Our First Show

Senseless Acts of Comedy has been my creative outlet for the past year. With six main stage performers and two alternates, I tried out without considering the possibility of being casted.

Me?...Good at making up scenarios and situations without a script? Impossible. ......Or so I thought.

Somehow, I was cast as a main stage performer. Every Thursday at 9:00pm in the BLUU Auditorium, I would be creating art. Practices were long and challenging. The group had a lot more experience with improvising and I often struggled with wondering if I could hold my own. The weeks pasted on, and show after show, my skills improved, but I still felt unsettled. In the middle of the year we had a sudden change in leadership. Two of our improvisers and our host had been offered a professional improv gig outside of TCU. The performance was the same night as SAC...they made their decision.

Thinking everything would fall apart, we had to recast and do it fast. Things were looking pretty gloomy, but all of sudden I was surrounded by new faces and we were all working together to put on the best show possible. The rainbow definitely came after the show. The group dynamic actually became better and I felt less nervous and 100% more confident in my abilities.

This year is the beginning of a new SAC. We advertised heavily by giving away free popsicles during lunch time. I also talked to countless numbers of freshman during the activities fair. This would be real test if SAC would survive this year. The activites board said we needed about 60 students to show up or we could not keep our space in the auditorium. I nervously shook my legs back stage, hoping the room would be filled and more importantly hoping that we could make a whole lot of people laugh.

Most performances, I try to completely forget that there is an audience in front of me just ...waiting. Waiting for me to say something funny, waiting for me to have nothing to say, waiting for there to be awkward silence proving improv can only be done by actors in Whose Line is It Anyways? ...It's definitely worse when my boyfriend or close friends come to show. If the audience is made up of strangers, they won't have the same expectations of me. I won't have to face them when I leave the stage.

We had about 120 students show up! Pretty good, for the first week of school where most students can't think of anything but hitting the best party.