Not Bad

Last night I had a decent improv show. The whole day was interesting. There had been an incident near the apartment. A guy with a gun had led police on a high speed chase and holed up in a house a little over half a mile way, and so the neighborhood was a little on edge. The matter was resolved in a matter of a couple hours, but jangled nerves healed slowly. This was some concern, since the location of the show was even nearer to where things had happened than my home.

As it was, one would not have known anything about it, as normally as the show proceeded. It was a student showcase, and several classes at lower levels went very nicely before it was the turn of my own. My roommate as well as other friends and acquaintances handled themselves nicely. I admit that I have some difficulty in paying much attention, and we typically have to miss some of the action while warming up for our own performance, but the other classes did well.

I found myself the de facto leader, which is not my most comfortable role, not that this called for some Moses-level leadership. I spent some time trying to communicate with the other team members and form back up plans should one fail to make it in. The people we were supposed to have showed up, we warmed up, and we were ready. The last thing I said to them was "equal status". The type of show we were doing works best if everyone is on the same level, with no one being a boss or a goat.

The first thing I did after we started (with a hard-earned suggestion of "White House") was to make myself the president. There's no decision I could have made that would be more antithetical to the idea of maintaining equal status, although my teammates might have made it right by making themselves other world leaders. I didn't think of that either, but what did develop salvaged the situation as well. I proved to be a rather hapless, strangely ill-informed president, and the whole thing went fairly well (so much so that I was amenable to hanging out after).