On Baskets and The Eggs That Fill Them

Three weeks, eh? Well, I hope you've all properly absorbed that long love-blog about Munich. At least it's not a one-eyed kitten.

Are you ever afraid of putting all your eggs in one basket? I am. I'm neurotically anxious about investing too much emotional involvement into one project (don't worry, Kristen, you're not a "project"). Improv, for one. I'm still spending 10 hours a week improvising in some form and another 50 mulling over past scenes, conceiving hypothetical scenes, reading message boards and books, and yet I'm completely unwilling to admit to myself that I want to participate in improvisational theatre for life. Why? Because I'm afraid I'll fail at it. More specifically, I'm afraid of confessing to my friends and my family about how devoted I am to it, for fear there will come a time when I'm forced to give up and everyone will acknowledge the irony of all my past enthusiasm, recognizing that, undeniably, I failed.

And improv is important to me, but it's by no means my only basket. I have a dozen baskets representing goals, aspirations, and future plans, but by no means do any of them hold more than one or two emotional-metaphorical eggs. With so many baskets, I can play one off the other, so that when I drop one basket, I can select another and say, "Sure I failed, but this basket was always so much more meaningful to me anyways!"

But right now I want to point to playwriting, a relatively new basket, and talk about this play I read for my class yesterday afternoon. Everyone in the class already knew what they wanted to write about, stuff about "Issues" like loss and abortion and Reallife, but I had absolutely no clue what my project was going to be, so a couple of days before the proposal was due I just started writing about whatever I had on my desk, which happened to be the new Space Pen I'd gotten for Christmas.



Then pen is a space pen because it can write upside down or in extreme heat or cold. But it's a play about the guy who came to NASA and offered to build them this pen, and I expanded the real story by fictionalizing a history wherein the space pen inventor is invited to go in space with the Apollo astronauts and demonstrate his space pen as a PR event, but he makes problems when he declares that the first words he plans to write in space will be a Bible verse. And I've been structuring some scenes to be improvised, scenes where performers have to work out math problems on stage or hold a press conference where the audience asks questions and it's all very Neo-Futurist and Second City and even The Computer Who Wore Flat-Soled Pumas (a show at Dad's Garage), and also very messy and confused with itself and stilted. And I read the first scenes in class yesterday, and people laughed when I was explaining the premise, but when the dialogue was read all I heard was a lot of heavy breathing, capped by some very vague notes from the instructor ("You've outlined the rest of the plot, yes?"). And I came home that afternoon feeling all sulky about it, and running the dialogue through my head all night, and I still felt sulky this morning, but now I'm writing about it and I realize, shucks, I like, not love, but really like the idea behind this play, and as an audience member I'd immediately want to go see it, so this time I'm going to fill this basket with easter eggs and at the end of the quarter just throw the damn thing down a flight of stairs and see what happens.

Other baskets on the schedule today include aforementioned improv basket (Playground rehearsal), English major basket (see Art Institute exhibit for class), and Law basket (see American constitution lecture at Newberry Library). For some reason, the maintenance of these baskets requires a lot of CTA fare.

Oh yeah. . . SPOOKY GOOD BASKET!