Finally, validation! For the past two months, I, along with others, have rehearsed a show for young audiences. It’s an adaptation of the story of the Golden Goose, and, if our first show last Friday is any measure, it is a resounding success.
1
May
Love of Learning
Learning is great. I love to learn. I do my best to consider every day an opportunity to learn something new. Sometimes I’m successful, and sometimes I’m not.
15
April
Wingin’ it
Last night, Saturday the 14th of April, Taichung Improv traveled to Hsinchu to perform at an intimate venue called Titty Tea. We played for about 2 hours in front of a packed house of about 60 people. And we were rocking!
One of the reasons I enjoy improv so much is because it is rooted in the imagination. It is all very much about pretending, creating a reality and believing in it. It’s such a relief to play, to let it all hang out, to act and be without judgment or concern for political correctness. It’s sponataneous and in the moment. It does have some meditation aspect. To do it well, all preconceived notions should be thrown out the window. It’s all very much about the now, about listening to what’s happening and allowing whatever comes to flow out into the world.
Last night, I was lucky enough to become a husband in a fight with his mother-in-law, a (different) husband trying to cope with his wife’s menopause, a baseball player (and then the whole baseball team), and finally, my favorite, an old English fortune teller named Madame Zelda.
There was also a dodge-ball player who arrived at the wrong convention and explained his profession in Finnish to an audience expecting to hear about the UN coalition for condom distribution. There was a pair of grave-diggers who exhumed their long-dead grandmother. Sarah Palin announced that she was a lesbian and having Cher’s baby. A singing psychologist helped his 3 singing patients. There was a slideshow from someone’s trip to Machu Picchu, a bus full of mimes, and a whole lot more.
If you’re interested in knowing more about Taichung Improv, check us out on Facebook.
13
April
Making Emotions
“He made me mad,” or “She makes me happy”, are common expressions in the English language. But is it true? Can anyone make you feel anything? I mean, outside the extreme cases of violence, can anyone make you feel some way, without your permission? We are constantly offering others the authority over our feelings, avoiding the responsibility of our emotional state.
28
March
Saving Face
The other day one of my Taiwanese friends was a little upset. I’m not going to go into how or why, but she was experiencing a time of grief when most people that I know would be experiencing grief. What I’m telling you is that how she was feeling would pass my standard as ‘normal.’
But the unusual part was that her current crisis was triggering something from her past, two previous stressful situations when she was told not to be upset. By her account, she was given a leeway, a certain amount of being upset, but once she passed some magical point, someone in an authority role would pretty much tell her to get over it. Without going into details, I assure you that both of these situations experienced as a child less than 12 were world-altering, paradigm-shifting. Pulling the metaphorical carpet of stability out from under her.
25
March
I have a clown.
I have a clown and sometimes, he is me. I don’t only mean that I’m silly and absurd. I mean that I’ve actually spent hard-earned money and a large amount of time learning how to have a clown. And I don’t mean balloon animals and face painting.
13
March
Girls or Women?
A few years ago, I noticed the strangest thing. I was referring to full-grown women as ‘girls.’ Not all the time, but definitely most of the time. I was uncomfortable with it for a while before I actually understood why I was uncomfortable. I’d have some discomfort when introducing my ‘girlfriend’ to friends and family. What 28 year old dates girls?
6
March
Life Lessons on the Road
I’ve wanted to write this post for years, long before I even started this blog, but for some reason, it’s never happened. Traveling, constantly reshuffling my life has taught me some valuable lessons that college never offered. At least, not in any way that was ever meaningful to me.
The world is not like I was told it was.
Well-meaning family members and newscasters spent years slowly describing a world full of danger to me. It happens all the time. It’s happening right now. This is probably one of the oldest fallacies, a symptom of the us vs. them mentality that often gets human beings into much trouble. For whatever reason, there was always a reason that Europe wasn’t as safe as the States or that South America was full of kidnapping drug-dealers or that Asia was full of…ninjas!
28
February
Do you remember Castaneda?
He wrote about a character named Don Juan, who claimed to be a man of knowledge, someone who sees and knows about the world more accurately than the common person. Although the work has effectively been debunked as an actual ethnographic text, and Castaneda was, at least in his later years, a complete nutter, I was always drawn to these books, primarily because I find indigenous spiritualities so interesting. Pretty much, I’ve always believed that there’s more to life than the physical, that human beings are inherently spiritual creatures. I was unsatisfied with my Christian upbringing and not only because of the controversial and sometimes hypocritical actions of the Church. Pretty much Christianity, as it’s mostly practiced today, is devoid of any real individual spiritual experiences and it’s the priests who act as the bridge between God and me. Screw that.
19
February
Taiwan National Lantern Festival in Lukang
It’s the Year of the Dragon, and somehow that’s a big deal, so much to cause a mini-baby boom. Every 12 years, there’s a spike in birth rates. Dragon babies are very popular, and, from what I’ve been told, the Dragon Lantern Festival is even more spectacular than the other animals of the zodiac. Every year, a different city hosts the Taiwan National Lantern Festival. This year, it was hosted in Lukang, the most traditional village on the island, and only a hop, skip, and a scooter ride from Taichung.
