rocky top

this whole week, i have been in the mountains of appalachia.

joey, heather and i made the 11 hour road trip last sunday morning to southwest virginia. joey and i are teaching here at the community's MAD camp - music, arts, and drama - to the kids of the surrounding area. the camp comes but once a year, and the kids (ranging in age from 8 to 14, in three levels) travel from up to two hours away in the mountains to get to the community school we teach at each day.

since we are mainly improvisers, we've taken a real shine to generally teaching them the lessons of acting in improv. these kids are blown away by improv and love it; on day one, we tell them nothing they say can be wrong, and not much more could put you at ease in the world.

we face some difficulties, though - kids having to travel so far, those who are home-schooled and haven't dealt with ever leaving their parents - camp or otherwise... general shyness, lots of that sort of thing. for the most part, though, the kids are on top of it and ready to play, and the rest is cake from there.

joey and i have become obsessed with a few of the campers. i just realized that maybe they could find this blog, so i won't say who... though, if you've heard us talk about this camp in real life, you probably know who. joey can do a spot-on imitation of about 50% of the people we've met here, and for that alone, he should be famous.

i'm going to write more when i have access back in chicago again. hang in there...

imagine tap

oh man.

in an effort to see more out there than just improv, robyn and i went to see a show at millenium park compliments of second city called Imagine Tap. pretty much imagine stomp/bring da noise, etc., with more tapping and a hip-hop battle. this show gave me everything i wanted, including the fantasy that by morning, i would be a perfect tapper.

i am signing up for tap lessons, stat.

pop-cultch

my friends erin, kat, and amber debut on the VH-1 show World Series of Pop Culture tonight.

all that improviser pop-culture "research" probably will pay off tonight. see, it's worth something knowing all this useless junk. please tune in! they could win 250,000!

dirty thirty

today is my thirtieth birthday.
last night, friend erin and i had a kickass birthday bash, and now i am on a gig in arizona. i'd love to be in chicago or columbus, but arizona is sunny and 99 degrees, and i am at a resort with nothing to do but sleep in the sunshine until tomorrow.

i think a lot of people wig out on their 30th. i wigged out last year, thinking it was the last year i had to do things right before the big 3-0. now that i'm here, i think that's insane. i feel younger than many years in my teens and twenties, and more excited about things than ever before.

thirty years.
there's not much in this world i don't feel thankful for.

kid fantasy/adult nightmare

on wednesday after the holiday weekend, several people from CSz went to six flags great america, about 35 miles outside of chicago. boy, it was a grand old time. we left around 10am and had high hopes for the holiday rush being over. we sure were right.

what was once a dream quickly became reality - and we realized that everything we had hoped for was right in our laps... a theme park with no lines. until about 6pm, everything we rode had maybe a 15 minute wait. that was nothing. bits flew in the lines we waited in, making those short waits even more bearable. we rode anything we could get our paws on, only breaking for quick, gross items served only on sticks and in funnel shapes, then taking a hiatus at the water park to cool off. at 7pm, we saw maybe the best thing ever created - a tribute to the stars performance that was REMARKABLY GOOD AND SIMULTANEOUSLY BAD, giving us a full day of everything we dreamed. at 8pm, though, it got even better. everyone, everyone - they all left the park. we went back to the raging bull and rode it within 5 minutes. we then sprinted to batman, rode in the first car, and returned to the station. upon return, we realized there was no line. do you guys want to go again?, the 6 flags operators asked, and we excitedly screamed yes. we went on three times in a row until we almost gagged on our own giddyness and vomited from concussions. we closed the night out with the superman ride, a coaster that suspends you horizontally to the ground. this bad boy threw us all over the edge.

we stumbled to the parking lot, beaten down and abused for our overachievements, around 10pm. each of us had turned from a sun-pinked youth to a green-faced cripple.

it was worth it.

slacks

first off, i've been slacktastic on this thing.

lots of fun stuff, you know, out there in the world. i just haven't really had too much to say that's been new or insightful on top of getting things done around here.

but, i do miss you guys and writing here.

as a sidebar, i hate the word "slacks". it's always made me uncomf.
also, so do these:
thimble
panties
caulk