Sophomore Slump

 

I can’t say I really know the song “I Never Do Anything Twice” by Stephen Sondheim, but I do remember hearing it when I was 23 and living in New York and understanding, maybe for the first time, the humor of a double entendre.

Once, yes, once for a lark/Twice, though, loses the spark/One must never deny it/But after you try it you vary the diet…

 I hope I’d heard the term double entendre before I’d heard that song, but it’s entirely possible I hadn’t.  This brings me to the Whorfian hypothesis, that discredited notion that language determines perception, that people can’t conceive of things for which they lack the vocabulary.  The Eskimo people got dragged into this debate–and clumped into a single language group–because Whorf (and Sapir, uncredited) said Eskimo people experience snow differently insofar as they have a much more refined and extensive vocabulary for snow.  They have specific words for the first snow of the season, the snow after a rain storm, the snow that portends an early spring. This linguistic precision allows them to see the world differently from those of us in Minnesota who just see snow.

So, if I lacked the word for a double entendre, then Whorf  posits that I’d never understand one, that I’d remain forever a corn dog, and that I’d continue to do things more than once instead of learning from Sondheim’s song that it’s best to relish the experience and then move on before time and repetition dull the blade.

I had my second rehearsal with my new improvisers tonight.  It was tough. If I’d left after Wednesday’s workshop they would have thought that improv was fun and liberating and easy.  Tonight I showed them that it can be hard.  Our show is in 48 hours, and so I leapt into scene work before I’d really emphasized the fundamentals.  Shoot.  Here they are when improv still seemed new:

There is no “after” picture because the sun set and hope faded. Yes, I exaggerate, but the second time for any class, in my experience, is always a bit of a drag. The excitement is blunted and habits already start asserting themselves. I tend to rush things for fear of losing the students’ attention. My old stories get louder to make sure I haven’t forgotten them (“they’ll think this is too easy”; “they’ll think this is too hard”; “I don’t know what I’m doing”). We all get to taste the struggle that goes with anything worthwhile.

Of course, it’s the struggle that makes us stronger (stop me if you’ve heard that before), the repetition that helps us dig deeper to find new ways to keep things fresh.  I know what tired old slushy snow looks like, how it is like a dirt slurpy, how it’s like a metaphor for the second time even if some of us don’t have a specific word for it.

And yet.  And yet.

We say in improv that everything is a gift, even this deflated balloon feeling. There is a lot to learn, especially in the grist-for-the-mill classes.  My students felt the silence of the joke that didn’t land (and the fact that jokes, in improv, shouldn’t land; quit planning!). They learned the cul-de-sac quality of scenes where everyone is drunk or high and that playing intoxicated on stage to justify slurry choices doesn’t give you a whole lot to work with. They saw that scatological humor shouldn’t be funny, but somehow transcends culture and language and age and race:

I got to ask myself, again, what the value might be in teaching improv.  It’s a good question.

And so I’ll need to recalibrate and trust that doing things twice is necessary. This group did do some eye-opening work for this American corndog. We had scenes about revenge and polygamy and ballroom dancing and erotic uses for cooking oil (I am in Pakistan.  I am in Pakistan) and phallocentric building codes that served the purpose of a sadistic state.  A quantum physicist did the Michael Jackson moon walk to demonstrate that life isn’t linear.  Why am I complaining?

I had lunch this afternoon with a Pakistani friend-of-a-friend (lots of hyphens today). He was a wonderful conversationalist; we talked about Urdu and the Pakistani press and cultural misperceptions and xenophobic myopathy and why political trauma can be necessary because, hard as it is, it shows us where our fault lines are and how deep they really run.  The food was Persian (hello, Laressa and Ali and Edie!) and completely satisfying. Here’s a photo of my placemat:

And here’s an art nouveau illustration from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam to make up for the earlier picture, the one above the champagne: