Notes on Camp: Day Six

“I'm taking an awful risk, Vader. This had better work.” 

- Governor Tarkin, "Star Wars" (1977)

The improv club was created as a way for the campers to show off their skills in a manner in which they did not need to feel the pressure of an audience of anyone other than their peers (i.e., their parents). If a comment is accidentally blue – trust me, I actively discourage this – no harm, no foul.

This year, however, we haven’t taken the same amount of time to develop these skills. It all comes down to their innate ability to riff, the characters they have been thinking about since last week (we haven’t actually played with any of them to date), a set of camper-generated prompts in the form of episode titles, and the heavy hand of the narrator: me.

So, anyway. We had a lot to do today, and a lot planned. Short scenes and Shakespeare in the morning, final improv rehearsal in the afternoon. What we did not expect was that the fire alarms would be tested for over an hour and a half. The sound was loud and disturbed – and it was ninety degrees outside. We found the band room to be slightly less horribly loud, and played games and, yes, practiced some improv, until lunch.

These things happen. How you cope with them is what matters.