The Improvisers
Jeff Friedman
I had to miss sixth and seventh periods for therapy twice a week after the incident. Once a week would no longer suffice. I knew it was necessary—I had no strong aversion to psychiatrists. But once I met Mark Rader, I despised the therapeutic label. Therapy was predictable. It made me sick to my stomach.
It was my sophomore year of high school at the September club fair. He put out a casting call for the group—they lost one member.
“We are the Improvisers,” Rader boomed with no mic.
“All we need to get started is a one-word suggestion of anything at all.” Metallic gym benches chilled my rear.
“Lights!” someone yelled. “Zebra!” howled another. “Rope!”
“I heard zebra!” he replied. He stepped back in line, now shoulder-to-shoulder with the other four Improvisers. They were a team.
It’s important that I tell you about Mark Rader before I say more about therapy or the incident. His eyes were hazel-green, stuck behind a bird-like nose. He was tall and lanky in a high-school-senior kind of way. He rarely spoke in eighth-period BC calculus, but now, he swooped around the stage with grandiosity. His lips rested on the verge of a “puh” sound. He pulled one girl off the back wall to join him.
“Can you help me out? I’m having trouble breathing!” he panted.
“As your best zebra-friend, I know you’re just freaking out cause we’re in a blimp!” she said. The crowd, teachers included, sprayed spit into the pale-brown gymnasium.
She mimed the zebra—full tail, four legs, the whole works. Which is why I had an epiphany that I needed to be on stage. Don’t get me wrong, knots of nothingness still cinched my gut. But the distraction helped. I knew now—I’d lost touch with the make-believe, and I was sure it could help me. I just needed a way into it, an excuse to become a zebra. That’s the other thing—I could be funny when I wanted to. In the psychiatrist’s office that afternoon, I debated slipping the Prozac prescription into my front-right pocket, but decided it would be safer in the front-left for various reasons. For instance, because I kept objects in each of the other jean pockets, I would risk removing the script along with house keys or a bouncy ball from any other pocket. These are the worthless ideas I had on her couch once a week. At the time, I didn’t mind it. But I’ve taken college-level psychology now, and I know these sessions did nothing for me. My cousin Judd was smarter than this disgrace to the PhD.
The office smelled of semi-new carpet and tasteful modernity. The bookshelf over her right shoulder housed such self-published works as Nipping it in the Bud: A Guidebook to Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Fight the Fear: Reclaim Your Life. At the end of each session, I thought she’d try to sell me a mortgage even though I was fourteen. I skipped kindergarten.
My therapist would probably consider it rude or blasphemous to have these thoughts in her office. No matter what I thought, I should take the pill every morning with breakfast and hope for results. Good results. And no side effects. At least side effects less prominent than the good results.
“Medication in conjunction with therapy is the most promising path to success,” she said.
I wondered if she felt her own robotic-ness, if people who sound like broken cassette tapes suggest I am sick and tired of being this way and, perhaps, please help me. She parted gray bangs that belonged to the sixties. I wondered if she knew that, too.
Just take that script to your pharmacist right away,” she said. “And one more thing.” She rolled back on her hip joints and pinched fingers toward a stack of sheets, skinning one off the top. “I want you to be comfortable with me, Aidan. Fill this out for next time. Whatever you don’t feel you can say in here—write it down for me.” She jabbed under my nose a survey titled “What Jennifer Needs to Know, But I Won’t Say.” I left to see my calculus tutor.
In class the next day, I watched Rader scratch his notebook. He drew something martial-arts related, two men sparring with swords of some kind. I could see his figure circle the stage laugh after laugh, commanding the space like an expert fighter. His eyes traced the tip of his pen as his tongue traced the inside of his lips.
It was at this time I also discovered something strange. I took solace in hand dryers. Not the crumby, shit-of-the-Earth ones with crusty metal buttons in frail porcelain. The new, slick, “Jet Towel” ones that say “MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC” and sweep every last drop. So after I woke up with insoluble nausea and diarrhea, I would use them for comfort during the early periods at school. I endured knowing my palms could bathe in warm air.
“Hey man, are you here for the auditions?” Rader asked. I found myself in the tucked-away theatre wing after eighth period that day.
My vocal chords lulled.
“Only if you are!” I said. No response.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Aidan.”
“Aidan,” he said.
I knew if I had a way to make people laugh, I could quit my time- and money-wasting therapy. Rader’s nose carved at the air between us. A green, graph-paper button-down hugged his small neck. He always tucked it in, which I respected. Everything he said was ready for the camera—his features were cool, his tone limber and adaptable. He looked like Daniel Day-Lewis’s son.
“Great,” he said. He gave me a form and pointed toward a row of chairs.
I took small steps toward the row. My hands were clammy. I could feel the clenching now in the left portion of my chest—pain swelled from the insides of my elbows. I tried to calm myself with the familiar off-white floor pattern, black veins bridging adjacent tiles.
“All right,” Rader said. He looked down at the row of chairs—five others sat with me.
“Thanks for coming, everyone. We’re excited to have you. We wish we could take you all into the group, but unfortunately, we only have room for one. Remember—we’re just social rejects looking to have a little fun.”
“Sorry I’m late,” rushed Emily Lovitz, Rader’s much-too-serious co-president. “Lab went long.” Her condescending voice dipped in pitch at the end of each precious phrase. Dirty-blond strands nestled the natural curves of her neck. She always had a reason to be later or more important. She dropped her brick-filled backpack.
“Anyway, let’s get right into it,” Rader said. We would go without a warmup, straight into standard two-person scenes. He asked us to stand up and form a backline. “Also, just some basic rules of improv: always say yes, establish a clear who/what/where in each scene, and never ask questions.”
I stood second from the left, my right knee quivering every three to four seconds. Emily and Rader took two center seats in the row. I wanted to melt the clear rims of her glasses. I noticed the girl to my left patting her right foot. An old air conditioning vent overcompensated for the fall heat. Then, foot girl darted center-stage. No one went out with her, so I figured I might as well—if I didn’t now, I never would.
I’d read somewhere that it was actually okay to ask questions in improv scenes, that the “no questions” rule was an oversimplification. It just depends on the circumstances. When you’re trying to figure out specifics at the top of the scene, you wouldn’t want to ask your scene partner questions cause it pressures them to make all the decisions. But questions can be central to the “why” of a scene—can even be the “game” of the scene (the odd pattern that makes a scene funny)—when the improvisers use them right.
“Dad, please stop asking me to fight off the raccoons in our backyard!” she said. “It makes me really nervous!”
My lungs constricted. My hands ached for snug air. Why couldn’t I be her father? I looked for comforting visuals—a chair, the familiar tile, Rader’s hazel eyes—but nothing could free me from this noose. An image of myself with the therapist entered my mind. I saw myself clearly, too clearly. I wanted a way out of observing myself—being in my body was fine, I just didn’t want to see it.
“Well, you’re gonna have to do it!” I managed. Neither one of us could speak. Rader tapped his foot through the silence, then cut it off: And, scene!” he called. I stumbled back in line. The rest of the scenes were better but not great. I had a hard time listening.
“Now, we’re gonna play a game called ‘Back in My Day,’” Rader said. He crossed his legs like a Hollywood director. “You get an object suggestion of anything at all, and come up with reasons why you wouldn’t have needed it a long time ago.” Some people looked confused.
“Can we get an object? Anything at all,” he said.
“Deodorant!” someone yelled.
“Okay.” Rader beamed. “Deodorant. Take it away, guys.”
I sort of gave up for the rest of the audition, which made me perform a little better, I think. I stopped paying close attention. But I do remember one thing. A few minutes into this game, I made everyone laugh: “Back in my day, we didn’t need deodorant because those damn Millennials invented armpits!” I roared from somewhere outside myself. It was one of the only laughs I got, but it shot into me like a drug. Emily never showed a reaction to anything, but I remember Rader’s impressed green eyes. That’s why I was so devastated when I found out I didn’t get the spot.
“I thought you were really talented, man,” Rader said. I approached him after calculus the next day, demanding an answer. He checked our surroundings. “I was fighting for you. But Emily wouldn’t have it. She was obsessing over you not being ‘big’ enough on stage. And she kept talking about that one hiccup you had at the beginning. I thought you were great though, man. You seem like a natural.”
And they thought they were the fucking rejects.
“Thanks anyway,” I told him.
That night, my father greeted me as usual: “How was Ridgemont today, Aidan?” It still made me furious. I was a student at Boyd High School. I cared none for movies I’d liked in middle school. I went outside for a walk. I worried I would turn out like my father. He wore the same tie for two weeks at a time, and laughed at the television like it was the only being ever to touch his soul. Not to mention, he married a woman who died drunk driving when I was two.
***
“Hey,” Emily squealed. She caught me outside the first-floor bathroom after my hand drying the next morning. “I thought you were really good. I just wish we had more than one spot.” She lisped in a preventable way, and her administrative tone made me gag. In the hallway sunlight, her scrunchy face looked like a half-deflated balloon.
“No worries!” I managed. She looked around, as if she owed me something. It was the first time I saw her question herself. Then, she resorted to what she knew best.
“Don’t worry, little bro!” she said. She punched my shoulder. “If the kids at school don’t like you, it’s their loss!”
“Thanks, sis!” I almost ran back to the toilet.
But I was still a Mark Rader fan. They had open rehearsals in the assembly hall every Wednesday after school, so I usually stopped by and sat in the back. Each laugh hurt, but I liked watching him. He was a craftsman, and I appreciated all kinds of art. One day, after rehearsal, he walked up to me.
“Hey there,” he said. I nodded. He looked to his left and took another step toward me, as if he had a secret. “I notice you here,” he continued. “I respect your dedication to improv. It’s not something too many people appreciate.”
“I think it’s a great form,” I said.
“What do you say we hang out and talk about it?” I checked my watch.
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
I had no reason not to, so we got into his white Acura and left the main campus circle. He shifted gears tightly, navigating the roads like a young father. We sat in silence for a few minutes. He turned onto an uphill. Then, he told me about his passion for martial arts—Kendo, to be specific. He said they used the shinai in practice to replace the sword, but his cousin gave him a real, 18-inch sword for his last birthday. I said I’d love to see it some time.
“Are you happy?” he asked. I had no idea where we were going.
“I think so.” I tried to give him a straight answer. I respect a straight question. We drove alongside yellow-green hills I did not recognize. The sky began to fold into the hilltops. A couple of kids played with hula-hoops, but most of the time, we were the only people in sight. We were comfortable in the silence. It dripped between us like honey.
“Someone I know saw you with a Prozac prescription. Are you depressed?”
I stayed quiet for a while.
“I might be,” I said.
“Well, good,” he said. “Good that you recognize it. Depression runs in my family. I’ve taken Zoloft for the past three years. My older brother died from a heroin overdose. So I’m glad you’re doing something about it.” All of a sudden, I wanted to propel out the door. Or become an engine piston.
We were at the top of a hill. In front of us spread endless paths and power lines—it must have been the highest point in suburban Cincinnati. He said it was his favorite spot in the world.
“So doc, can you help me figure out why I’m feeling this way?” he said. He hugged himself on the hood of his car, rocking at the waist in the fading light.
I watched the sun set over the hills.
That night, my body kept me awake. I often had trouble sleeping. In fact, I usually did.
But my tense calves strung me along for hours, and eventually, I didn’t care about wasting the time. I made shadow figures on the wall from the light of my alarm clock. I thought it might be funny if a doctor had OCD. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I need to double-check to make sure I did your blood work correctly. My hand shadows played with each other.
I’d begun to lose interest in my classes. Not that I’d ever been really interested in them, but now I definitely wasn’t. Sometimes I didn’t think I was interested in anything but Mark Rader. His success fascinated me. I imagined us branching off and creating our own improv group. We would practice seven days a week (four more than the Improvisers), and our group mind would sharpen till weapon-like.
We even became friends. Rader and I started eating lunch together every day, sitting and talking through the whole forty-eight-minute period. We talked about books, art, improv, culture, and high art. One day, some of the other Improvisers approached our table.
“Heya, boys,” Emily said. “Are we intruding?” Three faces hovered behind her. One was the girl I tanked the scene with in the audition.
“Please, join us,” Rader said.
The group slapped trays down in unison. They enveloped our table. They acted like they’d been together all morning, which was probably true.
“Jason, can you pass me that salt shaker?” said one of the girls.
“Not until you start being nice to your step-mother, Alice,” Jason said. A few of them laughed, and he passed the shaker.
“So, Aidan, are you having a good day?” Emily asked without looking up from her lettuce.
I said I was.
“Are your classes going well?”
“As well as they can be in Cincinnati,” I said. No one laughed.
“I can’t even remember what it’s like to be in classes,” she said in a grown-up, New York accent. A few of them laughed again, but I didn’t.
“Be nice to your step-mother, Aidan!” Jason shouted. Now, the table roared. “She cares about you, boy! Be nice to her!” His words swept me onto my back. I entered a world in which nothing was funny, the most hilarious punchlines tragically unfunny, and the most skillful improvisation useless. Then, I remembered something else I’d read. The attempt to be funny in improv is a dangerous thing. While it’s important for the improviser to admit he or she has the desire to be funny, there must be no manifestation of this attempt on stage. Any visible attempt could be fatal. Audiences can detect with precision the improviser’s desire to be funny. One slip could ruin the whole show.
“Are you okay, man?” Rader’s face hovered close to mine.
I had fallen straight out of my chair. The Improvisers left for afternoon class. After school, I went down the street to my therapist.
“Is the medication helping yet?” she asked.
“If you’re trying to help my wiener stay soft, then yeah, the medication’s working great.”
I couldn’t believe I said this. She stayed silent for a while. I didn’t laugh at my joke.
“Has the progressive muscle relaxation helped your sleep?”
“A little.” I lied. “But could we maybe talk about some other ways to help with sleep?”
She nodded.
“And this Mark Rader guy you mentioned on your sheet? Who’s he?” She cradled her self-made worksheet like its paper parents paid her $185 an hour and I was a sack of shit.
“He’s just a friend I’ve recently gotten used to being around,” I said.
“Good.”
“Yeah.” I supposed it was good.
“Do you get along with him well?”
“We have similar interests.”
She had one of those things on top of her bookshelf that stood balanced on a metal cylinder. These devices always fascinated me. A tiny metal human with points for feet clutches an indescribable arc that balances him completely. It raised questions. Why was he holding it?
Did he know that he would fall, obliterate his entire existence, if he let go?
In object work, improvisers should never make their hands look like mimed objects themselves. This improper practice is most common with the miming of two objects: telephones and guns. A telephone is not a fist with the thumb and pinky extended. To mime a telephone, the improviser simply imagines an actual phone in hand. Likewise, a gun is not a fist with the thumb and forefinger extended.
“Aidan,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Time’s up.” I noticed that one of her lower eyelids was bigger than the other. Now, I laughed. I laughed the entire walk home.
I stopped going to their practices on Wednesdays because I couldn’t stand the sight of Emily. Also, I stopped taking the pills. My father begged me to. He even offered to pay me five dollars each time I gulped. I kept going to therapy as a compromise, but I’d found what could make me happy, and the pills didn’t help anyway. Improv was my antidepressant.
So I started immersing myself in the literature during the week. At lunch, under the orange light of my bedroom lamp, in the bathroom stalls at school. The time they spent rehearsing onstage I spent working through hypothetical scenes and characters in my head. A brain surgeon with crippling OCD, a freelance costume artist who attends funerals to comfort the bereaved, a hunchback head of PR who works as the publicity rep for evil people. I would picture all my characters in Rader’s body. You would be surprised how much you can read about improv. It’s funny. As “unplanned” as the whole thing is.
Then, after studying improv for the week, I’d see Rader over the weekends. One Saturday, he took me to his house. I met his parents on a stout floral couch—she knitted while he read the paper. Their living room had a cabin-in-the-woods feel to it, but it sat in a damp
neighborhood behind the gas station. The coffee table, floor lamp, even the wooden chair in the corner were too short for Rader’s build.
“Mark speaks very highly of you,” his mother said from behind semi-circle lenses. It was strange. I’d never heard anyone call him “Mark.” He took me upstairs to show me the sword he’d been bragging about for weeks.
“He’s a shiner,” he said over the blade’s slick whisper. I saw the reflection of his lower lip in the triangular steel. He caressed the holster, a Hershey-brown piece of smoothness.
“Wanna see me use it?”
“Be careful,” I said.
He waltzed around the room. I closed my eyes. The floor boards creaked under his golden-toed socks. Maybe he learned self-defense for the same reason he did improv.
“I want to kill Emily,” I said. We sat down on his bed. He told me that he, too, wanted to lash out at people sometimes. To make spaghetti from their throat tubes, or knead their organs into bread.
The next Saturday, Emily invited me to her house for Cards Against Humanity. I guess I was Rader’s plus one. He said he had to go, so I figured I would. I couldn’t have her take away our weekend time.
We hiked up the front steps to her mansion. The Cincinnati chill slapped our skin. The door was a rich green—the house could’ve belonged to the Addams Family. I bet her parents were the happiest in the world. She opened the door wearing a low-cut V-neck.
“Ew, who invited you?” she said. She giggled at herself, but her lips avoided smiling. I should’ve seen it coming.
Inside the living room, she’d set out a bowl of Fritos and Sprite Zero. Rader looked ready to vomit. We sat there in the firelight and listened to her talk about her day. Something about her renewed driver license not coming in time. It surprised me. Listening to her talk was actually kind of relaxing. There was a lull, so I took a turn speaking: “The waiter hasn’t come by in ages!” I said, gesturing toward the kitchen. Nothing.
“I have to be going.” Rader flung from his couch cushion. “My mom needs me right away.” He strung along the black tile through the front door without another word. Emily looked confused.
“So,” she said through the side of her mouth. “Should we get started?”
She handed me “Testicular Torsion” and “Sarah Palin.” I laughed out a tear—she looked at me as though I’d lost a child. The fire quivered behind my back.
“I just couldn’t get him to listen,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mark.” I began to feel queasy—I hadn’t eaten in hours. She glanced at the front door before continuing. “He refused to have you in the group. I begged him to let you in. He can’t stand keeping it a secret from you anymore. He agreed you have great instincts, but he just didn’t think you were ready. He said the stage would crush you. And he couldn’t stand to watch that happen.” My smile faded.
“Anyway,” she peeled off the first black card, “First category: ‘Daddy, why is Mommy crying?’”
Improvisers pride themselves on their capacity for authentic human connection. In fact, most of the greats have an unbelievable capacity to remember names. They make it a point to call a person by name each time they see them, even five, ten years after a one-time meeting.
How could someone with such a dedication to interpersonal connection deny me my chance to be creative? Did my name mean nothing to him?
A few days later, I came down with a sickness worse than I’d ever experienced. It affected me for at least four weeks, maybe five—at some point, I couldn’t distinguish microbe- induced nausea from my usual anxiety. I kept going to school throughout the whole thing. Emily would smile at me in the hallways, but Mark prevented our paths from crossing. My lungs ached with the sickness, and I woke up each morning to discover a new section of my throat had swollen. I tried to distract myself from the symptoms by thinking about Mark, but thoughts of him only made things worse. So I prohibited myself from thinking of him, even tangentially. Of course, this meant I couldn’t daydream about improv.
But no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find a topic that didn’t somehow trace back to him. We’d talked about all my favorite musicians, writers, actors, directors, painters, even talk show hosts. Not to mention, all art is a form of improvisation. Hell, all human interaction is a form of improvisation.
One night, as I lay in bed trying to pick Mark from my brain, I thought I’d finally found something. My face lit up as I mouthed myself through the possibility. If I could just think of The Beach Boys, I thought. Not as musicians or people with a remote interest in producing creative work. In fact, not even as human beings. Just an intangible concept. If I could think of the intangible concept of The Beach Boys, I could certainly get some enjoyment from that, and in no possible way would it remind me of Mark. But then I remembered—one Saturday afternoon, the third week of our friendship, we’d heard “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” playing on the
beaten-up radio of his Acura. He’d scrolled past the station as he signaled a left turn—he didn’t care much for The Beach Boys. So, of course, that whole idea flopped.
On the last day of regular classes, I saw Emily idling by the library metal detectors at school. I approached her.
“Hi, Emily.” She continued to thumb her phone for a few seconds before looking up at me.
“Oh, it’s you.” Her left lip curved upward into a half-smile. “Hi!” she said. I almost lost my balance. I felt this was the first time we’d had a real conversation. I looked around before speaking.
“Why did you invite me to your house?” I asked. She blushed.
“Mark wanted me to be there when he told you the truth,” she said.
“Do you know what’s going on with him?”
“A lot of things are going on with a lot of people,” she said. I rolled my eyes, and she laughed. “What do you mean specifically?”
“He’s managed to dodge me completely,” I said. “And I should be the one avoiding him.”
She made a calculation in her head before deciding to spill something forward.
“Mark’s scared of you.”
I nearly collapsed. Something felt so right, so powerful, so well-anticipated about it.
Mark Rader feared me.
That night, I walked the tan carpet of my hallways repeating it out loud. It took me some breath to top the sound of my father’s snoring. I laughed so hard that I would cough to the point of light-headedness. There was no way I couldn’t think of Mark in this way. It felt too good to know he had this much respect for me. So I made myself a deal—as soon as the sun went down, I would allow my mind free reign to deal with Mark-related topics. Anything at all that would come to my head.
Sometimes I even dreamed about him. I saw us on his squat living room couch, sitting around the television with his parents and my dad. We were laughing at something Mark had done—he gave a Billy Crystal impression and chuckled in my direction, a subtle worry for respect in his look. “You look marvelous,” he said. I smiled with approval. My dad laughed so hard he cried.
The first day of our final exams, I saw Mark sitting on the tile floor in the third-story hallway. He leaned against one of the lockers, baby-blue backpack padding his shoulder blades.
He drummed his fingertips and gazed at the ceiling.
“What’s up?” I said in a soft voice. I felt like I should help him. My words snapped him to alertness, but then his features relaxed.
“Nothing,” he said, his breath nearing my right thigh. “I’m nervous for our show next week. That’s all. And I had to switch medications.”
t the end of each semester, the Improvisers held a final show.
“Do you want me to come?” I asked.
“Yeah, I do. Sure.” I could see a weight lift from his torso. I had troubling taking a full breath when I spoke—my lungs were getting worse, but strangely, my stomach felt better than ever. My next instinct was to touch his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said. He stretched his eyebrows. If improv scared him, if even I could scare him, then anything could. I felt so guilty for him. Sometimes I think it’s what made me sick in the first place.
“Thanks,” he said with an easy smile.
So I would see the final show. Whether Mark thought I was ready for the stage or not, even if he flat-out didn’t want me in the Improvisers, at least I had my love for the form. Also, as much as I wanted to deny it, he was probably right.
I’d never seen him on the main stage of our school’s theatre. Pointed lights gave a gentle, orange glow to his pale frame. His eyes, planted further into his skull now than ever, scanned the crowd like tiny sprinklers. They landed on me and smiled. The team behind him meant nothing to me now.
“All we need is a one-word suggestion of anything at all,” he said. He was quieter this time.
“Sword!” I shouted. I coughed from the effort.
That’s when the incident happened. Mark glanced my way and began to mime with shaky hands. His face wore a hollow look. I saw him remove from his rear waste the holster he’d described to me so many times before cradling its polished surface in his bedroom that Saturday afternoon. I looked around my row of seats—no one seemed to share my horror. I knew now I’d have to let therapy win. He unsheathed it, and I could see its tip glimmer in the incandescence.
The Improvisers drummed their knees.
He began a scene with Emily.
“I got you a sword for our anniversary, honey!” he said.
I wondered what it would be like to treat every real-life interaction like an improv scene. To live and breathe in a quirky world of fake objects and larger-than-life characters. On one hand, it could bring endless joy, bonding laughter, healing creativity. But on the other hand, it could ruin a life. Now, the crowd roared, smacking thighs in excitement. I lost control of my breath and ran from the theatre. I saw Mark stab himself in the gut with that sword on stage. He called “And, scene!” to the audience, directing his own demise.
It was my sophomore year of high school at the September club fair. He put out a casting call for the group—they lost one member.
“We are the Improvisers,” Rader boomed with no mic.
“All we need to get started is a one-word suggestion of anything at all.” Metallic gym benches chilled my rear.
“Lights!” someone yelled. “Zebra!” howled another. “Rope!”
“I heard zebra!” he replied. He stepped back in line, now shoulder-to-shoulder with the other four Improvisers. They were a team.
It’s important that I tell you about Mark Rader before I say more about therapy or the incident. His eyes were hazel-green, stuck behind a bird-like nose. He was tall and lanky in a high-school-senior kind of way. He rarely spoke in eighth-period BC calculus, but now, he swooped around the stage with grandiosity. His lips rested on the verge of a “puh” sound. He pulled one girl off the back wall to join him.
“Can you help me out? I’m having trouble breathing!” he panted.
“As your best zebra-friend, I know you’re just freaking out cause we’re in a blimp!” she said. The crowd, teachers included, sprayed spit into the pale-brown gymnasium.
She mimed the zebra—full tail, four legs, the whole works. Which is why I had an epiphany that I needed to be on stage. Don’t get me wrong, knots of nothingness still cinched my gut. But the distraction helped. I knew now—I’d lost touch with the make-believe, and I was sure it could help me. I just needed a way into it, an excuse to become a zebra. That’s the other thing—I could be funny when I wanted to. In the psychiatrist’s office that afternoon, I debated slipping the Prozac prescription into my front-right pocket, but decided it would be safer in the front-left for various reasons. For instance, because I kept objects in each of the other jean pockets, I would risk removing the script along with house keys or a bouncy ball from any other pocket. These are the worthless ideas I had on her couch once a week. At the time, I didn’t mind it. But I’ve taken college-level psychology now, and I know these sessions did nothing for me. My cousin Judd was smarter than this disgrace to the PhD.
The office smelled of semi-new carpet and tasteful modernity. The bookshelf over her right shoulder housed such self-published works as Nipping it in the Bud: A Guidebook to Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Fight the Fear: Reclaim Your Life. At the end of each session, I thought she’d try to sell me a mortgage even though I was fourteen. I skipped kindergarten.
My therapist would probably consider it rude or blasphemous to have these thoughts in her office. No matter what I thought, I should take the pill every morning with breakfast and hope for results. Good results. And no side effects. At least side effects less prominent than the good results.
“Medication in conjunction with therapy is the most promising path to success,” she said.
I wondered if she felt her own robotic-ness, if people who sound like broken cassette tapes suggest I am sick and tired of being this way and, perhaps, please help me. She parted gray bangs that belonged to the sixties. I wondered if she knew that, too.
Just take that script to your pharmacist right away,” she said. “And one more thing.” She rolled back on her hip joints and pinched fingers toward a stack of sheets, skinning one off the top. “I want you to be comfortable with me, Aidan. Fill this out for next time. Whatever you don’t feel you can say in here—write it down for me.” She jabbed under my nose a survey titled “What Jennifer Needs to Know, But I Won’t Say.” I left to see my calculus tutor.
In class the next day, I watched Rader scratch his notebook. He drew something martial-arts related, two men sparring with swords of some kind. I could see his figure circle the stage laugh after laugh, commanding the space like an expert fighter. His eyes traced the tip of his pen as his tongue traced the inside of his lips.
It was at this time I also discovered something strange. I took solace in hand dryers. Not the crumby, shit-of-the-Earth ones with crusty metal buttons in frail porcelain. The new, slick, “Jet Towel” ones that say “MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC” and sweep every last drop. So after I woke up with insoluble nausea and diarrhea, I would use them for comfort during the early periods at school. I endured knowing my palms could bathe in warm air.
“Hey man, are you here for the auditions?” Rader asked. I found myself in the tucked-away theatre wing after eighth period that day.
My vocal chords lulled.
“Only if you are!” I said. No response.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Aidan.”
“Aidan,” he said.
I knew if I had a way to make people laugh, I could quit my time- and money-wasting therapy. Rader’s nose carved at the air between us. A green, graph-paper button-down hugged his small neck. He always tucked it in, which I respected. Everything he said was ready for the camera—his features were cool, his tone limber and adaptable. He looked like Daniel Day-Lewis’s son.
“Great,” he said. He gave me a form and pointed toward a row of chairs.
I took small steps toward the row. My hands were clammy. I could feel the clenching now in the left portion of my chest—pain swelled from the insides of my elbows. I tried to calm myself with the familiar off-white floor pattern, black veins bridging adjacent tiles.
“All right,” Rader said. He looked down at the row of chairs—five others sat with me.
“Thanks for coming, everyone. We’re excited to have you. We wish we could take you all into the group, but unfortunately, we only have room for one. Remember—we’re just social rejects looking to have a little fun.”
“Sorry I’m late,” rushed Emily Lovitz, Rader’s much-too-serious co-president. “Lab went long.” Her condescending voice dipped in pitch at the end of each precious phrase. Dirty-blond strands nestled the natural curves of her neck. She always had a reason to be later or more important. She dropped her brick-filled backpack.
“Anyway, let’s get right into it,” Rader said. We would go without a warmup, straight into standard two-person scenes. He asked us to stand up and form a backline. “Also, just some basic rules of improv: always say yes, establish a clear who/what/where in each scene, and never ask questions.”
I stood second from the left, my right knee quivering every three to four seconds. Emily and Rader took two center seats in the row. I wanted to melt the clear rims of her glasses. I noticed the girl to my left patting her right foot. An old air conditioning vent overcompensated for the fall heat. Then, foot girl darted center-stage. No one went out with her, so I figured I might as well—if I didn’t now, I never would.
I’d read somewhere that it was actually okay to ask questions in improv scenes, that the “no questions” rule was an oversimplification. It just depends on the circumstances. When you’re trying to figure out specifics at the top of the scene, you wouldn’t want to ask your scene partner questions cause it pressures them to make all the decisions. But questions can be central to the “why” of a scene—can even be the “game” of the scene (the odd pattern that makes a scene funny)—when the improvisers use them right.
“Dad, please stop asking me to fight off the raccoons in our backyard!” she said. “It makes me really nervous!”
My lungs constricted. My hands ached for snug air. Why couldn’t I be her father? I looked for comforting visuals—a chair, the familiar tile, Rader’s hazel eyes—but nothing could free me from this noose. An image of myself with the therapist entered my mind. I saw myself clearly, too clearly. I wanted a way out of observing myself—being in my body was fine, I just didn’t want to see it.
“Well, you’re gonna have to do it!” I managed. Neither one of us could speak. Rader tapped his foot through the silence, then cut it off: And, scene!” he called. I stumbled back in line. The rest of the scenes were better but not great. I had a hard time listening.
“Now, we’re gonna play a game called ‘Back in My Day,’” Rader said. He crossed his legs like a Hollywood director. “You get an object suggestion of anything at all, and come up with reasons why you wouldn’t have needed it a long time ago.” Some people looked confused.
“Can we get an object? Anything at all,” he said.
“Deodorant!” someone yelled.
“Okay.” Rader beamed. “Deodorant. Take it away, guys.”
I sort of gave up for the rest of the audition, which made me perform a little better, I think. I stopped paying close attention. But I do remember one thing. A few minutes into this game, I made everyone laugh: “Back in my day, we didn’t need deodorant because those damn Millennials invented armpits!” I roared from somewhere outside myself. It was one of the only laughs I got, but it shot into me like a drug. Emily never showed a reaction to anything, but I remember Rader’s impressed green eyes. That’s why I was so devastated when I found out I didn’t get the spot.
“I thought you were really talented, man,” Rader said. I approached him after calculus the next day, demanding an answer. He checked our surroundings. “I was fighting for you. But Emily wouldn’t have it. She was obsessing over you not being ‘big’ enough on stage. And she kept talking about that one hiccup you had at the beginning. I thought you were great though, man. You seem like a natural.”
And they thought they were the fucking rejects.
“Thanks anyway,” I told him.
That night, my father greeted me as usual: “How was Ridgemont today, Aidan?” It still made me furious. I was a student at Boyd High School. I cared none for movies I’d liked in middle school. I went outside for a walk. I worried I would turn out like my father. He wore the same tie for two weeks at a time, and laughed at the television like it was the only being ever to touch his soul. Not to mention, he married a woman who died drunk driving when I was two.
***
“Hey,” Emily squealed. She caught me outside the first-floor bathroom after my hand drying the next morning. “I thought you were really good. I just wish we had more than one spot.” She lisped in a preventable way, and her administrative tone made me gag. In the hallway sunlight, her scrunchy face looked like a half-deflated balloon.
“No worries!” I managed. She looked around, as if she owed me something. It was the first time I saw her question herself. Then, she resorted to what she knew best.
“Don’t worry, little bro!” she said. She punched my shoulder. “If the kids at school don’t like you, it’s their loss!”
“Thanks, sis!” I almost ran back to the toilet.
But I was still a Mark Rader fan. They had open rehearsals in the assembly hall every Wednesday after school, so I usually stopped by and sat in the back. Each laugh hurt, but I liked watching him. He was a craftsman, and I appreciated all kinds of art. One day, after rehearsal, he walked up to me.
“Hey there,” he said. I nodded. He looked to his left and took another step toward me, as if he had a secret. “I notice you here,” he continued. “I respect your dedication to improv. It’s not something too many people appreciate.”
“I think it’s a great form,” I said.
“What do you say we hang out and talk about it?” I checked my watch.
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
I had no reason not to, so we got into his white Acura and left the main campus circle. He shifted gears tightly, navigating the roads like a young father. We sat in silence for a few minutes. He turned onto an uphill. Then, he told me about his passion for martial arts—Kendo, to be specific. He said they used the shinai in practice to replace the sword, but his cousin gave him a real, 18-inch sword for his last birthday. I said I’d love to see it some time.
“Are you happy?” he asked. I had no idea where we were going.
“I think so.” I tried to give him a straight answer. I respect a straight question. We drove alongside yellow-green hills I did not recognize. The sky began to fold into the hilltops. A couple of kids played with hula-hoops, but most of the time, we were the only people in sight. We were comfortable in the silence. It dripped between us like honey.
“Someone I know saw you with a Prozac prescription. Are you depressed?”
I stayed quiet for a while.
“I might be,” I said.
“Well, good,” he said. “Good that you recognize it. Depression runs in my family. I’ve taken Zoloft for the past three years. My older brother died from a heroin overdose. So I’m glad you’re doing something about it.” All of a sudden, I wanted to propel out the door. Or become an engine piston.
We were at the top of a hill. In front of us spread endless paths and power lines—it must have been the highest point in suburban Cincinnati. He said it was his favorite spot in the world.
“So doc, can you help me figure out why I’m feeling this way?” he said. He hugged himself on the hood of his car, rocking at the waist in the fading light.
I watched the sun set over the hills.
That night, my body kept me awake. I often had trouble sleeping. In fact, I usually did.
But my tense calves strung me along for hours, and eventually, I didn’t care about wasting the time. I made shadow figures on the wall from the light of my alarm clock. I thought it might be funny if a doctor had OCD. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I need to double-check to make sure I did your blood work correctly. My hand shadows played with each other.
I’d begun to lose interest in my classes. Not that I’d ever been really interested in them, but now I definitely wasn’t. Sometimes I didn’t think I was interested in anything but Mark Rader. His success fascinated me. I imagined us branching off and creating our own improv group. We would practice seven days a week (four more than the Improvisers), and our group mind would sharpen till weapon-like.
We even became friends. Rader and I started eating lunch together every day, sitting and talking through the whole forty-eight-minute period. We talked about books, art, improv, culture, and high art. One day, some of the other Improvisers approached our table.
“Heya, boys,” Emily said. “Are we intruding?” Three faces hovered behind her. One was the girl I tanked the scene with in the audition.
“Please, join us,” Rader said.
The group slapped trays down in unison. They enveloped our table. They acted like they’d been together all morning, which was probably true.
“Jason, can you pass me that salt shaker?” said one of the girls.
“Not until you start being nice to your step-mother, Alice,” Jason said. A few of them laughed, and he passed the shaker.
“So, Aidan, are you having a good day?” Emily asked without looking up from her lettuce.
I said I was.
“Are your classes going well?”
“As well as they can be in Cincinnati,” I said. No one laughed.
“I can’t even remember what it’s like to be in classes,” she said in a grown-up, New York accent. A few of them laughed again, but I didn’t.
“Be nice to your step-mother, Aidan!” Jason shouted. Now, the table roared. “She cares about you, boy! Be nice to her!” His words swept me onto my back. I entered a world in which nothing was funny, the most hilarious punchlines tragically unfunny, and the most skillful improvisation useless. Then, I remembered something else I’d read. The attempt to be funny in improv is a dangerous thing. While it’s important for the improviser to admit he or she has the desire to be funny, there must be no manifestation of this attempt on stage. Any visible attempt could be fatal. Audiences can detect with precision the improviser’s desire to be funny. One slip could ruin the whole show.
“Are you okay, man?” Rader’s face hovered close to mine.
I had fallen straight out of my chair. The Improvisers left for afternoon class. After school, I went down the street to my therapist.
“Is the medication helping yet?” she asked.
“If you’re trying to help my wiener stay soft, then yeah, the medication’s working great.”
I couldn’t believe I said this. She stayed silent for a while. I didn’t laugh at my joke.
“Has the progressive muscle relaxation helped your sleep?”
“A little.” I lied. “But could we maybe talk about some other ways to help with sleep?”
She nodded.
“And this Mark Rader guy you mentioned on your sheet? Who’s he?” She cradled her self-made worksheet like its paper parents paid her $185 an hour and I was a sack of shit.
“He’s just a friend I’ve recently gotten used to being around,” I said.
“Good.”
“Yeah.” I supposed it was good.
“Do you get along with him well?”
“We have similar interests.”
She had one of those things on top of her bookshelf that stood balanced on a metal cylinder. These devices always fascinated me. A tiny metal human with points for feet clutches an indescribable arc that balances him completely. It raised questions. Why was he holding it?
Did he know that he would fall, obliterate his entire existence, if he let go?
In object work, improvisers should never make their hands look like mimed objects themselves. This improper practice is most common with the miming of two objects: telephones and guns. A telephone is not a fist with the thumb and pinky extended. To mime a telephone, the improviser simply imagines an actual phone in hand. Likewise, a gun is not a fist with the thumb and forefinger extended.
“Aidan,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Time’s up.” I noticed that one of her lower eyelids was bigger than the other. Now, I laughed. I laughed the entire walk home.
I stopped going to their practices on Wednesdays because I couldn’t stand the sight of Emily. Also, I stopped taking the pills. My father begged me to. He even offered to pay me five dollars each time I gulped. I kept going to therapy as a compromise, but I’d found what could make me happy, and the pills didn’t help anyway. Improv was my antidepressant.
So I started immersing myself in the literature during the week. At lunch, under the orange light of my bedroom lamp, in the bathroom stalls at school. The time they spent rehearsing onstage I spent working through hypothetical scenes and characters in my head. A brain surgeon with crippling OCD, a freelance costume artist who attends funerals to comfort the bereaved, a hunchback head of PR who works as the publicity rep for evil people. I would picture all my characters in Rader’s body. You would be surprised how much you can read about improv. It’s funny. As “unplanned” as the whole thing is.
Then, after studying improv for the week, I’d see Rader over the weekends. One Saturday, he took me to his house. I met his parents on a stout floral couch—she knitted while he read the paper. Their living room had a cabin-in-the-woods feel to it, but it sat in a damp
neighborhood behind the gas station. The coffee table, floor lamp, even the wooden chair in the corner were too short for Rader’s build.
“Mark speaks very highly of you,” his mother said from behind semi-circle lenses. It was strange. I’d never heard anyone call him “Mark.” He took me upstairs to show me the sword he’d been bragging about for weeks.
“He’s a shiner,” he said over the blade’s slick whisper. I saw the reflection of his lower lip in the triangular steel. He caressed the holster, a Hershey-brown piece of smoothness.
“Wanna see me use it?”
“Be careful,” I said.
He waltzed around the room. I closed my eyes. The floor boards creaked under his golden-toed socks. Maybe he learned self-defense for the same reason he did improv.
“I want to kill Emily,” I said. We sat down on his bed. He told me that he, too, wanted to lash out at people sometimes. To make spaghetti from their throat tubes, or knead their organs into bread.
The next Saturday, Emily invited me to her house for Cards Against Humanity. I guess I was Rader’s plus one. He said he had to go, so I figured I would. I couldn’t have her take away our weekend time.
We hiked up the front steps to her mansion. The Cincinnati chill slapped our skin. The door was a rich green—the house could’ve belonged to the Addams Family. I bet her parents were the happiest in the world. She opened the door wearing a low-cut V-neck.
“Ew, who invited you?” she said. She giggled at herself, but her lips avoided smiling. I should’ve seen it coming.
Inside the living room, she’d set out a bowl of Fritos and Sprite Zero. Rader looked ready to vomit. We sat there in the firelight and listened to her talk about her day. Something about her renewed driver license not coming in time. It surprised me. Listening to her talk was actually kind of relaxing. There was a lull, so I took a turn speaking: “The waiter hasn’t come by in ages!” I said, gesturing toward the kitchen. Nothing.
“I have to be going.” Rader flung from his couch cushion. “My mom needs me right away.” He strung along the black tile through the front door without another word. Emily looked confused.
“So,” she said through the side of her mouth. “Should we get started?”
She handed me “Testicular Torsion” and “Sarah Palin.” I laughed out a tear—she looked at me as though I’d lost a child. The fire quivered behind my back.
“I just couldn’t get him to listen,” she said.
“Who?”
“Mark.” I began to feel queasy—I hadn’t eaten in hours. She glanced at the front door before continuing. “He refused to have you in the group. I begged him to let you in. He can’t stand keeping it a secret from you anymore. He agreed you have great instincts, but he just didn’t think you were ready. He said the stage would crush you. And he couldn’t stand to watch that happen.” My smile faded.
“Anyway,” she peeled off the first black card, “First category: ‘Daddy, why is Mommy crying?’”
Improvisers pride themselves on their capacity for authentic human connection. In fact, most of the greats have an unbelievable capacity to remember names. They make it a point to call a person by name each time they see them, even five, ten years after a one-time meeting.
How could someone with such a dedication to interpersonal connection deny me my chance to be creative? Did my name mean nothing to him?
A few days later, I came down with a sickness worse than I’d ever experienced. It affected me for at least four weeks, maybe five—at some point, I couldn’t distinguish microbe- induced nausea from my usual anxiety. I kept going to school throughout the whole thing. Emily would smile at me in the hallways, but Mark prevented our paths from crossing. My lungs ached with the sickness, and I woke up each morning to discover a new section of my throat had swollen. I tried to distract myself from the symptoms by thinking about Mark, but thoughts of him only made things worse. So I prohibited myself from thinking of him, even tangentially. Of course, this meant I couldn’t daydream about improv.
But no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find a topic that didn’t somehow trace back to him. We’d talked about all my favorite musicians, writers, actors, directors, painters, even talk show hosts. Not to mention, all art is a form of improvisation. Hell, all human interaction is a form of improvisation.
One night, as I lay in bed trying to pick Mark from my brain, I thought I’d finally found something. My face lit up as I mouthed myself through the possibility. If I could just think of The Beach Boys, I thought. Not as musicians or people with a remote interest in producing creative work. In fact, not even as human beings. Just an intangible concept. If I could think of the intangible concept of The Beach Boys, I could certainly get some enjoyment from that, and in no possible way would it remind me of Mark. But then I remembered—one Saturday afternoon, the third week of our friendship, we’d heard “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” playing on the
beaten-up radio of his Acura. He’d scrolled past the station as he signaled a left turn—he didn’t care much for The Beach Boys. So, of course, that whole idea flopped.
On the last day of regular classes, I saw Emily idling by the library metal detectors at school. I approached her.
“Hi, Emily.” She continued to thumb her phone for a few seconds before looking up at me.
“Oh, it’s you.” Her left lip curved upward into a half-smile. “Hi!” she said. I almost lost my balance. I felt this was the first time we’d had a real conversation. I looked around before speaking.
“Why did you invite me to your house?” I asked. She blushed.
“Mark wanted me to be there when he told you the truth,” she said.
“Do you know what’s going on with him?”
“A lot of things are going on with a lot of people,” she said. I rolled my eyes, and she laughed. “What do you mean specifically?”
“He’s managed to dodge me completely,” I said. “And I should be the one avoiding him.”
She made a calculation in her head before deciding to spill something forward.
“Mark’s scared of you.”
I nearly collapsed. Something felt so right, so powerful, so well-anticipated about it.
Mark Rader feared me.
That night, I walked the tan carpet of my hallways repeating it out loud. It took me some breath to top the sound of my father’s snoring. I laughed so hard that I would cough to the point of light-headedness. There was no way I couldn’t think of Mark in this way. It felt too good to know he had this much respect for me. So I made myself a deal—as soon as the sun went down, I would allow my mind free reign to deal with Mark-related topics. Anything at all that would come to my head.
Sometimes I even dreamed about him. I saw us on his squat living room couch, sitting around the television with his parents and my dad. We were laughing at something Mark had done—he gave a Billy Crystal impression and chuckled in my direction, a subtle worry for respect in his look. “You look marvelous,” he said. I smiled with approval. My dad laughed so hard he cried.
The first day of our final exams, I saw Mark sitting on the tile floor in the third-story hallway. He leaned against one of the lockers, baby-blue backpack padding his shoulder blades.
He drummed his fingertips and gazed at the ceiling.
“What’s up?” I said in a soft voice. I felt like I should help him. My words snapped him to alertness, but then his features relaxed.
“Nothing,” he said, his breath nearing my right thigh. “I’m nervous for our show next week. That’s all. And I had to switch medications.”
t the end of each semester, the Improvisers held a final show.
“Do you want me to come?” I asked.
“Yeah, I do. Sure.” I could see a weight lift from his torso. I had troubling taking a full breath when I spoke—my lungs were getting worse, but strangely, my stomach felt better than ever. My next instinct was to touch his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said. He stretched his eyebrows. If improv scared him, if even I could scare him, then anything could. I felt so guilty for him. Sometimes I think it’s what made me sick in the first place.
“Thanks,” he said with an easy smile.
So I would see the final show. Whether Mark thought I was ready for the stage or not, even if he flat-out didn’t want me in the Improvisers, at least I had my love for the form. Also, as much as I wanted to deny it, he was probably right.
I’d never seen him on the main stage of our school’s theatre. Pointed lights gave a gentle, orange glow to his pale frame. His eyes, planted further into his skull now than ever, scanned the crowd like tiny sprinklers. They landed on me and smiled. The team behind him meant nothing to me now.
“All we need is a one-word suggestion of anything at all,” he said. He was quieter this time.
“Sword!” I shouted. I coughed from the effort.
That’s when the incident happened. Mark glanced my way and began to mime with shaky hands. His face wore a hollow look. I saw him remove from his rear waste the holster he’d described to me so many times before cradling its polished surface in his bedroom that Saturday afternoon. I looked around my row of seats—no one seemed to share my horror. I knew now I’d have to let therapy win. He unsheathed it, and I could see its tip glimmer in the incandescence.
The Improvisers drummed their knees.
He began a scene with Emily.
“I got you a sword for our anniversary, honey!” he said.
I wondered what it would be like to treat every real-life interaction like an improv scene. To live and breathe in a quirky world of fake objects and larger-than-life characters. On one hand, it could bring endless joy, bonding laughter, healing creativity. But on the other hand, it could ruin a life. Now, the crowd roared, smacking thighs in excitement. I lost control of my breath and ran from the theatre. I saw Mark stab himself in the gut with that sword on stage. He called “And, scene!” to the audience, directing his own demise.
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Jeff Friedman is a Pomona senior from St. Louis, Missouri. He's majoring in Media Studies with a minor in Theatre and an emphasis in fiction writing. His idols include Robin Williams, Rashida Jones, and Philip Roth.
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