Prompted by Anonymous

I’ll be honest with you, it was terrifying.

Which is so, so silly in retrospect, because my first improv show was with a team of twelve (TWELVE!) other people who had been doing it for not much longer than I had, in a Penn State campus lecture hall to about 40 people who had also probably never seen an improvised comedy show before.

I WAS TERRIFIED.

This is mostly because I had put a HUGE importance on doing comedy before I had gotten to Penn State. I was starving for a creative outlet that my high school couldn’t provide. I just wanted to do it, you know? Comedy. Performing, I guess. Anything, really, I didn’t care. And I got to Penn State and didn’t have any friends because I was a real sad-sack so I found this group in a database search of groups on campus. And I just sorta showed up.

It’s also so silly because college improv teams are the absolute worst. They are worse than going to the dentist. They are worse than “Whitney” on NBC. They are a bunch of kids who are starved for a creative outlet that their high schools didn’t provide and had been told that they were very funny for a very long time, but are too lazy to write or prepare a show and think improv is easy and everybody wants to watch them do it.

But, you know what? It’s fucking fun, too. To do it. Not always to watch. But to be fair, before I graduated, we tried to make the shows less masturbatory and tried to make them as fun as possible for the people who were good enough to come out at watch us every other Sunday night. I think we did a pretty good job.

That first show, though… whoo boy. That was atrocious.

For as dumb and stupid as college improv was (and is), I was really, really nervous to put myself out there like that. I don’t care if you’re in front of 40 or 40,000, if you’re the best comedian in the world or the sad-sack old man who is trying stand-up for the first time in the back of a shitty dive bar in Brooklyn, putting yourself out there like that, for the first time, when you have absolutely no idea how it’s going to go, is brave. Not, like, go off to war and lay down your life for your country brave. But still.

I remember entering, not to any sort of music or fanfare, but with a pre-scripted bit where we were all on one of the famed Penn State campus tours (it was the beginning of the fall semester), a half-hearted bit that just sort of petered out until one of us, probably Jeff, said, “Welcome to Full Ammo Improv!” and prompted the audience to clap for us.

Then we stumbled through like two dozen short-form improv games, the type you might see on Whose Line Is It Anyway? (“You’re a doctor, and he is your patient, and you have to say each line with the next letter of the alphabet, and then you go home and question your lives and maybe kill yourself.”)

Then the show ended and everyone came up and told us what a great job we did and we went to an all-night diner and had fries and it was the most fun I’d ever had.

College improv shows suck but without them I wouldn’t be who I am today: an unfunny hack with just enough of a sense of superiority to shit on college improv shows.

Prompted by Anonymous

The way I look at it, finding someone you have a good creative relationship with is rare. And finding really good friends is also rare. So finding a group of friends you can collaborate with is like, double rare. It’s like the shiny foil Charizard Pokemon card. (Murder me.)

Sometimes you try to be creative with your friends, but you realize maybe your sensibilities don’t click and what you’re making sucks. Or you might find a good creative relationship with somebody but you don’t really click as buddies. Both are perfectly acceptable relationships.

But the special part of having friends whose creative juices make a nice tasty goulash with yours (ew) is that, in addition to wanting to create the best stuff, you’re emotionally invested in the other people. You want to see them grow and succeed, just as you want them to help you grow and succeed.

Critiquing someone else’s work is always difficult. But we all understand that it’s for the greater good, that we are all doing this stupid comedy/writing/improv/bullshit stuff to learn and grow and fulfill ourselves without drugs (there are still some drugs).

Also, if you’re friends with the person you’re working with, you figure out how to critique them without pushing the freak-out buttons or the hurtful buttons. You’ve gotta figure out the best way to go about. Like I said before, just Don’t Be A Dick. There’s gotta be trust on both sides, and that trust comes from the friendship. I trust that if I give notes on someone’s work, they’re not going to take it the wrong way. Flip-side of that is that the other person trusts me that I’m not going to shit all over their stuff (to their face).

In addition to all of that, I just got really, really lucky.

BEER FOOTBALL LOOSE WOMEN AND NO TEARS

Prompted by allimuffin

This one cut to the core. In a good way! Congrats, you sharp soul-cutting knife, you.

It cuts, because I’ve been thinking about this recently. Not a lot, but occasionally. I think it went along with the whole, “you’re not writing enough, you dumb idiot” reflection. How can you write about something if you don’t have a philosophy? Even shitty writers have philosophies; usually they are “EVERYONE WANTS TO HEAR WHAT I SAY.”

So every time I went to answer the question, I came up blank. But it seems the clock has stopping ticking. Shit.

Well, I originally started writing this by saying how I had all these mini-philosophies in life and about how it’s important to not focus on one philosophy but you know what? Nah, screw that. I realized everything kept boiling down to one simple concept: DON’T BE A DICK.

It should be pretty self-explanatory, but it absolutely floors me how many people are dicks every single day.

Everything in life boils down to “don’t be a dick.” You want world peace? Just don’t be a dick. Golden rule? Don’t be a dick! Even the Ten Commandments subscribe to the notion of “don’t be a dick,” but the one telling you not to be a dick is God, and sometimes, he is a MASSIVE DICK and so are his followers, so, you know, take that with a grain of salt.

And you know what? Nobody is perfect. Sometimes, you end up being a dick when you don’t mean to be a dick. That’s okay! If you make an effort to apologize, and undo a dick thing, people, as long as THEY are also not being dicks, will be able to see that you’re not a dick. I truly believe that. Of course, I also believe most people can tell when you’re being a dick but on the surface trying to be nice. That’s still being a dick. Don’t do that.

In fact, sometimes making a big deal about someone else being a dick makes you a dick. What? Ryan, you dick. Let me explain. Yesterday, I was looking at the Macy’s windows on 34th and Broadway, and I was kind of just standing there in the middle of the walking path. I was being a dick. But when a lady shoved me out of the way and said, “Take a fucking picture!” well, she became the dick. But now we are two dicks! TWO DICKS! Swordfighting jokes etc. etc.

I do actually have a few smaller things, not philosophies really, but things I try to keep in the back of my head besides constant shame and self-hatred. I usually remind myself around this time of the year how I’ve failed at these things and then make new resolutions that I also end up failing. Ultimately, they end up having to do with just being a well-rounded person: slowing down, creating more, being balanced. Philosophies don’t account for Netflix Instant though so it all ends up flying out the window because Breaking Bad.

Prompted by Anonymous.

Notes: These are in no particular order. They are the first 9 I thought of. Ten is a more round number but screw it, all lists are 10 long so mine is 9 long. Also, I realize that some of these characters would be considered under age, but they are not real, so imagine them of-age if that makes you feel better.

Wilma Flintstone. She’s svelte, probably because she eats wild game and runs from dinosaurs all day. I would wait for Fred to be out of the picture though, I wouldn’t fuck wit dat. Dude’s built. Wilma’s got the cute red-head thing going for her, too. Also, blah blah blah pearl necklace.

Meg Griffin from Family Guy. She’s nerdy and probably inexperienced, but she’s also cute and brunettes are sort of my jam. She’s probably got decent taste in music at the very least.

Eve from Wall-E. Eve is straight up, serious and professional. Unfuckwittable. But deep down, she’s also a sweetheart. She would bring home the bacon and then come home and get cuddly to some musical on Netflix Instant (her choice). Plus she looks like a Mac, the sexiest of products.

Blondie, Dagwood’s wife. She is a newspaper cartoon, not an animated cartoon, but there was no stipulation here so it counts. She is the cartoon world’s closest thing to a Marilyn Monroe-esque sex pot.

Misty from Pokemon. Ditzy in a good way, and probably a bit of a freak, though I am probably thinking less of the character and more of the ample, glorious cosplay images available online. (Seriously, Google it.)

Any female superhero from Justice League or X-Men. Wonder Woman and Storm are obvious choices, but Rogue would be straight up fun, were it not for the you-die-if-you-touch-her-for-long thing. There’s probably some great pent-up aggression there though if you’re willing to figure out the logistics.

Patti Mayonnaise. Classic girl next door. Again, only if Doug was out of the picture, because if he found out he might become so heartbroken he’d just snap and who knows what he would do. Think about it. That dude had some serious issues with the multiple personalities and delusions and what-not. Whatever was in that journal would most likely become a Unibomer-esque manifesto.

Leela from Futurama. She’s smart, sarcastic, and doesn’t take shit from anybody. She’s banging, but totally attainable, because Fry totes got with her. Just need to get over that one eye thing.

Josie and/or the Pussycats. Because, come ONNNNN.

Prompted by markmccoley

Okay!

Towards the end of my Junior year, there was this ridiculous application that really caught fire on Facebook. It was basically a way to send your “friends” messages, completely anonymously, with absolute zero traceability.

The idea, ostensibly, was to say nice things to your friends that you just didn’t have the courage to say to their face. For all of its optimism, this pretense was particularly pathetic; the idea that we had gotten to a place in society where we needed anonymous Facebook messaging just to say something nice about someone we purportedly already knew well enough to be Facebook friends with was laughable.

Under the surface, I believe that more people installed the app for a different reason: to hear from their unrequited loves about how the feelings were actually reciprocated, and how the subject was just too ashamed or embarrassed to admit this earlier. You see ads for this kind of exploitation all the time: YOUR CRUSH HAS A MESSAGE FOR YOU! CLICK HERE TO RECEIVE!

But I believe the real motivation behind this was to allow people to be their meanest. And to tap into the weird masochistic tendencies people have when it comes to hearing the truth about them from their closest friends (there are apparently now several websites that allow you to send a link to a form for people to fill out anonymously). This is why I believe this app to have been created by the Joker, or some like-minded evil genius.

It was a weird dichotomy to explore. People seemed to be biting at the bit not just to unleash emotional bile on their friends, but to get it in return. There was even a functionality to respond to a message while retaining the sender’s anonymity, in a move that I can only imagine was put in place to help encourage such destructive tendencies.

Lots of people had these boxes. I did. And I even acquiesced to the urge to shit on someone that I knew (but was not particularly friendly with). It was a lot like doing a drug; it felt weird, but also kinda good. Cathartic. But I still knew it was unhealthy. And a bit of a rush. But ultimately, sick.

I wish I still had the message I receive one day not long before the end of that spring semester in ‘08. I’ll do my best to paraphrase for you. It was something along the lines of:

Not everyone cares for your jokes and not all of your closest friends believe the nice-guy routine. Maybe next semester when you come back you could be a little careful about the people you claim to “help,” you asshole.

I know that’s not completely right, in fact, it may be way off from the actual message, but I remember what hurt most was the sentiment. It wasn’t a baseless insult about my appearance or my voice or whatever, it was a direct attack on my character. That I had somehow hurt someone close to me by trying to “help” them (I specifically remember the word “help”) and still coming off like an asshole.

If you’ve made it this far in this project, or if you’ve known me for longer than 45 minutes, you’re probably aware that I am positively RIDDLED with anxieties about my relationships. I am, in fact, known to do occasional relationship “check-ups” — conversations with people just to make sure “we’re still cool” if I happen to misinterpret a phone call or text message. It’s a sickness.

So needless to say, hearing that a close friend of mine actually had this deep-seeded resentment cut to the core of me.

I remember foregoing sarcasm and responding genuinely, asking what I had done to this person, and if there was anything I could to do make up for it. I was told quite simply there was nothing I could do, just to be more careful.

Okay, well, fuck you, buddy. I know I’m an asshole. I really try not to be an asshole (REALLY, I PROMISE YOU THIS IS TRUE!). So when I genuinely ask how to be less of an asshole, the least you could do is guide me in the right direction. But still, I’m sorry you think I was an asshole. Although I’m now flying blind here, I will try to be less of an asshole.

That was not a response I sent, just something I just now came up with.

In fact I deleted that box and to this day have no idea who sent it or why and ended up finishing my college career with most of my relationships in tact, and not getting shot. So hopefully, either a) I made good in this person’s eyes or b) they dropped the issue or c) we’ve stopped talking and I just hadn’t noticed. This is a distinct possibility since, as previous mentioned, I’m an asshole. I’m sorry.

I prefer my pizza plain. Maybe sometimes with pepperoni IF I’M FEELING ADVENTUROUS.

Thank you to the five people who already submitted prompts on the first day. I love all of them and will try to get to one more today. The rest I want to spread out because after that I probably won’t get anymore and this project will begin its slow, inevitable death.

From Anonymous.

First of all, I love that this is phrased like I’m in a relationship with New York City. It’s not a novel approach, but it’s true, isn’t?

New York really is this huge, personal entity with which each person can have their own intimate relationship. It does seem like it has its own personality, made up of all the good parts, the bad parts, the look of it, the feel and smell of it, the story and history (including your chapter in that story), the previous lovers and the emotional/physical scars you can either choose to embrace and ignore.

For the most part, most of what you could say about New York applies in a relationship. It may be a one-sided relationship, but I’ve been in my fair share of those, too.

So how’s it going? Fortunately, I’d say ‘well.’

I moved into New York just over two years ago; it was right before Thanksgiving of 2009. I was only out of college for 6 months, and I was freelancing at Asylum. This was the ‘honeymoon period,’ so-called. I really enjoyed getting to explore New York and get to know what the daily grind and atmosphere was like once you were really entrenched. I always had a crush on New York growing up; my family would always come around this time of year to see the Christmas Spectacular in Radio City, visit the tree, FAO Schwartz, etc., in honor of Christmas and my brother’s birthday (the 18th).

Actually living in/with New York is a totally different story, though. There have certainly been ups and downs, and many, many moments where I’ve drunkenly ranted about how I was going to leave New York forever or how New York has done nothing for me. Sometimes it feels like New York cheated on you, if one of your friends achieved any sort of success that you would like to achieve. The jealousy manifests itself in this weird misdirection towards the city itself. Like it somehow “chose” someone else over you. As if it owes you anything.

But then I realize, New York has given me a shit ton. The day I write this is actually my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend, who I would not have found were it not for New York. New York has also served as a post-college congregating spot for almost all of my college friends, giving our relationships a secondary boost that others are not afforded when they go their separate ways. And I have a decent job that’s not a complete reversal from what I really want to do. So there’s that.

But I mean, it’s also really easily to over-romanticize living in the city, which is something I’m reminded of every time a bum vomits on the subway. It’s not enough of a relationship where I’d be willing to hold his hair back.

From Anonymous.

During my freshman year at Penn State, the theatre department offered a discount on a trip into New York City, which included tickets to some artsy-fartsy Off-Off-OFFFF Broadway play about a female serial killer. I can’t remember if it was Aileen Wuornos or the chick Charlize Theron plays in ‘Monster’ - I DO remember the play was not good. (On reflection, it could have been a fine production, marred simply by my categorization of it being “artsy-fartsy” before the damned thing even started.)

I wasn’t a part of the Penn State theatre program, but in high school I was known affectionately to the school’s more athletic students as “The Theatre Fag,” so since I had no friends at Penn State (surprise!), I identified with the kids in the program and signed up for the trip.

Part of the itinerary included downtime to explore the city. Instead of going sightseeing, or experiencing new food, or taking in Central Park, this gang of jaded future “actors” wound up hunting for discount DVDs in a now-defunct FYE store somewhere near Central Park. I very distinctly remember wanting to do “normal, non-touristy” things in New York City, as though we were pretending that we already lived in New York City, and thus had no reason to do anything but what normal people do, which apparently is go shopping for discount DVDs in an FYE store. (Now that I live in New York, I know now that New Yorkers mostly just suppress the urge to punch the closest person standing next to them at any given moment.)

It was late, and the store was nearly empty. We were downstairs when he walked in. I didn’t see him right away; in fact, I wasn’t aware he was in the building until one of the two guys I was with slipped up behind me and whispered into my ear, like a Secret Service agent informing the President of an issue of national security, the phrase “Nick Cage is here.” As though we had been expecting him.

It took me a moment to register what he meant. It was also strange that he chose the abbreviated version “Nick,” since any media outlet I’ve ever heard of usually refers to him as “Nicolas.” It had a weird familiarity to it, like we had met a thousand times. “Oh, Nick’s here! Thank you, Jeeves. Please show him to the parlour, and pour him a brandy already!”

I looked up, and sure enough, there was Nicolas Cage. Dr. Stanley Goodspeed himself. When you have your first random celebrity encounter, what strikes you first is how “normal” they seem. This is unsurprising in retrospect. You always hear people saying, “Celebrities are just like us!” Well, they are and they aren’t. There’s something weird about being able to instantly recognize someone you’ve never met, and something weirder about seeing them with slightly disheveled hair and a plain white v-neck tee. I could go on and on about the psychological effects of celebrity, etc., but I’ll leave it at just, “Nick Cage was there, and he was Nick Cage.”

The other two guys made a bee-line, but I insisted on playing it cool, so I figured I’d turn around and pretend to look at whatever rack of DVDs was behind me, then slowly inch my way over and, “Oh, look who it is! Nick Cage! I didn’t see you there!” This plan turned out to be a bust when I turned around and realized I was looking at the children’s DVDs. It’s hard to play it cool when you’re pretending to be shopping for a Dora the Explorer disc. So I said, “Screw it,” and joined my friends.

The conversation had already started, so I joined late. What I will always remember about Mr. Cage was his introduction. When I sheepishly joined the group, before I could introduce myself, he stuck out his hand for a shake, flashed a huge, perfect white smile, and introduced himself first. “Hi, I’m Nick Cage.”

He said hello to ME. As if I were the important one. Like he was excited that I decided to join the conversation. I just hope he wasn’t disappointed when I replied with. “Heh, Iah erm Ryah Simmonsloveyourmovies.”

I can’t stress enough how perfect his teeth are. I guess that’s not a big surprise, given that he’s a huge celebrity, but I suppose I had never seen the teeth of someone for whom being attractive is a job requirement. I was dazzled.

The actual conversation was relatively uneventful. When it came up that we were “actors,” he took the very Mark Twainian approach of reminding us not to let schooling get in the way of our education. It seems like a simple sentiment now, but when you’re an impressionable 20-year-old and you’re speaking to the man who saved the world in several action movies, it’s wildly profound.

We noticed he was shopping with his son, so we didn’t keep him long. We didn’t ask for pictures or an autograph; we simply said thank you for taking the time to speak with us and went on our way.

***

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet several celebrities through my job since then. I’ve interviewed a few directly, but in most cases, I am usually just on hand and have just enough time with them to say a quick “hello.” Nine times out of ten, they’re incredibly nice, humble, and “normal” people. I’m convinced any time a celebrity is heard of being a dick, it’s because he or she had a shitty day and just want to go home. It happens to all of us. If I had TMZ up my ass every time I gave someone on the subway some lip service because I had a crappy day, I’d probably look like Mel Gibson.

Nick Cage was the first reality check I had about a lot of things; about the social landscape of New York (“Celebrities shop at FYE, TOO!”), about celebrity, about just being nice to people. I wish it made for a better story, but I am content in knowing that Nicolas Cage is just plain cool.

***

On the way out of the nearly-empty store, we spotted him again at the cashier, paying for a STACK of xBox games for his kid (and not, as some people have asked, a stack of his own movies). I said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Cage!” He gave a polite wave back.

My friend Dave elbowed me in the ribs. “You’re going to blow his cover!” he said.

“What cover? The guy’s not a super-hero,” I replied. Well, not totally, anyway.

**********

Thanks to Anonymous (read: Steve) for this submission. Off to a good start!

…that while it terrifies me to my very core, I have set the prompting link to allow for anonymous submissions.

This one time, there was a Facebook add-on thing that allowed you to receive anonymous notes from your “friends”. That was probably the 2nd worst idea anyone ever had. I say 2nd-worst, because me adding it to my profile had to have been mankind’s biggest blunder. I received a message that cut to the core of me and actually kept me up for two nights.

It’s something I’d be willing to talk about… IF PROMPTED!

Have at it, you scallawags.