Improv Fun

We’d been learning about improv from Ken Rundell, and didn’t think much of anything more ’til we came upon an evening with Ken, Bill Ott, and Annunziata Scarpino improv-ing for us at Briarwood Lodge. They are part of a group that meets every week to learn and do improv comedy.

This night the three were a small troupe of their own. As it turned out, the stuff actually happening right in front of us was funnier than those of us in Ken’s class thought it would be. Others who’d come to see the performance were laughing, too. It was– honest– good fun.

Briarwood Lodge owner Pat Fitzsimmons was most gracious in providing a spaghetti dinner, gratis, for those who had come to see the show. Here she is, left, with Bob and Sondra Torchia, in a bit of a blurry shot for which my camera apologizes.

My partner and I had no more walked in than we were introduced to the Torchias. You may recognize Sondra from the acting she does, presenting eight famous, infamous, and not-so-well-known women of Arkansas. Sondra says she researches the women at the Historical Society, and once she gets to know them, presents them in monologue. She performs in the schools, and elsewhere around the state. Some of us are hoping that Sondra might be one of the next performers at Briarwood.

After dinner, we were led to a large room upstairs that served as comfortable, intimate, theater. Sitting next us on a laid-back couch were Sandra Ostrander and Debbie Frisbie, who stood most properly up for their picture. Sandra currently does the publication for the Good Shepherd Humane Society but she is also a prize-winning poet.

We also ran into Sharilyn, who wanted to make sure we knew about her bee video on YouTube. We hadn’t seen it, but she said bees were her thing these days:

The blur in my camera lost lots of other pictures I’d snapped for the evening but I did get one of Ken and Annunziata playing the couple from a faraway land who spoke a language unknown to be translated by Bill. The fun of this improv game is that the language is quite genuinely gibberish, wonderful nonsense syllables spoken with all the inflection one can muster. A translator (in this case, Bill) then makes weird sense– as in using one word to “translate” a long harangue. Here then are our foreign couple at improv.

So now that you’ve seen the CAPC publicist in his other life– Ken has been a professional comedian– we’d like to invite you to join us in improv.

It’s Tuesday evening, 6:30pm, at Main Stage. Don’t worry about coming in after it’s already started. We’re all just learning as we go.