Summary of Improv Goals 016

At the Roving Imp Training Center, John is creative director, in both title and nuisance, and challenges all of us to keep an improv journal, which I have doing, but only recently. In class on Tuesday, “Yes, and ...”, agreeing with the premise and adding to the scene with a new detail, and listening, hearing with understanding of the most important thing said, were kept in focus.

I have since forgotten some scenes, and the quality of my listening sure varies. Because I really, really want to tell another story, I am going to start with an example from my friend Denton from last night.

Having accumulated more than 200,000 miles, his car has been having problems, so I agreed to follow Denton as he drove to our mutual friend Sam’s house, and give him a ride back home; that is our basic premise.

When I asked Denton about the route,
he said, “We’ll see how it goes.”

I think that I recognized that we could need to stop, but I was still somewhat baffled when we did not immediately leave QuikTrip after he returned outside; we had stopped to let the car cool.

I asked a question about which of the two ways we were going to leave the station: east to Marty or west to Foster.

“Well, Sam’s house is north; we’re not going back south.”

With that clarifying detail, we were soon rolling again, and arrived at Sam’s house without incident. Returning to Denton’s house, we even had a call-back to when I drove him to the Capitol in Topeka.

Last Thursday, he and I were returning to Kansas City on Interstate 70. I thought that I saw an emergency vehicle. I worked my way over to the right to stop, but no one else was, and I finally had to exit. All the time, Denton asked me what I was doing, especially after the flashing lights were just from a loaded, flat-bed truck.

The interchange between I-435 and I-70 in Kansas City, Kansas is a cloverleaf, and Denton observed that we would now be going north, but I was insistent: if we took all the curves, then we would end up back on eastbound I-70 to I-635 and Metcalf as he wished.

Following three of the four loops, we soon both saw that this technique had a flaw: improvements had removed the fourth loop, so we were suck going south on I-435.

To which I quipped, “Shawnee Mission Parkway
is a better route anyway, not so perfect.”

Source: The Great and Powerful Trixie (FiM)

OK OK OK, The Hub are rebroadcasting episodes from season three of Transformers: Generation 1, from which I paraphrased the above, and I used again in a similar context. Denton and I were soon talking about the Dinobots.

I do now recall one of my scenes at the Roving Imp from class Tuesday night. I did not hear Frank, so I asked whether he said liar or lawyer, and this helped the scene.