a blogging goal public.). There are a few other things I’m sure I’ll want to include.

This brings me to a story I heard today on the radio. It was about some research that indicated that if surgeons followed some simple changes to their procedures, like instituting surgical checklists (similar to the checklists that pilots use when preparing to fly), they would likely have better outcomes and fewer mistakes. It got me thinking that I may want to develop a simple daily and weekly checklist for myself. That’s what I intend to do. I’m going to keep it simple at first, with a minimum of things to do and then slowly add things to it. Perhaps I’ll publish it after I’ve revised it a few times.

I tend to have about 60-70 podcasts on my iPod these days waiting for me to listen to them. One of the happy accidents of this is that I often hear interviews about movies after I’ve actually seen a film (instead of during the promotional run up to the film). So this morning, as I was doing my morning run, I got to hear two interviews related to the new movie Up In The Air..

The first interview is with the author of the novel on which it’s based, Walter Kirn. Recorded in 2001, Kirn talks about the genesis of the novel and what he thinks about “air world”, the setting for the book. The second interview was with the director, Jason Reitman, who also directed Juno in 2007. He talks about his own experiences with air travel, getting George Clooney to do the film and the interviews with real people who have lost their jobs which frame and punctuate the movie.

Here is one of the trailers for the film: