Sarah drove up from Chicago to join us at the cottage.
At night we went out into the pitch dark to look up at the sky.
Sarah: STARS!
It was nice, but also a little scary. We're both city folk and frightened by the sounds of the woods. At one point my stomach rumbled and Sarah jumped, thinking for a moment there was a wild animal behind us, ready to attack.
A pontoon ride around the lake.
Dad: Over there's where my brother Pat almost drowned. He was maybe six or eight. They pulled him out and he wasn't breathing. My Dad and my Uncle tried the old Navy resuscitation method, where you just pull their arms up and back behind them. A woman stopped her car on the road and said, "It's no use. That boy's dead." I'll never forget that. Finally someone said, "They're saying now you're supposed to try to blow in their mouth." Most people didn't know about CPR back then. Eventually they got him to throw up and start breathing.
I've heard this story dozens of time but it always spooks me out. Sherry and I have always been swimming pool kids, more than a little nervous about natural bodies of water.
Dad: After we got back to Ohio, my first day back, I was at the swimming pool and they dragged a dead kid off the bottom. I'll tell ya... put me off swimming for a while.
Wisconsin. Dad and Sherry decided to take a trip up to my grandparents old cottage in Shantytown. They stopped in Chicago and picked me up along the way.
Dad pointed out various historic family sites along the road on the way up. He always tells the same stories and we always enjoy them. "Your grandfather was stationed there before shipping out to the Pacific. He met your grandmother here and when he came back from the war, they got married."
You can chart at least three generations of family history along that drive to the cottage. Grandma Dottie grew up in Shantytown. After getting married, her and Paul and their (eventually) nine sons would vacation up there every summer. "Somehow we all fit in the station wagon with our luggage towed behind us. I remember the first time we saw a McDonalds. That was something."
As my Dad and his eight brothers grew up they started taking their own new families up to that same cottage every summer. Every weekend another group, or a couple groups at the same time. A new generation of road stories.
Sherry: I remember how exciting it always was to see the fast food places that were right ON the overpass, hanging over the highway. That seemed like the most exciting thing in the world.
Grandma Dottie passed away, and Grandpa Paul is too old to spend much time in Wisconsin, let alone a remote cottage. One of the son's took it over and decided to fix it up. This is the first time I've seen the renovations.
Dad: It's not exactly a cottage anymore is it?
Sherry: It's at least three times bigger than it used to me.
If you look at the picture, the farthest to the left house-shaped lump is what the cottage used to be. Now there's a garage and five bedrooms. My aunt Ginny who lives down the road said, "We don't call it the cottage anymore. We call it the palace."
My cousin, Brad, is at the cottage this weekend working on some of the final touches.
Brad: Two years ago when we were getting ready to start building we brought out a surveyor to make sure just where the land starts and ends. [waving his arm in front of the porch] It ended here. The whole cottage was built on someone else's land.
Warming up before a Diplomat Motel show.
While we were all talking, someone in the group (I think maybe it was Tristan) lifted up their pant leg for some reason. Without discussing it or drawing much attention to it, by the end of warming up we had all pulled one leg up.
There are endless different warming-up exercises. Some are vocal. Some are very physical. Some are just excuses to stand around and take turns making each other laugh.
Sometimes an exercise will become popular and suddenly every team is doing it. For a few weeks everyone seemed to be warming up with a game called Fred Schneider. You all stand in a circle and sing, "Hey, Fred Schneider, what are you doing?" Then each person takes a turn responding in their best Fred Schneider from 'Love Shack' voice, yelling something comically mundane like, "DELETING SHOWS FROM MY TIVO.... I'M NEVER GONNA WATCH."
Fun warm-ups spread pretty fast. One week someone says, "Let's try this new one I heard about, Fred Schneider." The next week you notice all the teams in the alley behind iO are doing it. (I guess they spread far and wide. A few weeks back when I read that list of jokes on an LA message board about the SUV crashing into iO West, one of them was, "Hey Fred Schneider, what are you doing?") Then, just as quickly, everyone stops, because, you know, everyone's doing it.
I think the best warm-ups, though, are the ones that just sort of happen and have no rules. Like the pants leg thing.
In that spirit, I've invented a new warm-up game. Actually it's more of a game to lay on top of other games.
Months ago, before a show, one of the members of Diplomat Motel said, "Before we warm up, I have to leave right after the show... I've got a date.... And if it goes as well as the last date... I think I'm going to do a little making out tonight!" We all responded with catcalls and general way-to-gos! Then during our warm-up, everything ended up being about that cast members up-coming make-out session. As if their good news was the suggestion for our warm-up.
So here's my new exercise. It's called Good News. Before you warm up, someone announce some good news. "Hey, good news everybody..." It can be real. It can be made up. Incorporate the news into whatever regular warm-up you do, celebrating that good news. There are no rules beyond that. Make it up together as you go.
Let me know how it works out.
[Warning: I'm not responsible for this leading to you having a shitty show. But I will take some credit for good shows. ]
I almost forgot I wanted to post this picture from the ComedySportz Award Banquet after-party.
Martin: I didn't win any award. I wasn't nominated in any category. But I accepted an award for [someone who wasn't there] and walked around with it all night aggressively and dickishly showing it off like it was mine.
I had a nice time at the banquet but since then I figured out why I (as far as I could tell) was the only non-ComedySportz-performing significant-other that showed up. I found out that Sarah had to pay $40 so that I could come along. Youch.
Glynn records the first act of the Whirled News show (most) every week and then posts them online as a podcast. He uses this Olympus recorder.
Somehow, though, between the show this Saturday and getting home, he lost the recorder.
Glynn: I called the bar, called the CTA and even put a reward ad on the lost-and-found section of Craigslist but, so far, no response. I'd like to at least blame a late night of boozing but this particular night I was home in bed by 12:30. Chin has been really cool about the whole thing and I'm sure it's no huge blow to the cast, but I've felt like a huge jerk about it since Saturday.
So, somewhere out there, a handheld recorder is floating around holding the only file of what will from now on be known as "Whirled News: The Lost Episode."
Sarah and I went to to birthday BBQ for several improvisers last night.
We ended up playing several rounds of a game where two golf balls attached by rope are thrown at a three rung PVC pipe stand. I played it last summer during a cabin trip. We didn't know what it was called then so we gave it various different testicle-themed names like Dangle Balls, Sling Sacs and Drape Nuts. Everyone at tonight's party called it Donkey Balls.
Twice the balls got stuck up in a tree.
By the time we got tired of Donkey Balls, we joined a group of people sitting around a picnic table playing a game where you'd combine the plots of two movies and everyone would have to guess the overlapping title. For example, "Hey, have any of you seen the movie where the elephant keeps thinking it can hear the sound of a tiny Indiana high school basketball team?" And the answer would be, "Horton Hears a Hoosiers."
[This is actually very similar to a game concept (and short lived TV game show) that Jellyvision developed years and years ago called SMUSH]
This may seem like a painfully nerdy thing to do, but drinking some beers and making pop culture wordplay jokes sounds pretty great to me.
Here are a few more:
"Hey, does anyone remember that Stephen King novel where a bunch of guys go camping and an alien crawls up their butts, taking over their minds making them wear hunting caps and think everyone around them are 'phonies'?"
and
"What was the name of that movie where the fish loses his son and while looking for him becomes a successful jazz trumpeter? I think it was directed by Spike Lee."
Whirled News members (and I'm guessing several other performers) had to fill out extra paperwork and bring in a passport or social security card and ID if they make any independent contractor money through iO.
Apparently it's a new Homeland Security thing.
Chin: It would be a brilliant plot for some terrorists to disguise themselves as a traveling improv comedy troupe.
After my Diplomat Motel show I went out for some drinks with Sarah and Meador.
Meador: I cleaned my first calostomy bag today. It was the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life. And I keep smelling it now, everywhere.
Sarah and I talked Meador into staying out and having a few more beers than he'd originally intended. Part of the deal was that we'd go to this underground bar called the Dugout, that none of us had been to before.
Meador: I've always been curious to go in there.
Me: It's really because its right next to the L isn't it?
Meador: Was it that obvious?
