Jerry's Fantasies

Tom Soter (far right in white jacket) in 1985 with the N.Y. Improv Squad.

A BLAST FROM MY PAST

My Life as an Improvisor, Pt. 2

"Tom, you'd better sit down," said the voice on the other end of the line. "I want you to be prepared for what I'm about to tell you."

"I'm sitting down," I said, not recognizing the name "Janet Smith" on my caller ID nor the voice of the man on the phone.

 "This is Jerry Patterson, Tom."

 "Jerry Patterson," I said slowly. I paused. "It's been a long time."

Twenty-five years, in fact.

It was aroung 1984 or 1985 and I had just been involved in improv comedy for a few years. I had been studying with Carol Schindler, an excellent teacher at Chicago City Limits, when Jerry turned up. He was a short, stout guy, with a nervous smile and an obsequious manner, who said he had studied improv in Florida and now hoped to make a splash here. One thing was certain: he was trying to ingratiate himself with everyone in the CCL class circuit. From small to large, there wasn't any assistance that Jerry wouldn't offer. He volunteered to help on the set of my public access cable TV show, Videosyncracies, and was very useful. After class, he'd treat people to drinks, praising their work and modestly downgrading his own.

Everyone found Jerry a nice enough guy, although he seemed to try too hard and was, well, you'd have to admit it, a little weird. One improv class we took together, for instance, was devoted to an exercise called "Fantasies," in which an improviser was allowed to play-act a favorite fantasy and his fellow performers had to go along with him. Jerry's fantasy was as odd as the guy, both ingratiating and self-destructive. He wanted to be a talk show host "with Carol Schindler and Tom Soter" as his guests. But as we played it out, he interpreted everything Carol or I said to him as an insult, as though we were putting him down. Which we weren't. So, his fantasy, really, was to be a talk show host who is insulted by his guests, Carol Schindler and Tom Soter.

Jerry's self-destructive nature was fully revealed in his last days at CCL. It turned out that he had been borrowing money from his fellow students by passing bad checks among them; he had even paid for classes with rubber money. Since everyone hung out together from class, it was inevitable that we would exchange notes and find out. But, Jerry obviously wanted to be found out. It was probably another fantasy of his.

The last straw came when he paid Mike Honda, his roommate and my classmate, with two bad checks. He had also, Mike said, stolen a shirt of his. Mike had reported Jerry to the police, but Jerry had apparently skipped town. Then, the police called Mike: they had found Jerry at the 34th Street YMCA. They had picked him up and wanted Mike to go to the station house. Mike brought me along with him.

We entered the squad room at the precinct. It looked like a set for Law & Order. Jerry was seated by the side of a desk, with a plainclothes detective working at the desk. Jerry stood up when he saw, but did so awkwardly because, I noted, one hand was handcuffed to the desk. "Sit down, Jerry," said the cop, without looking up from his paperwork. I wondered, Was this a Jerry fantasy, too?

The detective who had brought us in took us aside and asked us what we wanted to do. Did we want to press charges? Mike, apparently feeling sorry for Jerry, turned to me.

"What should we do?" he asked.

I, in turn, said to the detective: "If Mike doesn't press charges what happens to him?"

"We turn him loose."

 "And he'll probably do more of the same?”

“Yes.”

“If we press charges?”

“We book him and he spends the night in jail before his arraignment tomorrow.”

I looked at Mike, he nodded, and then, for the only time in my life, I was able to play cop for a moment and said, “Book him!”

The last time I saw Jerry was when Mike and I were downstairs at a phone booth, as two cops brought Jerry out in handcuffs and hustled him off to a jail cell. I never heard from him again. Until now.

“Jerry Patterson,” I said. “The last time I saw you was in a police precinct.”

“Yeah.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to audition for your show, Sunday Night Improv.”

“Why?”

“There aren’t a lot of improv venues out there,” he said matter-of-factly.

Or suckers willing to be burned again, I thought.

“I’ve straightened myself out,” he said, as though he had read my mind.

“I’m not holding auditions right now,” I said, diplomatically adding: “Why don’t you just come to the show and see if it’s something you want to get involved with?”

Silence.

“Let’s play it by ear,” I said, wondering if he had perhaps hung up.

“Okay,” he said awkwardly. “Maybe I’ll see you in the fall.” The line went dead.

What was that all about? I thought. Was he legit? Or maybe my rejecting him was just another episode in the Jerry Patterson Fantasy Show.

August 27, 2010

(Some of the names in this story have been changed to protect me.)

Loon Over Manhattan

MY LIFE AS AN 

IMPROVISOR, Pt. 3

Soter with NY Improv Squad, 1985

Be careful.

That’s the advice I offer to any aspiring improv teachers out there. I’ve had my share of oddballs in the classes I’ve taught since I began teaching in 1987, but none as loony as Dan (we’ll keep him anonymous) and his wife, who both studied with me in the 1990s.

Dan was a dynamic performer. He delighted in playing preachers and prophets and was well suited for the part. Magnetic in his manner, over six feet tall, thin and gangly in his appearance, he could evoke a crazed preacher with ease. His wife was, as I recall, somewhat mousy and quiet, content to remain in the shadow of the Great Man.

They came to my Friday early evening class fairly regularly. So did a rather large woman whom we’ll call Josephine. Now, Josephine didn’t like to be touched. By any one. So, I had to warn newcomers (and remind veterans) not to touch Josephine during a scene.

Apparently, Dan didn’t get the memo. During one group scene, Josephine, Dan, the Wife, and another student were sitting around an imaginary table and, for some reason, Josephine was berating Dan – rather savagely, I might add. At some point during Josephine’s monologue, Dan made eye contact with his wife and, zombie-like, she stood up and walked to a position behind Josephine. At another barely noticeable signal from Dan, the Wife placed her fingers around Josephine’s throat.

The class and I watched, mesmerized, as the next few events occurred in what seemed like slow motion. As Josephine yammered on with her insults, the Wife seemed to tighten her grip. We all thought it was stage play – you know, an imaginary squeeze – and Josephine hadn’t objected to the touch and was apparently playing along. Even down to her face turning purple. I was about to interrupt and compliment them on their acting, when the Wife let out a yell and Josephine inhaled and exhaled mightily. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said between breaths. “I couldn’t breathe.” But she apparently had been able to pinch the wife hard enough to get her to let go.

As everyone sat in stunned silence, I offered some advice about respecting each other’s space, not killing anyone during class hours, and anything else I could think of at the time.

The moral of the story: take your students seriously – or there might be serious consequences. And watch out for the loons.

September 19, 2010

My Dinner With Miriam

The scene is a coffee shop. Miriam Sirota and I are talking about improvisation.

IMPROV SQUAD_0001.jpg

“What do you feel has to happen between a group of people to make a group scene work?” Miriam asks.

“They have to have a lot of silence at the beginning. And beyond the silence, they have to clear their heads of any preconceived ideas. Then they have to watch what the other people are doing, listen, and observe what’s happen and not speak until they feel they have something to say. Sometimes you speak without knowing what you mean entirely. You have to trust and leap somewhere. I know that sounds very mystical, but you rely on techniques to try and figure out who the people are, even as you’re acting them out. The best thing that can be said is you have to trust who you’re working with.”

“For me,” says Miriam, “in a group scene where so many people are involved, you have to be aware of what is the scene is about. Who are the people in the scene? Who is the conflict with? And you have to play the part that you need to play within that. Because a lot of times, people try to pull focus in a group scene, they try to take over instead of listening and observing.”

“There’s a very good example of that. We did a scene at a funeral and someone made a mistake and made a reference to one of the dead people being our mother, when we had established that it was our father. And some other improvisers offstage rushed on and changed the coffin – it was very broad and comic and explained the confusion, but it also broke the realistic mood and made it into a big gag. Instead of trusting that we could have explained the mix-up ourselves. But it didn’t stop there. Soon they started changing the coffin regularly and turned that into a pattern, a disruptive pattern, because they didn’t trust that we had anything happening and they wanted to get some immediate laughs going. That’s a good example of what happens if you don’t give improvisers their space you don’t give the scene its space to breathe.”

“You’ve taught improv for years. What do you think is the most common problem that most newcomers have?”

“They think they have to be funny. They feel like they have to come up with gags and quips and play zany characters. They’re not real. They try to come up with one-liners, rather than realizing that what improv is about is playing a thinly disguised version of yourself in different situations and using the same skills you use in life, which is to listen, to observe, to communicate, to try to not judge. And they’re very judgmental of themselves when they get up there.”

August 25, 2010

The Pink Elephant Spontaneous Arts Show

MY LIFE AS AN IMPROVISER

Part 1

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The man was missing an arm. That was obvious.

I was teaching my Tuesday night improv class at the Lucy Moses School when a new student came in. And he was clearly missing an arm.

Now teaching people to improvise may seem like a contradiction –­ how can you learn to be spontaneous? – but it actually isn’t as strange as it sounds. As children, we can usually be very spontaneous, saying the first thing that comes into our heads, damn the consequences. But as we grow into adulthood, we are taught to reign in those spontaneous thoughts (lest we be considered rude or, worse yet, a bit nuts) as we find our place in polite society. When you teach improv, you use various techniques to get people to avoid censoring themselves. You teach them to once again be free to share their thoughts.

In any event, this new student walked into my class, sans arm. I politely ignored commenting on it and didn’t consciously notice it any more. But my unconscious must have been working over time. “How did he lose his arm?” it must have been saying to me. “How does he manage?” “What’s it like?” And although I pride myself on being sensitive to my students' needs (and have successfully run a number of improv classes since 1987), I found myself making unconsciously insensitive remarks.

“You had one arm tied behind your back,” I said to another student in my comments after a scene he had done in which he put up an impediment to succeeding. After I said it, I realized that my new class member might find the remark in bad taste. I made a few other off-key comments, and at the end of class I talked to him about the good work he had done, encouraging him to come back. I also apologized for the brief comments that I thought might have bothered him.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said, jokingly adding, “It was rough, but I can take it.”

I vowed to myself that I would do better, and one week later, when I was walking to class, I ran into my one-armed student. He was limping.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.

“No, I screwed in my leg wrong,” he replied matter-of-factly.

I smiled wanly. His leg missing? And Mr. Sensitive Improv Teacher commented on it?

It was going to be one of those nights.

The happy ending to this tale of insensitivity was that the young man whom I had so abused (and amused) went on to take my classes for years, and even ended up in my performance class and in my  Sunday Night Improv comedy jam. And when he performed, he was terrific. But at one show, my father, in the audience, noticed that his fellow performers would often do scenes about people losing limbs and other body parts. When he commented on this phenomenon to me, I explained it was the nature of spontaneity, and the more you tried to staunch it, the more it would surface. Not unlike the so-called "Pink Elephant" syndrome. "Don't think about pink elephants," you tell a person. Then, of course, all he can think about is pink elephants.

Improvisers at jam.

My father, naturally, didn't listen to me (do fathers ever heed the warnings of their offspring?), and the next week, when my student came to watch the show,  my dad went backstage and warned the cast of his presence. "Now be  careful what you say," he added as he left the dressing room. They all thanked him and promised to be sensitive, and even though I knew they all meant it, I shook my head in knowing despair. Sure enough, the performance that night could have been titled, "A Pink Elephant Showcase for the Unconscious at Work." Indeed, not since the French Revolution have there been so many scenes of people getting arms hacked off, heads guillotined, and other acts of de-limbification. The moral of the stoy: leave well enough alone.

A footnote: a few years later, I had a student who suffered from multiple sclerosis. He was confined to  a wheelchair, and he was very funny, often using the chair – and his condition – as the basis for humor. Not knowing this when we first met, however, I spoke with him before his initial class about how to refer to his condition.

I brought the matter up, I explained to him, only because of an experience I had had as a writer at Habitat magazine, interviewing someone in the mayor’s office for the handicapped for a story I was writing. “Do the handicapped…” I had begun to say to the mayor’s rep before he had cut me off. “Don’t use the word, ‘handicapped,’" he had warned. “It’s negative. It puts a negative spin on their condition.”

I had tried again. “Do the disabled…”

“Don’t use the word, ‘disabled,’ he had warned once more. ‘It’s negative, too. It puts a negative spin on their condition.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I suggest ‘physically challenged’ or, better yet, ‘people with disabilities.’”

I could see that phrase smoothly fitting into a story. Nonetheless, I realized people were sensitive and that words do matter. So, I had complied, and now in my improv class with my MS-afflicted student, I asked him, “What should I call you?”

He paused, as though thinking deeply, and then, with exquiste comic timing, replied: “Call me a cripple, Tom.” He laughed uproariously and we were students of each other for many years thereafter. 

 August 25, 2010

Workshops

We offer workshops every Sunday night at 5:30 P.M., Monday night at 7 P.M., and Wednesday at 6:30 P.M. at the Soter/Lee Blackbox, 236 West 78th Street (212-353-7716). What will you learn? Take a look at the section below or go to our home page.

To contact us with questions, comments, or suggestions, write sundaynightimprov@earthlink.net, or call 212-353-7716.

NEW YEAR'S RATE:
COLLEGE STUDENTS (WITH CURRENT I.D.) $15 A CLASS!

FAST AND FUNNY IMPROV
An ongoing drop-in class, for anyone who wants a quick tour of the improv world. The class, for all levels, features performers from the cast of Sunday Night Improv. You can do scenes with veteran improv performers – and then stay and see them perform in Sunday Night Improv! Class fee includes a ticket to that night's performance of SNI.
Time: Sunday, 5:30-6:30 P.M.
Location: Soter/Lee Blackbox 236 West 78th Street
Fee: $10 per class; fee includes ticket to performance of Sunday Night ImprovInstructor: Tom Soter

  Teacher: Tom Soter in 2008. 

  IMPROV FOR EVERYONE
An ongoing drop-in class, focusing on how to create improvised scenes and stories. Students are taught the basics of good scene work in a supportive environment.
Time: Monday, 7-9 P.M.
Location: Soter/Lee Blackbox 236 West 78th Street
Fee: $25 per class; $225 for ten classes
Instructor: Tom Soter 

  IMPROV FOR EVERYONE 2 Chicago City Limits alumnus Carl Kissin and SNI producer Tom Soter offer more techniques for improvised comedy.  Time: Wednesday, 6:30-9 P.M.
Location: Soter/Lee Blackbox 236 West 78th Street
Fee: $30 per class; $325 for ten classes
Instructors (alternating): Carl\Kissin, Tom Soter

CORPORATE WORKSHOPS

Carl Kissin

We also offer corporate workshops. Call/e-mail for more information.
"Our design department's Improv 'theory & practice' sessions with Tom Soter were a remarkable experience for all of us. Over a two week period, the NY Design Department at kpe engaged in theatrical improvisation seminars. Having now experienced these improv sessions for myself, I realized all over again that we've got a really amazing group of individuals here - sharp, spontaneous, thoughtful, ingenious. and, did I say creative? The excercises ranged from simple speaking to collaborative storyline generation. Tom Soter, the coach, designed this program especially for us to encompass the
challenges of the studio environment - presence, articulation, presentation, cooperation, communication. I recommend the improv approach to everyone. At the very least, I think that as a department, it 're-introduced' us to the qualities that make us a great team. thanks again, Tom!" – Scott Nazarian, executive, kpe advertising

THE ART OF
IMPROVISATION

By TOM SOTER