Midlife Meditation

Judge Whapners (or Judges Whapner, depending on how judgy a grammarian you are). One of the many gimmicks that makes ComedySportz a delightful place to work is the way we award points in our competitive improv shows. For $3, any "loyal fan" (audience member) can purchase a pair of colored fly swatters called Judge Whapners. Once both blue and red teams have played a round of games, the judges in the audience (at $3, the cheapest judgeship one can buy) vote for the team that gave them the most enjoyment, and points are awarded accordingly. The gimmick is based in a pun that is almost as old as the show--Joseph Wapner retired from The People's Court  in 1993, before many members of our audience were even born--but the conceit is so funny that we've held onto it. Much funnier than the pun is the idea of judging between two improv performances using fly swatters. Taste in comedy is a decidedly subjective thing. From my position at the keyboard in the sound boot...

Art is such a hard thing to qualify. And yet we do it all the time. My earliest preferences were colored by my opinionated mother, who never waffled on anything, and always had a reason for her preferences. This place is better than that place because such and so happened at that place; this TV show is better than that one because its sex jokes are implied rather than explicit; this piece of music is intolerable because it's performed by hippies; and so it went. She could back up every one of her clearly-defined judgments with some bit of information, some personal experience that rendered the conclusion obvious to anyone with a brain. As a child and adolescent, I clung to this binary view of all things. But then along came college and professors whose opinion mattered to me even more than my mother's did. They clearly knew what they were talking about, and mostly what they wanted was for me to keep an open mind about music I initially disliked intensely. This was partic...

Actually, I do know a thing or two about art; certainly not as much as my art major brothers, but enough to appreciate the good stuff, even the stuff that turns off casual museum-goers who prefer even a mediocre Norman Rockwell to anything by Jackson Pollock. I know enough to realize how much I don't see when I stand in front of a masterpiece: how the colors work together to achieve the overall effect, the role composition plays in it, how even the brush strokes matter to the final product. I know it would take me years to develop an eye for these things, years that would be well spent, but which are not part of my plan for the rest of my life. I walk around museums considering great works, sometimes being entranced by what I see without being able to put in words what has drawn me to this abstraction or that photo-realistic work, just savoring the experience, taking it in the same way I look up through trees at sunlight filtering through and feel my sou...