The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Now that I have more control over what I can do with my life I've decided to pick back up with the improv classes. The original reasons for doing it still apply - e.g., working on poise, quick-wittedness, etc. - but also, now that my days are starting to get consumed with law, it's good to make sure I get a chance to laugh from time to time.

(I suppose it's no surprise that out of the four women in the class, three of them are lawyers.)

Even though I'd done two levels of courses before, because it was a few years ago and I'm studying with a different outfit this time, I'm back in an intro course, going over the basics. The basics basically boil down to a performer 'making an offer,' and the other(s) picking up on that offer and accepting it by running with it. Without that accord scenes never get anywhere, and thus what we're mostly now learning about is how to make and accept offers properly.

Offers can really be anything. The first week I walked into a situation where two other students had been frozen in a pose with chests thrust out and shoulders back. It suddenly occured to me they looked like chickens, so my offer to them was when I began the scene by squawking and pecking. They then accepted by squawking and pecking too.

This week we did a drill where one person would be sitting, and another would silently enter. The sitting person would look at the body language of the person entering, determine who it suggested they were supposed to be, and then continue the scene accordingly. Because we're all pretty new at this, what the entering person has in mind isn't always what the sitting person concludes. On my turn, for instance, I entered as a person crawling through the desert, but the sitting person thought I was looking for a lost contact lens.

"Is this it?" he asked, pointing to the ground. I picked up the imaginary contact lens, pretended to put it in my eye, and then looked up at him.

"How many heads do you have?"

"Just one."

"Then it's not my contact lens."

Offers are part of the equation, acceptances are the rest. Acceptances work best when they are positive, something that takes the initial idea of the offer and extends it. When they're negative, refusing the reality the offerer is trying to create, it tends to shut things down and dampen the enthusiasm of the offering performer. In order to experience this dynamic and why it should be avoided, we did a drill the other day where we were actually supposed to negate the offer. Whatever was proposed, refuse.

Sounds easy, right? Except the person making my offer said, "I'd like to pay off all your law school loans."

I was wearing my Boston University School of Law sweatshirt, so he must have guessed it was a sensitive spot. So sensitive, that I froze. It was not possible to negate that offer. Yes, it was a a throwaway line in an improv class drill. Of course it wasn't a genuine. But I just could not make the words pass through my lips, anything that would have possibly spurned such an offer. Not even as a joke.

I mean, as a matter of course and principle I do believe in standing on my own two feet financially. But if anyone really did want to come along, saying those words I've longed to hear and offer to pay off my loans... well, let's just say it would be an offer I couldn't refuse...