Midlife Meditation

Muggles don't get it. By muggles, I'm referring to people who, while not themselves part of the improv or music worlds, nonetheless are appreciators of those worlds. The more enthusiastic ones can be called "fans," the obsessed ones "nerds" or "geeks," but all of them, from the utterly dedicated down to the mildly intrigued, constitute a group best characterized as "the audience." As the audience, they do utterly get that what they're experiencing is cool. That is to say, they're witnessing performers do something powerful, entertaining, deeply moving, something that resonates deep within the observer; and they're seeing it appear to be effortless. Seeing it happen, feeling awe at how polished it appears to be, how seamless are the transitions from one part to another, they cannot help but think there is something magical about what is happening on stage or, barring the supernatural, at least a sign of great talent. An...

Having church in Nashville: the Stacy Mitchhart Band performs at the Basin Street Blues and Boogie Bar. Music is my church, teaching is my religion. So I wrote in my last post to this blog . Much of my meditation on this formulation was about how I came to it. This post will unpack the first half of the formulation. Understanding what I mean by "music is my church" will require a discussion of what I mean by "church." My seminary education and my years both growing up in and ministering to churches  freight the word with countless layers of meaning. Let's start with the most obvious, the symbol that leaps to the minds of most Americans when they hear the word "church": a large brick and mortar (or lumber and siding) structure featuring a steeple and cross, and containing a large meeting room in which religious services are held. My early childhood years in New Hampshire predispose me to picture a white building in the town square. If you grew u...

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...