Tag Archives: improv comedy

She Will Grow on Laughter

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

When my mother was pregnant with my older sister, she was a visiting nurse. She drove around Aurora, Illinois in her blue Plymouth Horizon, stopping at the Dairy Queen drive through on the way home from work. She’d slurp banana milk shakes while listening to the instrumental theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.

While pregnant with me, she chased around my toddling sister. She exercised weekly at a local Christian workout class called “Believercise.” That is, until mom lunged too far, causing significant bleeding; the doctor ordered at least a week of bedrest. She had to pee in a bucket, another reason she’s the best mom of all time. In her third trimester, she survived summer days by scarfing down dripping slices of watermelon, a fruit I still consider to be one of my favorites.

There’s something sacred and terrifying about the way babies go wherever their mothers go. They eat the same foods, hear the same noises, and even pump the same blood. They can benefit or be harmed from the womb they inhabit, which is why pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat Subway or drink cocktails. Now that I’m pregnant, I worry my tiny has been anchored to a sinking ship.

You see, I’m not the best at being pregnant.  

For half my pregnancy, my body rejected prenatal vitamins. I either vomited them up in fits of sweats and shivers, or they seared my esophagus with heartburn, fighting their way down the digestive tract. Everyone offered solutions, chewables, more organic options, and even a liquid green sludge that needed chased down with orange juice, but all produced the same result.

My first trimester, I survived on a diet of brown sugar Pop Tarts and Barq’s root beer. When I tried to joke with others about my nutrition free diet, they looked at me like a candidate for a morning talk show featuring teen moms who aren’t fit to be mothers. Giving nervous laughs, their countenance seemed to ask, “should you be joking about this?”IMG_1291

People ask if I’m excited, and I choke out the right kinds of answers. When I was younger, I pictured myself wearing pregnancy like a veil of honor, rosy cheeks and a delightful little bump showing under a flowy peasant blouse, but it turns out, I’m not the glowing kind of pregnant.

Some days I’m a nauseous, sweaty animal, sprouting a new layer of acne on my back; on these days, it’s hard to put how I feel into a pleasant statement. Instead, I lead with my signature defensive humor and make offhand comments about the anti-depressants that I continue to take while pregnant. “I would drink an occasional glass of wine, but I figure the baby already gets the Zoloft,” I say with a wink and a nudge.

This punchline hangs in the air for a few moments of painful silence before I try to reel it back in, “but you know, the doctors are monitoring the baby, and I got a special ultrasound, and…” This is when the nice person who asked me about how I’m feeling smiles through anxious eyes and clenched teeth, nodding their head to try and keep things polite.

But among all the things that I know I’m already doing wrong as a mother, I’ve come to enjoy bringing the baby to the places I go. I may not do great with leafy green veggies, but my baby will grow on laughter.

My baby’s momma is a comedian. I perform in Chicago as a comedic improviser, staging twenty five minute pieces with seven to nine teammates. My three teams perform at several different theatres around the city, which averages out to two or three shows a week.IMG_2428

I take her with me to the bar for a drink with my teammates after a tough show with low audience attendance, trading in my gin and tonics for Shirley Temples and diet Roy Rogers. She gets the consoling pats on the back my castmates offer me, and I imagine they reverberate through my body and hit her like a wave of Vitamin D.

I take her on the stage to the sound of a quickening slow clap, which she must think is for her. Receiving biweekly applause has to be good for brain development. She goes with me into rehearsal rooms where we shriek, snort, and guffaw at each other’s moves. She’s the unseen tenth player on stage, kicking to be noticed during my scene work. I often hold my belly when I laugh, as if to make sure we’re both awake to the blessing of these joy filled spaces.

She is with me when we’re the only women on stage. As my body changes to hold her growing form, we shapeshift into diverse characters with their own points of view and treasure troves of specifics. On one night, I played a petite daughter stowed away in her father’s suitcase. I crouched low, tightening my body into a ball to simulate the cramped quarters and the baby tucked in to the warm curve of my body.

When I worry about the way my depression must seep into the womb, tears dripping through the umbilical cord and sorrow carried through my bloodstream, I revel in a night where I’m out late at a cabaret table, watching my heroes and friends on stage. Many of us are deeply sad people, but for a night, we are artists and poets who have discovered the hilarious underbelly to the tragedy.

So I’m glad  that as my baby grows to the size of various vegetables, that she is growing up with laughter, that her adopted aunts and uncles are some of the funniest people in Chicago.

When I fail in so many ways that I lose count, I know the baby must know well the vibrations of her mama’s laughter, punctuated with my drawn out snorts and the fog horn blats I let out when laughter catches me unexpectedly.

I cherish this special time when I take the stage with a tiny teammate. As my friends and I wait in the wings to make our entrance, we participate in the ritual of assuring one another, we’ve got each other’s backs. I place my palms over my growing belly and say to my girl, “We’ve got this WIlla.” Together we laugh and make others laugh, and for a moment in time, we have everything we need.

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Meredith-bio-YAH-1024x327

 

The Writing on the Stall

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

I am on the toilet, my black dress pants scrunched down around my ankles. I am not using the bathroom, but I want to keep up appearances. Or maybe de-pantsing is a reflex in bathroom stalls. I got up in the middle of improv class to check a missed call and voicemail from an unknown number on my phone.

If it’s someone from the Playground Theatre, I will be ecstatic. If it’s an automated message from the teacher’s union or my bank, I will probably crumple up and die on the bathroom floor, or at least, that’s what I am thinking in this moment. I take a deep breath and read the sharpie on the wall:

“Your jokes are better the more you love yourself.”IMG_0933

Many times in this stall I had repeated those words to myself, penance for plodding onto stage with cement feet and pandering for the approval of my classmates. The stall served as my place to recover from wounds on and off the stage.

Someone had sharpied this phrase on the stall door, right at my eye level. The stalls in the girls bathroom were covered with pen and sharpie graffiti, but those words always grabbed my attention first, usually with prophetic timing.

The stall sat in the far corner of the Del Close Theatre in the old iO building, the place I fell in love with and learned longform improvisational comedy. I started taking classes in 2010, somewhere in the depressive stupor of a difficult breakup. The place felt like a speakeasy for quirky folks–dingy, dark, and cramped. It did not provide a home for shiny-polished things, but a fertile ground for magic.

IMG_0932The iO building was located at 3541 North Clark, kitty-corner from Wrigley Field. It was not the ideal place for a theater. To get there, I nudged my way through Chicago Cubs foot traffic and mobs of bros who reminded me of my ex-boyfriend. I’d snake between cooing street vendors offering tickets from their back pockets and water bottles from blue coolers.

When I arrived at the theatre, purified by the incense clouds of cigarette smoke, I got swallowed into the crowd gathered in the lobby. I always think of people piling into that building; the walls pushed in on us and narrowed the margins between our bodies, teaching us to come together in the way tall ceilinged cathedrals invite visitors to crane their necks to the heavens. The building nudged us to huddle in, to listen to stories, and to perform in a way that made the audience lean forward and nod in recognition.

Before my graduation shows, our instructor counseled my class to walk on stage during the blackout so the lights went on as we entered, catching the momentum of our team moving forward onto the stage and into the light.IMG_0935

It was fitting advice for living too, after all, comedians are notoriously familiar with darkness of all kinds. We all tried so desperately to walk together into the light spaces, but the building held the darkness too, brightly painted blue walls and dark corners with ghost stories of depression and overdoses. There were nights when the building shook with laughter and others when it groaned from the weight of the heavy things we carried in our pockets.

My graduating class only got to perform three or four times at the theatre on Clark before the whole operation moved to Kingsbury street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. The new theatre building has potential, but it’s sterile and easier to get lost in with no cave paintings on the bathroom stalls.

I tried to alter my daydreams of playing on the stages of the old theatre, relocating them a couple miles south, but my mind’s eye is slow to catch on.

As they say, you can’t go back.

Right now, the old iO theatre sits as an empty relic on Clark street, waiting to be knocked down and made into a CVS, which isn’t even as good as a Walgreens.

Our theatre will be disposed of much like the shows we performed on its stages and in its classrooms, carefully constructed, lived in, worn out, and then demolished– a flash in the pan, utterly forgettable.  And yet, there were those nights–those glorious nights–that we carried the show out as a glowing gift only visible to those who gathered that night to listen to stories. Playing improv at the old iO theatre felt like performing near the earth’s core while the patron saints framed on the wall watched on.

When I think of a fitting end to that beloved blue building, I think of us pushing it out to sea, towards some heaven-like land, something Lord of the Rings-like, Gandalf being set loose towards an elvin heaven. I wish to baptize every nook and cranny as sacred ground, to annotate hallways and stairwells with my memories. But maybe the best I can do is to take all that the building taught me, and bring its lessons into new spaces, whose walls don’t yet whisper.

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IMG_1781“The Writing on the Stall” was written by Meredith Bazzoli (center with tank top, hands in pockets). Meredith has spent her whole life orbiting around Chicago and its suburbs. She currently resides just west of the city with her husband Drew, who grew up a hoosier. She never thought she could marry one of those. Meredith writes, performs improv comedy, and teaches in West Garfield Park (all stories for another day). She seeks to start conversations about the life we stuff under the bed and keep off our Instagram feeds.