Why don't people fill in availability polls?
It's one of improv's great mysteries.
A thing that’s working for me: Being better-than-average at admin
I was recently asked to guest with the brilliant improv group Michelle. I’m very grateful to have been asked and we did a fantastically bonkers performance set in The MotherFucking Dinosaur Museum. I had a lovely time playing a disgruntled gift shop employee, a sweary child, a reanimated velociraptor skeleton and a tuna sandwich.
Bonus: there was a reviewer in and the night got a 5* review.
How did I get this opportunity? Is it because I’m funny, a delight to work with and extremely modest to boot? YES to all three.
But I suspect there’s another crucial reason: I’m quite organised.
I keep a fairly up-to-date diary! I respond reasonably quickly to WhatsApp messages! This puts me in the top 20% of comedians.
The phrase ‘herding cats’ comes to mind whenever organising anything improv-related. People don’t fill in the availability polls! They don’t read their messages! They need to be chased for an answer and then frequently forget anyway! For me, organising other people is the most stressful thing about improv.
(Unlike performing stand-up, where my number one cause of stress was the ubiquity of sexual predators. So all-in-all I do not find improv that stressful.)
I should probably acknowledge that, as someone who doesn’t have ADHD, being better-than-average at admin comes a lot easier to me than it does to other people. What takes me five spoons might cost them fifty, and it’s worth being mindful of that.
I will say – purely from my own observations, which are biased, unscientific and don’t even come with the benefit of personal lived experience – that I find my ADHD friends to average out as the same level of organised as my non-ADHD friends.
My experience with my ADHD pals is that they *do* have a much tougher time staying organised, but that they’ve a) developed coping mechanisms around it and b) they’re very happy to be nudged and organised by others! And, also, sometimes they’re *super* organised.
This contrasts with my experience of neurotypical flakes who don’t seem that bothered when they drop the ball, because they didn’t really care that much anyway. But it means when I’m working on a project that I think they would be a really good fit for talent-wise, I’m much less inclined to want to include them because they’ve made the day-to-day grind such a hassle.
A thing I’m working on: Research!
As I’ve mentioned a mere 50 or 60 times or so, I’m writing a TV drama script set in 1830s Dundee. And when I say writing, I mean I’ve already done a pretty good first draft.
Now I need to go back and make it better in two main ways: make my protagonist more active, and make the setting a character in itself. As my protagonist is ostensibly a woman of little financial means and six children in 1830s Dundee, those two tasks really boil down to the same thing: research 1830s Dundee. What are her options given the historical context? OnlyFans won’t be invented for another 180 years.
But my protagonist is not the only character. I’ve got two doctors within the first episode – a whaling ship’s surgeon and a pathologist conducting an autopsy.
So I’ve been off to the Hunterian Museum to find out more.
What tools would a whaling ship’s surgeon have used? Not anaesthesia, it wasn’t invented yet. How would have a pathologist have approached a fresh corpse? With relish – the Anatomy Act allowing dissections of cadavers other than the corpses of executed murderers had only been passed two years prior. Demand was so enormous graverobbing was commonplace.
Also: did you know that in medieval times, surgeons were also barbers? If you can cut hair, you can cut a leg. That’s not a useful fact for my script, but it’s still interesting.
A thing I’m enjoying: Bob’s Burgers
It’s just finished its sixteenth series and I’m just gonna say it: pound-for-pound, it’s the best animated series of all time. Are there better South Park and Simpsons episodes? Sure. Have there been better South Park or Simpsons series in the past ten years? No.
Did I do the thing from before to build connections? YES
Progress on my website is glacial but that still counts as progress.
A thing I’m doing to build connections: Doing The Free Association’s Level 3 Intensive
Courses are (obviously) great places to learn, but they’re also great places to build connections. Looking forward to four days of face-to-face learning in The Free Association’s gorgeous new space.