Saturday, September 09, 2006

Dreams Do Come True!


So Reuben Williams is one of my favorite improv groups at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre. It has some of my favorite people from Dillinger on it and is just generally a very funny and very good group (the crazies make improv fun people). So their Saturday night show is called "As Seen on TV" and in the second half of the show they take a member of the audience, go through his or her wallet, and make tv shows for a network that person would watch. Granted it often makes fun of the person more than making shows he or she would actually be interested it, but its still pretty cool to watch because A. truth is stranger than fiction and B. You and you life get to be the suggestion for over 25 min. of improv.

So for over a year I have been trying to be the person they would pick. I was either not in a good place to be seen by the person picking, directly behind some fat lady so it looked like I was trying to get her picked (besides being obstructed), or just not quick enough. Well finally this past Saturday and on my last trip in to UCB before I leave for Vienna it happened, I was chosen and it was great.

There were some fun scenes with a translator character speaking in "beep bop boops" and helping people order food on the streets of New York and more interestingly speaking with a Jamaican maid, who spoke English, for her employer (also in "beep bop boops") and convincing her to perform oral sex on her employer. Then there was the cola museum, based on the receipt for the Constitutional museum they have in Philly that I went to with my brother, which was just really dull, so a guy pulled a knife and demanded some dirt on the museum. By far the best though were the St. Petersburg Metro scenes. I had had a St. Petersburg metrocard in my wallet so I explained how the doors on the subway cars in Russia don't open once they close, even if there is stuff in them. Sure its dangerous, but it means people don't throw themselves into the subway car's closing doors. So in the show there was a great scene about woman getting stuck between the doors repeatedly but not moving when they arrived at stops (cleverly mad up ones at that) and just having the crap kicked out of her by the doors. Then at the hospital she was also attacked by doors. Oh it was great, and the show was called "Russian Transit Mishaps," which of course made me think of Ruth.

It truly was my own network with mentions of Kazakhstan, cabs in New York that worked like the ones in Russian and Kazakhstan, and plenty of maiming. Yeah maiming.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow... to think *I* go to see... the IAN NETWORK!

That was a good time, and I'm glad you wrote it down. Now I'm scared of subway doors with Russian accents.

dos-zvee-DAHN-yuh,
Eddik