Bricks

I'm a perfectionist. I have been for as long as I can remember. To this day, I get upset when my nail polish chips or I make a mistake in pen and there's no white-out in sight.

There's a tough lesson for me to learn if I want to succeed in improv: no one is perfect. As much as I try to say the perfect thing, or make the funniest scene ever, it doesn't happen. Despite my best efforts, I may totally miss a perfect cue, or occasionally forget to get the whos, whats, and wheres of the scenes out quickly.

And that's really okay. As we were doing scenes tonight, I realized that any scenario can go a ton of directions, and none of them are wrong. Each team member could take a cue a different way, and that's the beauty of it. When we let ourselves focus on just one line (a.k.a. brick) at a time, we can build an amazingly good scene. Although some "bricks" may be more funny or more complex, there isn't a wrong way. That's comforting to me.

Even though Jeff had pointers for all of us, and during many of our scenes he would give us ideas of how to improve, none of our scenes were bad. I do get flustered when someone sets up a scene and I have no clue how to respond, though. Most of all, I'm learning to trust my instincts, to focus on relationships between characters, and to "bring a brick, not a cathedral."