It was December of 1989 when I walked into my first improv class. A friend from the Bay Area was visiting us, and she escorted me to that first class after I revealed that I was too intimidated to go by myself. The class had just started and was being run by a player from the Improv Team Kahoots. I’d seen them perform several times in Santa Barbara (it was a local team made up of folks who lived in the area), and I LOVED them as well as this crazy style of theater that was performed without a script. Even Saturday Night Live used scripts, which was how I had even heard the term improv. Remember, Whose Line Is It Anyway? wasn’t around at the time. Technically it had already started as a radio show in the UK, but it wasn’t known in the US. This improvised theater was still a new thing, and finding performances outside of the major markets was not easy.
Luckily, this friend had already taken some classes in San Francisco, and so when I told her how much I’d enjoyed Kahoots and shyly mentioned that they had started teaching a class, she insisted we go that night. And so on a dark Wednesday evening in December of 1989 I walked into a cavernous warehouse space on Chapala Street right next to the downtown Ralph’s (although that Ralph’s hadn’t been built at the time - it was just a big, empty lot on the corner of Chapala and Carrillo)
The instructors were Matt Ingersol, a member Kahoots and an actor in local theater, and a woman whose name I’ve since forgotten. There were less than 10 of us, and …
I LOVED IT!
It was hard, emotional, rewarding, and interactive in a way that I hadn’t ever experienced. I was a science-y computer engineer who had grown up on the Batman TV show, the original Star Trek, and seen the entire Star Wars trilogy dozens of times: a classic, socially awkward nerd. The idea of being up on stage in front of an audience was scary, interacting with other actors was mind boggling, and not knowing what I was going to do or say in advance was … intoxicating. I was hooked, and it is not hyperbolic when I say it has changed by life.
I don’t want to make these blog posts too long, so I’ll end this one here. I plan on periodically posting stories, thoughts, and perspectives about improv now that I’ve seen it in the 90’s, the 00’s, and the teens. I continue to learn a lot, and am anxious to see what the 2020’s will bring, but I’ve become reflective in my dotage. I have a platform to pontificate from (even if it’s for my own amusement), so I’ll take a few moments from time to time to see what my rusty old brain can regurgitate.
BTW, the picture is probably from 1991, during the reign of our second instructor, Sharon K. Bettis. I’ll tell stories of that time in another post. That’s me in the upper right, and you should be able to make out at least one other familiar face in that photo.