I Love Nights Like This

And this is what I mean…

So tonight at the wonderful household of Al-Chri-Treyz, we had a dinner guest, Greg C., who is a regular dinner guest at our place. Greg C. is also an actor at NSD. Chrissy was absent tonight because of a workshop she went to, so no begrudging towards her.

Anyway, what transpired was… cosmic.

We made dinner (a lovely meal of wheat pasta, sauteed veggies, jalepeno sausage and garlic bread… all accompanied with wine) just fine. It was nice.

The three of us (Greg C, Alex G, and me) then sat around the table and I asked them how their days were at school. Which is mostly a valid question because I only see either of them for 3.5 of 11 hours on Thursdays at NSD. What happened next became a family meal where Alex and Greg were siblings and I was their Long/Staten Island mother (we’re generally very gender neutral in our household improvs).

There were some real gems in our moments that we had. The kids had a great sibling rivalry going and I was kind of a stuff mom figure. We all had great, obnoxious accents. It’s actually very hard to relay everything that happened in a 20-30 minute timespan and make it real for the people reading this. So I’ll just give highlights.

Best line of the night:
Trey to Greg: “I am not paying $55,000 a year for you to convert oxygen into carbon monoxide.”

But in all truthiness, I loved this evening because for those thirty minutes the three of us were completely committed to our characters that were created through the improv. We basically threw stuff out to the other diners… and we ran with it! Because we had a trusting group and we were all willing to continue with what the others had given us. And we weren’t trying to one up each other.

So basically, we enacted tonight what all of our teachers have been telling us: have a free an open instrument and just go with what has been given you, because then the truth comes out and life happens… and everyone has a good time.

That’s all. Next time, we’ll have a video camera or a playwright. Then you can watch/read.