Ed Herbstman 5/5/06 Part 1
Ed Herbstman is a veteran improviser and actor. He started improvising in the late 80's, and performed throughout the 90's at the Improv Olympic and Second City in Chicago. In 1997, he moved to Los Angeles, where he helped open IO West. He eventually moved to New York where he became a police officer and later helped found the Magnet theater, where he currently performs and teaches.
JF: Where were you born?
EH: Arlington Heights, IL.
JF: Is that by Chicago?
EH: Yeah, it’s a suburb of Chicago. I was born in Arlington Heights hospital and I pretty much lived within a 20 minute drive of that area until I was 18 and went to college. …I’m not proud of that.
JF: Ok. What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
EH: My Dad. He always seemed to take great pride in his ability to make people laugh. He put a high value on things that I said when I was funny as a kid, and he would introduce me to people when I was a little kid and ask me to tell a joke. And he would buy me joke books. But I’m not really a joke teller. I don’t remember jokes well. I don’t feel comfortable telling long jokes to people. I’ve never become a joke-teller, but he was an early influence.
And Saturday Night Live and Steve Martin. Steve Martin was probably the most powerful comedy influence on me.
JF: How would you say that Steve Martin effected you later on in your career? Or your father? Do you see their influence today?
EH: Yeah, I think that I, and most people, accidentally borrow from Steve Martin all the time. His comedic timing and the way he says something, I guess could be described as quick reversals, from dead serious to absurdly silly, but with the same delivery. And just the way he would say something, then change his voice [deepens his voice] slightly and say it in a deeper tone, with a little more seriousness. [voice back to normal] Taking himself overly seriously to a comedic effect. Everybody has that Steve Martin voice, I think. …And I’ve definitely said ‘that cat was the best fuck I’ve ever had,’ many times.
JF: [laughs] Yeah, everyone has done that too, so I guess you’re right. When did you know you wanted to become a performer?
EH: I guess I didn’t so much know that I wanted to be a performer as I couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t want to be a performer. I just thought it was completely natural, and didn’t know that it was unique, that not everyone wanted it. When I would volunteer to be the kid that reads in front of the 5th grade class, I always felt like I got away with something by being the first one to volunteer. I didn’t know that nobody else wanted to do it.
I guess I realized it when I had by first opportunity to do something legit, like take a summer acting class at the Shomberg or Rickson or something like that. I did that and I realized that ‘hey, this is something that not everybody’s interested in, but I want to do it.’
JF: Were you involved in theater as a teen?
EH: No, the day I got my Driver’s License, the next day, I went to Second City in Arlington Heights, coincidentally, and watched their improv sets. I did that every Friday and Saturday night for a couple years. A year actually, then they hired me to tear tickets at the door and seat people.
JF: Wow.
EH: Yeah, Todd Stashwick got me that job.
JF: Really? You just knew him or hung out with him?
EH: No, I don’t remember exactly. I think I met him because he was working there, and I was in line [laughs] first in line, every fucking Friday and Saturday night. He was just out of Illinois State University where he majored in Theater, and he’s a very theatrical, theater person. An Actor with a capital A, who had done a lot of plays and musical theater and stuff I was never exposed to. He kind of encouraged me to pursue theater. He got me a job tearing tickets, that’s when I started [taking classes there.] I think I got to take free classes at Second City, because I worked there, or discounted classes. I was 16 in that first class that was taught by Dave Razowsky.
JF: So, what was it like watching shows there? This is not the Chicago Mainstage, but it sounds like they used a lot of the same actors.
EH: Oh yeah. It was basically their 3rd Main Stage. There was the Main Stage, the ETC stage, which was adjacent to the Main Stage in Chicago, then there was Second City Northwest. The people who did TourCo would be placed in one of these three stages, working their way up to the Main Stage.
When I started tearing tickets, Steve Carrell was in that show, Dave Razowsky, Fran Adams, Claudia Smith Special, John Rubano, Ken Campbell, and I still remember the scenes from those shows. I mean, I watched them over and over and over but the experience of watching those shows was probably the best education anybody in the northwest suburbs got on how to do sketch comedy.
And I just constantly fantasized about one of them having some sort of horrible medical emergency right before the show and then saying ‘who on the ticket tearing staff can fill in for Ken Campbell tonight!?’ I’d constantly fantasize about that. I’d go to sleep thinking about that, how badly I wanted to work at Second City. My stomach would turn as I went to sleep, as I’d think about how amazing it would be to do that.
Of course, I was watching people like Steve Carrell, who’s probably like, well all of America is recognizing his talent now, but this is 16 years ago. He was fascinating and fantastic, and really funny and extremely quiet offstage, a real mystery. I think I probably never shared more than five words with him, but it was kind of an ‘I worship him’ situation.
JF: What made him so interesting to watch? Because I’ve heard that from other people, that he was amazing.
EH: He committed to what he was doing 100% with a lot of physical energy and power that wasn’t unrealistic. It was not absurd. It wasn’t over-the-top. If you take someone else who was fantastic to watch, Chris Farley, he had the same energy, but he had it with no restraint. He would explode. But what Carrell does is he seems like he’s constantly restraining this intensity, and it’s eeking out in different ways. It’s sublimating, and in every character he has, no matter who he’s playing, it has this thing bubbling beneath it. That thing is different for each character, but it’s still intense. When it does come out, when he does allow it out, he’s really explosive and powerful.
A lot of the scenes he ended up writing and being in at the various stages Second City sort of reflect that. He played like a really, really nice guy who happened to be a serial killer. He was in the basement laundry room with Amy Sedaris and they basically have a romantic flirtation, seduction scene, where she recognizes him from the police sketch on the wall, and he’s slightly embarrassed by it, in the cutest way, but then goes into this revelry when he goes into how he kills people. Then there’s this intense silence, then he blasts out of it where he goes ‘blah, blah, blah! I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. Enough about me.’
I ended up playing those scenes when I was in the Touring Company. I sought out all those scenes that I remember seeing, and got to play his roles, and just found them way more complicated and difficult to pull off than he ever made them look. When after rehearsal, after rehearsal, I finally had some success with those parts, it really felt like I was growing as an actor because of it. That’s how Second City and the Touring Company works. You actually have to play those roles out, from these great comedy pieces that people before you created before you can step out on your own and start creating your own pieces as an actor/writer on those stages.
JF: It’s like a ritual.
EH: It’s definitely a process. I think they have other rituals at Second City. It’s definitely a process of an actor. I think it was David Mamet who said took Neil Simon’s plays and wrote them out word by word, by hand, so he could feel what it was like to write those words. I don’t know if that’s complete bullshit or not. It does sound like bullshit, doesn’t it? It sounds like a big waste of time, but I don’t know.
JF: What was it like being in those classes? Were you ever self-conscious because you were 16 or were there other people close to your age in there?
EH: No, I was always the youngest in those classes. I didn’t feel self-conscious because of my age. I think the only thing that I felt in those classes was an intense desire to get good at improv. I wanted to soak up everything I could soak up. My role models in life became my improv teachers, especially Dave Razowsky, who I studied with for over a year straight every Sunday at noon, because he was the only teacher at Second City Northwest. I would just take that class. I went through all the 5 levels with him, then started again in level 1, and he and I are very good friends.
JF: He was the only teacher there?
EH: He was the only teacher there, then Carrell taught classes, but I think at that time I went away. It was my Senior year, then I went to study in the city, and I studied with Fran Adams and a guy named Michael …I don’t remember his name, not Gellman, but ….Carey Goldenberg, Goldberg? That was a bad experience.
JF: Why?
EH: Because it was all warm-up games. Nobody really measured up to Razowsky at that point, because he was IO trained. He and Carrell both really didn’t do the Second City Training thing. They skipped it. They got hired into the Touring Company straight away from other performances they were doing. Razowsky just kept telling me ‘when you’re ready, go study at Improv Olympic. Forget this Second City stuff.’ Which I thought, like ‘oh my God! He must really think I’m ready to tell me this secret!’
JF: [laughs]
EH: And I did that, and that’s was really where everything changed.
JF: What was Dave Razowsky’s class like? What were some things that he would emphasize?
EH: Listening. Organic development of ideas. Respect for what you’re doing. That comedy comes out of the moment rather than the joke, which I think I pretty much paid lip service to. I thought that it was a nice philosophy, but in practice you just get up there and try to be as funny as you fucking can. That’s how I felt at that time. I mean, I was 16. I should have been …I don’t know, helping my friend repair his Volkswagen Bug, but instead I was [doing improv.] What do 16 year olds do? They try to get high or have sex. I would take a break from that every weekend to go study improv. I just thought it was the best goddamn thing in the world, and it really just saved my life, because I felt like I was wasting away in the suburbs and couldn’t really connect or feel like I was a part of that world for whatever reason.
JF: So then you went to Northwestern, right?
EH: Yeah, I went to Improv Olympic right before I became a Freshman at Northwestern, then I just studied at Improv Olympic while I was at Northwestern. I actually auditioned for level 2 at Second City and didn’t make it.
JF: You had to audition for the levels?
EH: Yeah.
JF: You had already been through all the levels with Dave Razowsky.
EH: Yeah, but that was an informal thing. This was a formal thing in front of a panel of people. And I was 16 and really anxious and totally blew the audition.
JF: Did you study at Second City later?
EH: No. Never. I never took another class there.
JF: Did that like turn you off to them?
EH: No, what I wanted was to be hired in the Touring Company and to eventually be on the Main Stage, and become one of “Them,” one of the people who were at Second City and were invited into that special world, that when I was 16 I looked at as the Holy Grail. But when I got to Improv Olympic and started doing work there, that kind of shifted my perspective on everything.
JF: What was that like at the time? What was Improv Olympic like?
EH: When I started taking classes, I think they had just started the School St. space, which was like a basement/boiler room of something or other, or cordoned off office spaces on School St. in this office building. They were performing at the Wrigleyside.
JF: Do you know what year this?
EH: 90. 90 or 91. It must have been 91, because I think I had graduated High School.
JF: So how were the classes?
EH: They were amazing. …They were amazing. It seemed like they were really special. Charna was just like ‘you’re good. You’re not good. You’re good. You’re good. You’re not good. You can do this. You can’t do this.’ It was very abrupt. She was very abrupt and clear. She seemed to have a plan for some people and not care about other people, and because I was one of the people she cared about I thought it was one of the best experiences I’d ever had. And she seemed to have a plan for me, and I thought it was great and a lot of other people didn’t have a great experience. She treated me special for whatever reason. I think Dave Razowsky may have given me a recommendation or something. I have no idea. But she liked me and I liked the classes and I learned a lot, then when I got to study with Del it was like ‘Oh my gosh, the work that we’re doing is kind of important.’ It’s not just a means of entertaining yourself or trying to show off, this is actually important work and you can use it as a tool to do things, good and bad in the world. I know that sounds high fallutin, but Del had a way of making small things seem connected to everything else in the universe. And that was useful in teaching people how to do long-form structures. …He didn’t let anything get by.
JF: Even in conversation or in scenes?
EH: In performances. In conversation, he was just a regular guy with a great sense of humor, and a really cutting, acerbic, cynical, angry perspective on the world, but still… He lived on another planet. I’ll just say that. He had so many experiences and led so many lives before I’d ever met him that speaking to him on a personal level was just like entering another dimension and listening to stories. I felt like when I was around Del my job was just to listen and to not disturb him.
JF: What were some memorable experiences that you had in Del’s class?
EH: We were working on a new form in one of his advanced classes. It was like Ian Roberts and Matt Besser, Neil Flynn, and John Rosenfeld, and I think Pete Hulne. I can’t remember if Hulne was there. And a couple other people. Miles Stroth. We did a 45 minute piece that had to do with mythic structures and Greek myths. And none of us had the knowledge of Greek myths that Del had, so it was kind of ultimately a fruitless endeavor. He’d be expecting us to make certain moves, and to refer to things that none of us knew about, because he was a library when it came to that stuff.
So, we did a 45 minute piece, then at the end he looked at me and said ‘you,’ and I was so excited that he pointed me out. He said ‘there’s something conventional about that Sea Captain character.’ And I was like ‘Sea Captain character? Ok. Yeah, I think about 25 minutes ago I played a Sea Captain character, like I was a Pirate or something.’ I don’t really recall what I did, but I remember I did something. And that was his only note for the whole piece, and then he had us do another one. And that was kind of an earthquake for me. Obviously, because I’m talking about it 15 years later.
I had another experience sitting in on one of his classes, where Graci, Graci was Charna’s dog, had taken a shit on the stage at the Improv Olympic at Clarke St. She had obviously done it the night before. Graci had done that kind of thing, because she was like ‘how come everyone’s looking at the stage, and not playing with me.’ So, she took a shit on the stage.
We were in a class and Del said ‘is that shit?’ And one of the girls in the class said ‘I’ll see.’ She picked it up and smelled it and went ‘it is shit.’
JF: Uch.
EH: And she goes ‘I’ll think I’ll go wash my hands.’ And he said ‘I think you should go wash your hands.’ [laughs] For the rest of that session, he called her something like ‘shit hands’ or ‘shit sniffer.’
JF: [laughs]
EH: He was like ‘um, when you did that scene with the shit hand, shit sniffer, I have these notes on it.’ Eventually, I think he pulled a wad of cash out of his own pocket to pay her back for the classes she paid for, so she would leave the class. She ended up being a problem in a lot of ways. He was like ‘this is ridiculous. You don’t belong here.’ He just pulled out the money and slapped it on the table and bought her out.
JF: Wow.
EH: Which was actually a relief to everyone in the class, because she was a problem.
JF: Where were you born?
EH: Arlington Heights, IL.
JF: Is that by Chicago?
EH: Yeah, it’s a suburb of Chicago. I was born in Arlington Heights hospital and I pretty much lived within a 20 minute drive of that area until I was 18 and went to college. …I’m not proud of that.
JF: Ok. What were some early influences on your sense of humor?
EH: My Dad. He always seemed to take great pride in his ability to make people laugh. He put a high value on things that I said when I was funny as a kid, and he would introduce me to people when I was a little kid and ask me to tell a joke. And he would buy me joke books. But I’m not really a joke teller. I don’t remember jokes well. I don’t feel comfortable telling long jokes to people. I’ve never become a joke-teller, but he was an early influence.
And Saturday Night Live and Steve Martin. Steve Martin was probably the most powerful comedy influence on me.
JF: How would you say that Steve Martin effected you later on in your career? Or your father? Do you see their influence today?
EH: Yeah, I think that I, and most people, accidentally borrow from Steve Martin all the time. His comedic timing and the way he says something, I guess could be described as quick reversals, from dead serious to absurdly silly, but with the same delivery. And just the way he would say something, then change his voice [deepens his voice] slightly and say it in a deeper tone, with a little more seriousness. [voice back to normal] Taking himself overly seriously to a comedic effect. Everybody has that Steve Martin voice, I think. …And I’ve definitely said ‘that cat was the best fuck I’ve ever had,’ many times.
JF: [laughs] Yeah, everyone has done that too, so I guess you’re right. When did you know you wanted to become a performer?
EH: I guess I didn’t so much know that I wanted to be a performer as I couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t want to be a performer. I just thought it was completely natural, and didn’t know that it was unique, that not everyone wanted it. When I would volunteer to be the kid that reads in front of the 5th grade class, I always felt like I got away with something by being the first one to volunteer. I didn’t know that nobody else wanted to do it.
I guess I realized it when I had by first opportunity to do something legit, like take a summer acting class at the Shomberg or Rickson or something like that. I did that and I realized that ‘hey, this is something that not everybody’s interested in, but I want to do it.’
JF: Were you involved in theater as a teen?
EH: No, the day I got my Driver’s License, the next day, I went to Second City in Arlington Heights, coincidentally, and watched their improv sets. I did that every Friday and Saturday night for a couple years. A year actually, then they hired me to tear tickets at the door and seat people.
JF: Wow.
EH: Yeah, Todd Stashwick got me that job.
JF: Really? You just knew him or hung out with him?
EH: No, I don’t remember exactly. I think I met him because he was working there, and I was in line [laughs] first in line, every fucking Friday and Saturday night. He was just out of Illinois State University where he majored in Theater, and he’s a very theatrical, theater person. An Actor with a capital A, who had done a lot of plays and musical theater and stuff I was never exposed to. He kind of encouraged me to pursue theater. He got me a job tearing tickets, that’s when I started [taking classes there.] I think I got to take free classes at Second City, because I worked there, or discounted classes. I was 16 in that first class that was taught by Dave Razowsky.
JF: So, what was it like watching shows there? This is not the Chicago Mainstage, but it sounds like they used a lot of the same actors.
EH: Oh yeah. It was basically their 3rd Main Stage. There was the Main Stage, the ETC stage, which was adjacent to the Main Stage in Chicago, then there was Second City Northwest. The people who did TourCo would be placed in one of these three stages, working their way up to the Main Stage.
When I started tearing tickets, Steve Carrell was in that show, Dave Razowsky, Fran Adams, Claudia Smith Special, John Rubano, Ken Campbell, and I still remember the scenes from those shows. I mean, I watched them over and over and over but the experience of watching those shows was probably the best education anybody in the northwest suburbs got on how to do sketch comedy.
And I just constantly fantasized about one of them having some sort of horrible medical emergency right before the show and then saying ‘who on the ticket tearing staff can fill in for Ken Campbell tonight!?’ I’d constantly fantasize about that. I’d go to sleep thinking about that, how badly I wanted to work at Second City. My stomach would turn as I went to sleep, as I’d think about how amazing it would be to do that.
Of course, I was watching people like Steve Carrell, who’s probably like, well all of America is recognizing his talent now, but this is 16 years ago. He was fascinating and fantastic, and really funny and extremely quiet offstage, a real mystery. I think I probably never shared more than five words with him, but it was kind of an ‘I worship him’ situation.
JF: What made him so interesting to watch? Because I’ve heard that from other people, that he was amazing.
EH: He committed to what he was doing 100% with a lot of physical energy and power that wasn’t unrealistic. It was not absurd. It wasn’t over-the-top. If you take someone else who was fantastic to watch, Chris Farley, he had the same energy, but he had it with no restraint. He would explode. But what Carrell does is he seems like he’s constantly restraining this intensity, and it’s eeking out in different ways. It’s sublimating, and in every character he has, no matter who he’s playing, it has this thing bubbling beneath it. That thing is different for each character, but it’s still intense. When it does come out, when he does allow it out, he’s really explosive and powerful.
A lot of the scenes he ended up writing and being in at the various stages Second City sort of reflect that. He played like a really, really nice guy who happened to be a serial killer. He was in the basement laundry room with Amy Sedaris and they basically have a romantic flirtation, seduction scene, where she recognizes him from the police sketch on the wall, and he’s slightly embarrassed by it, in the cutest way, but then goes into this revelry when he goes into how he kills people. Then there’s this intense silence, then he blasts out of it where he goes ‘blah, blah, blah! I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that. Enough about me.’
I ended up playing those scenes when I was in the Touring Company. I sought out all those scenes that I remember seeing, and got to play his roles, and just found them way more complicated and difficult to pull off than he ever made them look. When after rehearsal, after rehearsal, I finally had some success with those parts, it really felt like I was growing as an actor because of it. That’s how Second City and the Touring Company works. You actually have to play those roles out, from these great comedy pieces that people before you created before you can step out on your own and start creating your own pieces as an actor/writer on those stages.
JF: It’s like a ritual.
EH: It’s definitely a process. I think they have other rituals at Second City. It’s definitely a process of an actor. I think it was David Mamet who said took Neil Simon’s plays and wrote them out word by word, by hand, so he could feel what it was like to write those words. I don’t know if that’s complete bullshit or not. It does sound like bullshit, doesn’t it? It sounds like a big waste of time, but I don’t know.
JF: What was it like being in those classes? Were you ever self-conscious because you were 16 or were there other people close to your age in there?
EH: No, I was always the youngest in those classes. I didn’t feel self-conscious because of my age. I think the only thing that I felt in those classes was an intense desire to get good at improv. I wanted to soak up everything I could soak up. My role models in life became my improv teachers, especially Dave Razowsky, who I studied with for over a year straight every Sunday at noon, because he was the only teacher at Second City Northwest. I would just take that class. I went through all the 5 levels with him, then started again in level 1, and he and I are very good friends.
JF: He was the only teacher there?
EH: He was the only teacher there, then Carrell taught classes, but I think at that time I went away. It was my Senior year, then I went to study in the city, and I studied with Fran Adams and a guy named Michael …I don’t remember his name, not Gellman, but ….Carey Goldenberg, Goldberg? That was a bad experience.
JF: Why?
EH: Because it was all warm-up games. Nobody really measured up to Razowsky at that point, because he was IO trained. He and Carrell both really didn’t do the Second City Training thing. They skipped it. They got hired into the Touring Company straight away from other performances they were doing. Razowsky just kept telling me ‘when you’re ready, go study at Improv Olympic. Forget this Second City stuff.’ Which I thought, like ‘oh my God! He must really think I’m ready to tell me this secret!’
JF: [laughs]
EH: And I did that, and that’s was really where everything changed.
JF: What was Dave Razowsky’s class like? What were some things that he would emphasize?
EH: Listening. Organic development of ideas. Respect for what you’re doing. That comedy comes out of the moment rather than the joke, which I think I pretty much paid lip service to. I thought that it was a nice philosophy, but in practice you just get up there and try to be as funny as you fucking can. That’s how I felt at that time. I mean, I was 16. I should have been …I don’t know, helping my friend repair his Volkswagen Bug, but instead I was [doing improv.] What do 16 year olds do? They try to get high or have sex. I would take a break from that every weekend to go study improv. I just thought it was the best goddamn thing in the world, and it really just saved my life, because I felt like I was wasting away in the suburbs and couldn’t really connect or feel like I was a part of that world for whatever reason.
JF: So then you went to Northwestern, right?
EH: Yeah, I went to Improv Olympic right before I became a Freshman at Northwestern, then I just studied at Improv Olympic while I was at Northwestern. I actually auditioned for level 2 at Second City and didn’t make it.
JF: You had to audition for the levels?
EH: Yeah.
JF: You had already been through all the levels with Dave Razowsky.
EH: Yeah, but that was an informal thing. This was a formal thing in front of a panel of people. And I was 16 and really anxious and totally blew the audition.
JF: Did you study at Second City later?
EH: No. Never. I never took another class there.
JF: Did that like turn you off to them?
EH: No, what I wanted was to be hired in the Touring Company and to eventually be on the Main Stage, and become one of “Them,” one of the people who were at Second City and were invited into that special world, that when I was 16 I looked at as the Holy Grail. But when I got to Improv Olympic and started doing work there, that kind of shifted my perspective on everything.
JF: What was that like at the time? What was Improv Olympic like?
EH: When I started taking classes, I think they had just started the School St. space, which was like a basement/boiler room of something or other, or cordoned off office spaces on School St. in this office building. They were performing at the Wrigleyside.
JF: Do you know what year this?
EH: 90. 90 or 91. It must have been 91, because I think I had graduated High School.
JF: So how were the classes?
EH: They were amazing. …They were amazing. It seemed like they were really special. Charna was just like ‘you’re good. You’re not good. You’re good. You’re good. You’re not good. You can do this. You can’t do this.’ It was very abrupt. She was very abrupt and clear. She seemed to have a plan for some people and not care about other people, and because I was one of the people she cared about I thought it was one of the best experiences I’d ever had. And she seemed to have a plan for me, and I thought it was great and a lot of other people didn’t have a great experience. She treated me special for whatever reason. I think Dave Razowsky may have given me a recommendation or something. I have no idea. But she liked me and I liked the classes and I learned a lot, then when I got to study with Del it was like ‘Oh my gosh, the work that we’re doing is kind of important.’ It’s not just a means of entertaining yourself or trying to show off, this is actually important work and you can use it as a tool to do things, good and bad in the world. I know that sounds high fallutin, but Del had a way of making small things seem connected to everything else in the universe. And that was useful in teaching people how to do long-form structures. …He didn’t let anything get by.
JF: Even in conversation or in scenes?
EH: In performances. In conversation, he was just a regular guy with a great sense of humor, and a really cutting, acerbic, cynical, angry perspective on the world, but still… He lived on another planet. I’ll just say that. He had so many experiences and led so many lives before I’d ever met him that speaking to him on a personal level was just like entering another dimension and listening to stories. I felt like when I was around Del my job was just to listen and to not disturb him.
JF: What were some memorable experiences that you had in Del’s class?
EH: We were working on a new form in one of his advanced classes. It was like Ian Roberts and Matt Besser, Neil Flynn, and John Rosenfeld, and I think Pete Hulne. I can’t remember if Hulne was there. And a couple other people. Miles Stroth. We did a 45 minute piece that had to do with mythic structures and Greek myths. And none of us had the knowledge of Greek myths that Del had, so it was kind of ultimately a fruitless endeavor. He’d be expecting us to make certain moves, and to refer to things that none of us knew about, because he was a library when it came to that stuff.
So, we did a 45 minute piece, then at the end he looked at me and said ‘you,’ and I was so excited that he pointed me out. He said ‘there’s something conventional about that Sea Captain character.’ And I was like ‘Sea Captain character? Ok. Yeah, I think about 25 minutes ago I played a Sea Captain character, like I was a Pirate or something.’ I don’t really recall what I did, but I remember I did something. And that was his only note for the whole piece, and then he had us do another one. And that was kind of an earthquake for me. Obviously, because I’m talking about it 15 years later.
I had another experience sitting in on one of his classes, where Graci, Graci was Charna’s dog, had taken a shit on the stage at the Improv Olympic at Clarke St. She had obviously done it the night before. Graci had done that kind of thing, because she was like ‘how come everyone’s looking at the stage, and not playing with me.’ So, she took a shit on the stage.
We were in a class and Del said ‘is that shit?’ And one of the girls in the class said ‘I’ll see.’ She picked it up and smelled it and went ‘it is shit.’
JF: Uch.
EH: And she goes ‘I’ll think I’ll go wash my hands.’ And he said ‘I think you should go wash your hands.’ [laughs] For the rest of that session, he called her something like ‘shit hands’ or ‘shit sniffer.’
JF: [laughs]
EH: He was like ‘um, when you did that scene with the shit hand, shit sniffer, I have these notes on it.’ Eventually, I think he pulled a wad of cash out of his own pocket to pay her back for the classes she paid for, so she would leave the class. She ended up being a problem in a lot of ways. He was like ‘this is ridiculous. You don’t belong here.’ He just pulled out the money and slapped it on the table and bought her out.
JF: Wow.
EH: Which was actually a relief to everyone in the class, because she was a problem.
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