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...

  "The stranger who comes home does not make himself at home but makes home strange." --Marion Zimmer Bradley It's an old theme in literature: a young person leaves home to sojourn in other parts of the world or, if it's science fiction, on another planet, another star system, perhaps a different time or dimension. After a prolonged absence, the protagonist returns, transformed by the experience. Not only is he or she a different person, but through those differences, the home town or planet is also changed. I left America in 1988 to be a student pastor in Cheadle, Cheshire, a suburb of Manchester, England. I went with my wife, and while we were there, we had a child, Sarah, who will forever carry the distinction of an irregular birth certificate. (And no, she does not have dual citizenship; that possibility was shut down by the British a few years earlier to keep foreigners from having babies in Britain just so they could come back and take advantage of Nation...