Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Why is it that when teachers talk to you, they are insistent that you go to grad school so you can teach? When Chicago improvisers talk to you, they tell you to pick up and move to Chicago. Are those huge kinds of life shakeups really necessary for someone's career and craft to thrive? Is the measured approach not even a little viable?

As far as grad school goes: I am not even somewhat tempted to dive back into the pool of academia again. Moving to Chicago, however, is a somewhat more difficult idea to dismiss. I have been telling myself that I will stay in and around Nashville in order to build an improv community there. They're the people who got me invested in improv, and that is where my allegiance lies. I've been thinking that I am living my life in a smart and safe way, because luck fails me more often than it comes through. But maybe I'm just scared.

If I moved I'd be moving alone, with no support system in place up there, no job planned out, no money to survive, no place to live, no real guarantee that I'll even be doing anything worth all the stress of figuring all of those other things out. I'd also be able to get some real improv training and actually take steps towards making performing and teaching a full time career. And Chicago's cool, I guess. Well, it's freezing actually. Kind of the worst temperature.

If I stay... I stay. Plans remain unchanged and I can keep building myself up and getting my life in order. I think that it's pretty clear to me that Nashville isn't where my path ends, but I'm also pretty sure that I'm not exactly ready to handle some insane cross country move yet.

Road Show Syndrome

I've started to notice a trend with my performances that, while not catastrophic, is very frustrating. I call it Road Show Syndrome. Basically, whenever I'm doing a show on someone else's stage, I leave the show feeling as though I somehow didn't do enough. It happens for a lot of reasons and I'd like to spend some time here dissecting it.

Whenever I do a festival with the Nashville Improv Company, I'm one of at least five performers. We have sets that range from 18-30 minutes and we generally crush as a team. We hit the stage with energy and intensity, we play our games fast, and we say goodbye.

When I'm in someone else's house I get really hungry to impress them. I want them to see that I'm good and clever and hilarious. I know my cast-mates believe those things about me, but I find myself needing validation from the improvisers who don't know me. That'll be real! If they can watch me and think "wow, that guy is incredible!" then I'll finally be good enough. 

Let me tell you, that never has helped me. In fact, it makes me second guess a lot of my choices. It makes me set aside the fun things I really want to do in service of making the "smart improv" choice. I very often leave road shows feeling like the weakest link in our chain when I know that I'm not. At least, I'm not as weak as some of my road performances make me seem. 

The main difference between our normal shows and our road shows is time. We usually do 90 minutes, so a cast of seven is going to have time to let everybody shine. Everyone will generally have one or two moments that are huge laughs. In a 30 minute set, a seven person cast isn't necessarily going to have seven sterling performances. You'll probably get two or three great performances and the rest will hopefully just be "didn't screw up the great stuff." My point is, it's hard to stand out in a short set and that's totally fine. Not everybody on the team needs to hit a homerun to win the game. 

What's not okay is that my performances are suffering because I'm being an insecure baby. I've gotta stop worrying what other improvisers think of me, because the good ones believe in me already and the awful ones will always find a way to tear me down. So I guess the solution here is the same as always: quit worrying so much and just have fun.