? Liezl Estipona
how i fell in love with improv:
chicago
? Jeff Clampitt
I STOOD ONSTAGE PRESSED UP AGAINST A BACK WALL WHILE MY PEERS SCREAMED AT ME TO “SELL IT!” It was a “midnight improv jam” at the ImprovOlympic theater in Chicago, the freezing city I now called home. I had been taking improv classes and this late-night show was an opportunity to finally get onstage. Getting onstage was a big deal. You could spend week after week in classes doing scenes and studying improv forms, but a half-hour performance brought out the best and worst in you. I learned a lot about myself onstage. Sometimes I turned into a desperate joke machine. Other times, I got shy and passive. Once in a while I would get weirdly physical or sexual. When people are nervous and put on the spot, they tend to show you who they really are. That being said, long-form improvisation had terms and rules—and I was learning how to work within them. An improv jam usually consisted of a more experienced improviser encouraging students to get up before they were ready. A paying audience was there to watch young students get better. If improvisation is like surfing, this would be akin to paddling out for the first time to catch a wave on your own.
For those of you who know nothing about improvisation, I suggest you read The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual. I will wait. . . .
Okay, great! So now you know that to be a good improviser you have to listen and say yes and support your partner and be specific and honest and find a game within the scene you can both play. Long-form improvisation (as you already know because you just read our great book) comes from a one-word suggestion that turns into a whole show filled with scenes and other various forms.
It was 1993 when I moved to Chicago. Bill Clinton had just been elected president, Rodney King had been beaten by the police, and “Whoomp! (There It Is)” was burning up the charts. Speaking of burning, federal agents would storm the Branch Davidian compound that same year and the place would go up in flames. A short time later, during a series of Second City Touring Company gigs across Texas, two women named Tina Fey and Amy Poehler would visit that compound on their way past Waco, Texas. More on that in a minute.
I moved to a new city already knowing my Boston College roommate Kara and our friend Martin Gobbee, and the three of us lived together in a cheap but beautiful Chicago apartment. Crown molding, wasted on the young. My dad drove Kara’s jeep across the country loaded with our stuff and I settled quickly into a life of waitressing and taking classes. It was an awesome time. I was extremely poor and had little to do. I painted my tiny bedroom Van Gogh Starry Night Purple, and I smoked a lot of pot. I would ride my bike to shows while listening to the Beastie Boys. I was twenty-two and I had found what I loved.
Watching great people do what you love is a good way to start learning how to do it yourself. Chicago was swollen with talent at the time. The first Second City show I ever saw was Amy Sedaris’s last. The entire cast was saying good-bye to her and she was doing all of her best sketches. Amy Sedaris is the Cindy Sherman of comedy. When it comes to sketch, I don’t think I have ever seen anyone funnier. That night she was onstage with her cast, which included the two Steves: Colbert and Carell. I remember watching them all with a mixture of awe and excitement. Some of them were about to head off to New York to shoot their sketch show Exit 57. I remember thinking, “You are all so good and I wish I were better. Now get out of here because I want to be where you are.”
Over at the ImprovOlympic theater the talent was just as fierce. The “house team” there was a group called the Family. It was Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Adam McKay, Neil Flynn, Ali Farahnakian, and Miles Stroth. They were improv giants, literally. Everyone was over six feet tall and imposing, physical, and hilarious. The Midwest grows its actors big. I would sneak into their packed shows using my student discount and sit in the light booth to watch what great improv looked like. The members of the Family were my rock stars. They were my Chicago Bulls. I would get food with other amateur improvisers and talk about the different moves I had seen the giants pull. I would marvel at how easy they made it look. I would go home and write in my journal: “Amy, take more risks!” “Get better at object work!” “Don’t be afraid to sing!”
ImprovOlympic had a mommy and a daddy, and Charna Halpern was the mommy. She is the Stevie Nicks of improvisation. She is feminine and witchy but does not take any shit. Charna was my first real improv teacher and she ran the place. She was responsible for putting groups together, deciding who could proceed to the next level, and making sure everyone was fed. She had the keys to the place—literally and figuratively—a responsibility I didn’t truly understand until much later when I was running a theater of my own. It is incredibly hard to balance ego and opportunity as well as paychecks and liquor license boards. Being a small comedy theater owner is exciting and lonely. The shows are exhilarating, but few people stick around to help you sweep up. Charna took a liking to me, and me to her. She told me I was just as good as the big boys. She believed in me. She said there was another new improviser in another one of her classes whom she thought I would really like. Her name was Tina and she was like me but with brown hair. Yes, yes. I’m getting to it!
If Charna was the mommy, Del Close was the daddy. He was worshipped from afar and the man everyone was trying to please. He also had a beard, a tendency to be grumpy, and an amazing backstory. He was a comedy genius who had taught all of my heroes: Gilda Radner and Bill Murray and Chris Farley. He swallowed fire, toured with Lenny Bruce, named SCTV, and, according to him, was a good friend of Elaine May. He was a respected Chicago theater actor who believed improvisation was not an acting tool but a genuine performance form on its own. Del was also a Wiccan and a drug addict, and I was catching him in the last ten years of his too-short life. His story could fill many books. He is the most famous guy in comedy whom nobody knows. They weren’t married, but Charna was Del’s wife and emotional surrogate who encouraged his genius while running ImprovOlympic and keeping the lights on.
I took a class from a member of the Family, Matt Besser, and we started dating soon after. Matt was a talented Jewish boy from Arkansas who was effortlessly cool. He dressed like a punk rock soccer player. He had a fierceness about him that was exhilarating. He truly didn’t care what people thought. He was also an artist and big thinker. I first saw him onstage playing a Southern female waitress in an improv scene. He paid such fine attention to detail. He played this woman with total grace, while still being really funny. Matt was the first of many men I’ve been attracted to because they know how to play women. He was antsy and cranky and had big plans. He encouraged me to write, create, and take risks. He introduced me to artists like Big Black and GG Allin and helped me film my first “reel,” or excerpts of my best stuff for talent agents. Matt asked me to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a relatively young sketch group. They needed a girl. I had heard of their shows around town, which seemed like a mixture of improvisation and performance art. They had done a show where each member sat on a street corner and had a Thanksgiving dinner. They did a show where they pretended a member was committing suicide. They did a show where they took an audience member for a virtual-reality tour out into the streets of Chicago. Most of their stuff was about getting the audience out of their chairs and out of their comfort zone. The Upright Citizens Brigade name came from a fake big bad corporation that was mentioned in one of their shows. The idea was this group had co-opted the name and was causing chaos on purpose—picture Occupy Wall Street if they renamed themselves “Halliburton Inc.” Like I said, Matt had big ideas. He had a big plan for the UCB and I wanted to be part of it. I grabbed his coattails and held on tight.
Besser turned me on to Fugazi. He talked about the spirit of Ian MacKaye and how Fugazi never charged a lot for their shows. He wanted the Upright Citizens Brigade to feel like that—owned by the people. We had no plans for a school or theater or television show, but we all felt an itch. I scratched mine reading Daniel Clowes comic books and shopping at thrift stores for old Doc Martens. I went to bars and saw Liz Phair. I lived in a scary part of Chicago and watched police shoot a dog in our backyard. I started improvising with people better than me and got better myself. I started to call myself an artist.
The audience was staring at me as veteran improviser and all-around captain Dave Koechner pointed and yelled, “Sell it!” I had bailed on a scene. That meant I had started a scene with someone and either failed to commit, laughed, or negated that person’s choice. Improvisation is like the military. You leave no man behind. It’s your job to make your partner look good and if you are afraid to look stupid you should probably go home. Improvisation was about not being cool. Nobody stood outside of improv theaters in tiny leather jackets smoking cigarettes. Being “clever” wasn’t rewarded. It was about being in the moment and listening and not being afraid. I had let my partner down and I was being told to “sell it!” This was a way to shame young improvisers. It was a rolled-up-newspaper-swat approach. When Dave Koechner told you to “sell it,” it meant you had to do the monkey dance. The monkey dance was really embarrassing.
I was part of an improv team called Inside Vladimir. We’d named ourselves after a gay porn title we saw at JJ Peppers, a Chicago convenience store that sold only porn and food. Very convenient, indeed. Tina Fey was one of my team members. She was sharp, shy, and hilarious. We took classes together and sat in the back. She would whisper funny and harsh things about Del to me. When we did scenes together, they weren’t particularly funny or interesting. There was absolutely nothing pointing to the fact that anyone on our team would be successful in any kind of comedy career. We were all just trying to keep up. Inside Vladimir performed frequently at ImprovOlympic, and the men on our team were great and supportive and totally fine with Tina and me taking over. Together we wrote a two-woman show that we performed one night only. It was called Women of Color and had a sketch about two policewomen named Powderkeg and Shortfuse. I think we did fifteen minutes of written material and then padded the rest with improv. Soon after, we performed the Del Close–invented long-form structure called “The Dream.” In it, you interviewed a member of the audience about their day and performed what you thought their dream would look like at night. And the gentleman in the audience who raised his hand? A young Seth Meyers. I don’t remember one thing about meeting him but I’m sure in Seth’s memoir he will describe it as the night he saw god.
Soon after, Tina and I both auditioned for Second City’s touring company. You had to do a bunch of characters and I have completely forgotten what I did. I’m sure Besser helped me. Here is a sheet someone recently found in an old drawer at Second City, from the day I auditioned.
Remember, kids, they can spell your name wrong and you can still get the job!
Tina and I were placed in a touring company called BlueCo, and I took the spot left behind by Rachel Dratch who had been hired for the Mainstage company. We traveled all over Chicago and the United States in a van with hilarious men and women. I think we were paid $65 a show. We would drive across Texas and perform three or four times and come back to Chicago deep in debt. Those van rides were tiny comedy labs. I remember a lot of beef jerky and bits. Tina taught me how to pluck my eyebrows. During our Texas tour we stopped at a Dallas S&M club and drank warm Diet Cokes as we watched a woman lazily whip a guy. Nothing is more depressing than a tired dominatrix. We did a show just outside of Waco and wondered if it was gauche to drive to the Branch Davidian compound. I complained to the manager at the Red Roof Inn about blood in my sink and then sheepishly asked him where the “bad stuff went down.” He handed me typed-out directions. He had clearly been asked before. We arrived to find charred children’s toys still littering the place. We noticed Jews for Jesus graffiti and many people still wandering around. An Australian woman with her arm in a sling was preaching on a burned-out school bus. She spoke of how handsome David Koresh was and how he was getting ready to return, while I stood fascinated by her wristwatch, which she had safety-pinned to her sling. It was weird, man. Especially since one of us was very stoned.
While I was touring with Second City, I continued to perform at ImprovOlympic and with the Upright Citizens Brigade. The group had morphed and now it was the fab four it remains today: Besser, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh, and me. Ian was an intense and cerebral guy from New Jersey who was the best improviser I had ever seen. He was a great actor who looked like he wanted to wrestle you. I saw Matt Walsh for the first time when he played Captain Lunatic (Lou Natic), an over-the-top cop who chugged Pepto-Bismol and cursed God. I was in awe of his characters and his distinct voice. Adam McKay and Horatio Sanz were still performing with us on occasion, although both were being groomed to join SNL. Adam was good at everything. He was an unbelievable writer and bulletproof onstage. Horatio was sweet but fearless. He once walked through a sliding glass door on a dare.
The UCB4 started to write and perform our own shows, most of which included audience plants and fake gunplay. This included Thunderball, a sketch show conceived during the baseball strike. We dragged our audience to the entrance of Wrigley Field and declared baseball officially dead. We had the crowd light candles and chant “Baseball is dead, long live Thunderball.” James Grace played a plant in the audience who supported baseball and we shot him. Horatio played the ghost of Babe Ruth, and he wept over James and shouted “No!!” up to the heavens. It started to rain and then cops made us disperse. James committed to lying in the rain for hours. We got big crowds and mixed reviews. Del liked to remind us that “no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” He also liked to tell us to “fall, and then figure out what to do on your way down” and that “professionals work on New Year’s Eve.” People around us started becoming actual professionals. Adam and Horatio and Tim Meadows got hired at SNL. Andy Richter was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Big stars, like Mike Myers, Andy Dick, and Chris Farley, would come back and perform with us. I had coincidentally rented Farley’s old Chicago apartment years after he had left. He was incredibly nice and painfully sensitive. He would stand backstage and berate himself if he felt he didn’t do a good job. It was almost like he couldn’t hear how loud everyone was laughing.
We were rehearsing for a UCB show when the O.J. Simpson verdict came down and we watched it live. When O.J. was acquitted, Besser predicted O.J. would find himself back in jail not long after. Besser knew something about the future, it seemed. He was a time traveler and understood the long game. In addition to doing UCB, Matt performed as a stand-up comedian and had a manager. His name was Dave Becky, and Matt told Dave about this group with the funny name. Dave traveled to Chicago and saw something in the Upright Citizens Brigade, and seventeen years later Dave still represents me. The UCB had done a few showcases in New York and Los Angeles, and soon Besser decided it was time for us to leave Chicago. We sat in a booth at the Salt & Pepper Diner and charted our course.
No one thought this was a good idea. A casting director told me we would never make it as a group. Second City reminded me I was in line to get a spot in a Mainstage company—the big-time there. ImprovOlympic was a warm blanket we didn’t want to crawl out from under. My choice was easy to make, though, because I was moving back east near my family and had wisely learned to do whatever Besser told me to do. Also, Ian and Walsh and Matt were the funniest people I knew and Ian had once punched a drunk guy wearing a sombrero who yelled gross stuff to me from across the street. I felt protected.
It’s easier to be brave when you’re not alone.
We were young and foolish and didn’t know what we were up against. Thank god. We said good-bye to our friends and our cheap and beautiful apartment in the scary neighborhood. We packed all of our things and my yellow Lab, Suki, and pulled away in a U-Haul truck. We had no apartment or job or place to perform in New York City. I didn’t really know who I was, but improv had taught me that I could be anyone. I didn’t have to wait to be cast—I could give myself the part. I could be an old man or a teenage babysitter or a rodeo clown. In three short years Chicago had taught me that I could decide who I was. My only job was to surround myself with people who respected and supported that choice. Being foolish was the smartest thing to do.
I stood onstage and did the monkey dance. I put my two fingers up my nose and turned it into a pig nose. I took my other hand and put it up between my legs and grabbed my crotch. I danced and made monkey sounds as everyone clapped. These were the people I wanted to impress. They still are. Who needed a job? I was already my own boss! (Cue my parents gasping.) Money? Who needed money when I was already so rich? (I was very poor. I needed money badly. I borrowed a lot from my parents.)
New York, here I come!
the russians are coming
MY PARENTS STILL LIVE IN THE HOUSE WE MOVED INTO WHEN I WAS FIVE. In my old bedroom are the dried flowers from my prom and a street sign I stole when I hung out with some bad kids for a few months. I loved school. I loved new shoes and lunch boxes and sharp pencils. I would hold dance contests in tiny finished basements with my friends. I roller-skated in my driveway and walked home from the bus stop on my own. We never locked our door. I had a younger brother whom I loved and also liked. I thought my mother was the most beautiful mother in the world and my father was a superhero who would always protect me. I wish this feeling for every child on earth.
Because of this safe foundation, I had to create my own drama. I’m aware many children were not afforded that luxury. Some had houses filled with chaos and abuse, and they learned to keep their mouths shut and stay out of trouble. I was dealt two loving parents, and they encouraged me to be curious. This safety net combined with the small drumbeat inside of me meant I did a lot of silly things to try to make life seem exciting. Our little town of Burlington, Massachusetts, was quiet and homogenous, an endless series of small ranch houses on tree-lined streets littered with pine needles. The only thing we feared was the dreaded gypsy moth. Burlington was sleepy, and to a restless young girl like me it often felt like a ghost town. I yearned for adventure and spent a lot of my youth in my own head, creating elaborate fantasies that felt grown-up and life threatening.
The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak outside of our house at dusk with a pair of binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from: kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes, fire fantasies where I would save my whole family and jump from my window into a snowbank, drugstore-robbery daydreams where I would find a way to connect with the troubled teen and get him to drop the gun. After school, I would eat ravenously and then hop on my pink Huffy bike. The bike read CACTUS FLOWER on the side, and as I coasted down the street, I would pretend I was being chased. Riding fast and helmetless, I would look over my shoulder and pick a random car and decide it was filled with Russians. I would pedal furiously up to the edge of the woods and jump off my bike, stashing it in the bushes. I would pile leaves on top of me and lie very still, imagining how ridiculous those bad guys would feel when they realized they had walked right past me. This was during the Gorbachev/Reagan years, and our enemies had thick-tongued accents and fur hats. “Do you see the girl?” the small and scary boss would say. “Nyet,” the big and dumb one would answer. I would pretend to wait until they were gone and then jump out of the leaves to get to the business of delivering the microchip into the hands of Pat Benatar.
On long car trips, I would make my little brother, Greg, pretend he was deaf while we sat in the backseat. We would communicate in made-up sign language as we sped down the highway, in the hope that a passing car would see us and feel pity for the beautiful family with two deaf children. When you have a comfortable and loving middle-class family, sometimes you yearn for a dance on the edge. This can lead to an overactive imagination, but it is also the reason why kids in Montana do meth.
My best friend, Keri Downey, lived a block away. Her house was a much livelier version of mine. Keri and I met the first day of kindergarten. I was dressed in a cowgirl outfit, which says more about my mother’s wonderful acceptance of my weirdness and less about my fashion choices at that time. Remember, this was still the 1970s, a time when my teachers wore leotards and corduroys and kissed their boyfriends in front of us. My mother was at home, but Keri’s mom, Ginny, worked. Keri was a typical latchkey kid, and her house had that exciting Lord of the Flies feeling of being run by children. Keri had a list of chores and suffered consequences if she didn’t do them. I came from a home where my mother would gently suggest that maybe I could pick up my room if I had the chance. Keri had a police officer dad who slept during the day and was not happy if we woke him up. I had a dad who would snore on the couch as we all stood around him and teased him loudly. Keri had fierce sisters who punched. I had a brother whom I occasionally argued with. The Downey sisters were a tiny gang. They fascinated me. They would fight hard, wrestling around and pulling hair. They would even challenge me to fight, occasionally pushing me into the scrum. One time Keri’s sister threw a set of toenail clippers at her eye and it drew blood. Blood! So exciting! They would torture each other with big emotional threats, and then they would cry and make up and eat a sandwich. They had each other’s backs even when they were talking behind them. Keri would come to my house and luxuriate in the calm and the junk food, and I would head over to her house to watch her sisters in action. I would come back from Keri’s house riled up, like I had witnessed some kind of dogfight. I would talk back to my mom and mess up Greg’s baseball cards and act like I was a real tough piece of business. My parents would send me to my room and I would stomp up the stairs, excited to be such a troublemaker. I would knock over some books. I would kick the wall. I would put on my Jane Fonda workout and really feel the burn this time!
Even though we had such different families, Keri and I were a good pair, both freckled and Irish with a strong belief in justice. We would go out for recess and spend the whole time walking and talking. This is something I still love to do today. I call it “walking the beat.” I often call my friends and tell them to meet me on a New York corner at a certain time. The physical act of walking combined with the opportunity to look out at the world while you are sharing your thoughts and feelings is very comforting to me. You are in charge of the route and the amount of eye contact. I guess those days with Keri were when this started. Anyway, Keri and I spent most of our fourth-grade recess time walking the beat and discussing the important issues of the day: the recent release of the Iranian hostages, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, the fact that Luke technically raped Laura on the dance floor when they first met but now they were the best couple on General Hospital.
One day a student named Jamie brought a pair of handcuffs to school. I don’t remember where he said he got them, but looking back now it was really odd. Where does a ten-year-old find a pair of handcuffs? This felt like an incident one would file under “having older brothers.” This was by far the most dangerous thing anyone had ever brought to school besides the honeycomb full of bees that the beekeeper brought for career day. It’s an indication of how truly safe and idyllic my childhood was that the handcuffs didn’t scare me. They didn’t remind me of one of my relatives being hauled away to jail or anything traumatic like that. They only reminded me of a terrific episode of Hill Street Blues. And they were a pair of handcuffs, not a gun, a homemade bomb, dynamite-infused bath salts, or whatever horrible shit kids have to deal with these days.
Keri and I immediately took them and then shared a look as we locked them on to our wrists. Keri discreetly dropped the key to the ground and then we pretended it was lost. We faked being upset while a small group of kids gathered around, excited about the idea of handcuffs and lost keys and people being stuck together. The general hubbub turned into real concern once we couldn’t actually find the key we had dropped. The recess bell rang and Keri and I walked back into the building to find a teacher. We were wrist to wrist; I could feel our pulses quickening. I was thrilled. The other kids crowded around us as we told the teacher what had happened. “They are stuck together!” they cried. “They will never get free!” Attempts were made to pull us free, but we would yell out in fake pain and the pulling would stop. We were brought over to the sink. Paints and brushes were moved aside and thick liquid soap was poured on our hands. Our tiny wrists looked like they could easily slide out, but they refused. Teachers became irritated at the thought of sending us home in handcuffs. I loved the attention. I loved acting cool and calm about being handcuffed to my friend. We became instant celebrities.
Eventually, Keri got nervous about getting in trouble. I spoke quietly and evenly to her about how everything was going to be okay. I made jokes about splitting up the week with each other’s families. It was the beginning of what I now think is my natural instinct to try to bring levity and calm to stressful situations. I am an excellent person to be around if you’re having a bad drug trip. You need a balance of humor and pathos mixed with some light massage and occasional distractions. I once helped a now very famous actor cross over while he was on ecstasy by speaking to him softly and then pretending to do magic tricks. I was also on ecstasy at the time. This may have helped my comedy, but it certainly didn’t help with my magic.
Keri and I sat in class for what seemed like hours while the teachers huddled to figure out what to do. There was talk of going to the police station! There was even talk of getting a big machine to cut us apart! Then we went back outside to look again and found the key. Keri was happy because she didn’t want her police officer dad to lecture her on handcuff etiquette, but I was so bummed. We rubbed our wrists and talked to everyone on the bus about how scared we had been. We dined out on the great handcuff incident for weeks. The school called us the Handcuff Girls, which will be my band’s name when I become a rock star in my midsixties. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me up to that point, and it was the perfect kind of scary story that only lasts a few hours and ends up well.
As we grew up, Keri’s house remained my comfortable danger zone. We would pile up pillows for Fright Nights on Fridays, when we would watch scary movies and make popcorn in a giant and expensive microwave. We would sit through Friday the 13th and The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street while we folded laundry. I have fond memories of cranking up the air-conditioning in Keri’s house and then lying under tons of blankets to watch those movies. Her scrappy sisters would snuggle together and her sweet mom, Ginny, would join us. I would mostly watch through the holes of an afghan, and Ginny would tap my shoulder just before each scary part. I vividly remember watching Carrie and tensing up at that last scene when Amy Irving lays flowers at the grave. Ginny gently sat tapping my shoulder and I prepared for the inevitable zombie hand bursting out of the dirt and the chorus of screams that followed.
Once middle school rolled around, Keri went to Catholic school while I stayed in our public school. She wore a uniform and became proficient with black eyeliner. Older kids meant more chaos, and my school suddenly had the energy and excitement I was looking for. It also started to teach me that there were kids who truly weren’t loved or happy. Even though most of us lived in the same detached homes with wall-to-wall carpet, inside those homes were drunk moms and mean dads. The danger I was looking for started to become a little more real. There was a fight in our school every day. Students rushed to the parking lot or the hallway when a fight was starting. Cops broke up parties and boys got drunk and started to smash their bodies into each other. Steroids were a big drug for a lot of the high school boys in my town, and this produced a weird collection of rage-filled football players who were just as bored as I was. The difference is when I was bored I would listen to my Walkman and pretend I was in a music video. When they were bored they would beat someone up. Years later a few of these football players would be arrested for picking up a prostitute near their college campus and raping her. It would be a landmark case of an admitted prostitute and drug addict winning a conviction against a bunch of white men. I watched it on Court TV and thought about all those boys and the parties they attended in my house.
The girls were a tough bunch as well. I was pushed into a locker and punched by a cheerleader. One girl pulled my hair at lunch because she thought I was “stuck up.” It was bad to be “stuck up.” It was also bad to be a “slut” or a “prude” or a “dexter” or a “fag.” There were no openly gay kids in my high school. My school had a quiet hum of racism and homophobia that kept all of that disclosure far away. Every year the girls would have a football game called the Powder Puff. The girls would play tackle football on a cold high school field while the boys dressed as cheerleaders and shouted misogynist things at everybody. It was as wonderful as it sounds. I played safety and tried to talk my way out of getting beat up. I saw a girl hike the ball and then just go over and punch someone in the nose. There was so much hate and hair spray flying. Black eyes were common. I started to learn that as much as I chased adventure, I had little interest in the physical pain that came with it. I also realized I didn’t like to be scared or out of control.
And then Keri’s mom, Ginny, got cancer.
Suddenly the world was small and tight. Our parents could get sick and our pretend games felt a million miles away. The inevitability of death became a new nightmare. I don’t remember when I first heard of Keri’s mom getting sick, but it was in that way young children receive news, a watered-down fashion that is a combination of investigating and straight-up eavesdropping. I remember her children pleading with her to stop smoking, and stealing her cigarettes from her purse and throwing them in the garbage. I remember her daughters spending days lying in her bed with her as her cancer spread from her brain to the rest of her body. I remember their dad and her husband, Mike, seeming very lost but also very strong. I also remember my incredible paralysis through the whole thing. All of my practice chasing bad guys did not add up to much. Cancer was too scary and too real, and I wanted the whole thing to go away. I was in high school when Ginny died, and I didn’t do a very good job of being there for my friend. I had little experience with death and did that classic thing of thinking I should just leave everyone alone and wait for the sad parties to reach out when they needed help.
Now that I am older life seems full of things to worry about. Sometimes I search for bad news as if reading the details will protect me somehow. I call it tragedy porn. I will fill myself up with every horrible detail about the latest horrible event and quote it back to people like some bad-news know-it-all. Remember that Austrian dad Josef Fritzl who raped his daughter and kept her and her kids in the basement for twenty-four years? I do, because I spent many nights reading every horrible specific fact about it and talking about it to everyone who would listen, until one day Seth Meyers gently reminded me that I worked at Saturday Night Live and it was a comedy show and maybe I was bumming everybody out. At the end of the year the “Update” team surprised me with a framed copy of an Entertainment Weekly cover Seth and I had posed for. They replaced Seth’s face with Josef Fritzl’s. I am smiling and pulling at his tie. This is what it is like to work in comedy. Hilarious and horrifying.
Speaking of horrifying, I still troll the Internet for terrible stories. I see an awful headline and try not to click it. I often can’t believe how hard it is not to read. For a while I was obsessed with a cable show called I Survived . . . I was never very interested in the people who were attacked by mountain lions while hiking or the dummies who crashed their single-engine airplanes. Those stories seemed like foolish risk-taking scenarios I could successfully avoid by never going outside. No, I would watch the horrible pieces on women who had been assaulted and left for dead. First-person accounts of people being attacked by strangers or stabbed by boyfriends. This is the ultimate narcissistic white-girl game. I would picture how I would handle the attack differently. Or the same. Inevitably, I’d think about my own death, which next to staring at your face in a magnifying mirror is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself. The ambulance-chasing aspect combined with the Monday-morning quarterbacking of it all is the luxury afforded to those of us left untouched by trauma. Sometimes I would use these tragedy-porn shows to unlock deep feelings or cut through the numbness. I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit. Either way, it was all gross and all bad for my health. I remember being depressed after my second boy, Abel, was born. I couldn’t lose weight and I couldn’t stop working. One evening, Will tried to gently point out that drinking a bottle of wine by myself while I watched Oprah on DVR probably wasn’t the best way to feel better. I remember arguing with him that these shows didn’t make me feel sad. They were real. They were emotional. They were what I needed to feel better. Then Oprah’s show came on and she announced the topic was African baby rape. I was forced to admit perhaps it was time for a break.
Let’s not end on African baby rape (or start with it, for that matter). Let’s end by pointing out all the positive ways you can scare yourself and feel alive. You can tell someone you love them first. You can try to speak only the truth for a whole week. You can jump out of an airplane or spend Christmas Day all by your lonesome. You can help people who need help and fight real bad guys. You can dance fast or take an improv class or do one of those Ironman things. Adventure and danger can be good for your heart and soul. Violence and desperation are brutal things to search out. Why search out the horror? It’s around us in real ways every day. I’m talking to you, the people who made that movie The Human Centipede. No more Human Centipede movies please. No more movies about people’s mouths being sewn onto people’s butts. The whole idea of making and watching a movie like that makes me want to take a ten-year nap.
Having said all this I would like to pitch some taglines for the inevitable Human Centipede 4 movie.