I am very fortunate!

In the midst of chaos, in the grind of every day life, your true friends will emerge from the fog.

Last year, my birthday fell on a Thursday SAC show. The troupe was different then. The group was mostly made up of veteran SAC members who had been performing for years and I was the new girl who auditioned and made SAC on a whim. Hardly any of the troupe members even mumbled the words Happy Birthday to me and even if someone else said it in earshot, they just ignored it. SAC was more about politics then and less about making people laugh and having fun ourselves. I am glad it is different now, because school is filled with enough stress, SAC's purpose was to help me alleviate some of that.

My birthday was this past Friday. The group let me pick out the dinner place before we performed and I received a number of warm hugs. At the end of the show,  the cast surprised me and sang me an improv birthday song, while bringing out a balloon and a princess tiara. Who knows, if the extra kindness was ensued because my sister is in the troupe now, but in any event it was very special.

After the performance, some of the members came over to my apartment to play a board game and then counted down till 12:00am. I didn't make plans to do anything after SAC and it was a great feeling that my friends wanted to be with me at midnight. I feel very fortunate to have good friends because they are not always easy to come by.

During the actual show, we tried a different format of improv called Long Form Imrpov. Instead of games and scenes that last 3 to 7 minutes, long form can take anywhere between 15 to 40 minutes. It is definitely not easy to do because you have to keep your audience entertained the whole time.  Ricky introduced a new game called "Fairy Tale," and we performed it during the show. Ricky was the narrator of the fairy tale. At the beginning Ricky asks the audience for a classic fairy tale story. During the show, the suggestion was "Hazel and Gretel." Ricky then begins to narrate the story and says that "this is the real version of the Hanzel and Gretel fairy tale that wasn't allowed in children's books." Then as performers we act out what ever Ricky is saying, but add our own twist to the story. By the end of the game, the characters must come full circle and have a parallel ending to the actual fairy tale story.

I felt like the game went relatively well during the show. The only dilemma was that we had just practiced the game 15 minutes prior to the show and the suggestion given to us then was "Hanzel and Gretel." So it was hard not to copy the story we had just done. Also, it was hard to keep the energy level up through out the whole scene without their being a dull moment. I know we just need to work on it more as a group and when we do finally get it right, it will be that much more exciting!