Okay, for those of you who don’t read past the first paragraph, here’s the actionable intelligence:

• The Improv for RPGs workshop is Saturday from 10am to 1pm! This is basically all the character development stuff from Improv for Introverts distilled down into a three-hour intensive. Absolutely no experience with gaming or improv required, so if you want a shot of Mercury but can’t commit to the six-week class, this is a great introduction.

• If instead you want the full-strength Mercury Improv experience, the next session of our flagship class Improv for Introverts starts on Wednesday April 1st and runs for six weeks. This is still the best class in town for non-performers: a low-pressure, super-supportive introduction to the fundamentals. If the idea of taking improv fills you with anxiety, this class was literally made for you.

• Also, don’t forget the buddy system! When you sign up two people at once for a class, you’ll get a substantial discount (and you’ll also have a friend with you in class for moral support). Check it out!

For those of you who don’t recognize her, the rock legend pictured above is Joan Jett. I thought of her this week because of a monologue she delivers in the 1987 Paul Schrader movie Light of Day. Jett and Michael J. Fox (badly miscast but probably the reason the movie got made) play siblings in a bar band who become estranged.

I haven’t seen the movie since it came out, so I may be misremembering this, but toward the end the Fox character goes to see his sister play with her new band, and during their conversation backstage Jett’s character explains why she does this.

She says the guys she’s playing with think they’re gonna hit it big, but she knows better; they’re not going anywhere. She’s not playing music to get rich or famous. She’s doing it because she likes the way it makes her feel.

Most people have a list of things that they don’t love doing but do them because they provide benefits. (Depending on who you are: exercise, meditation, budgeting, car maintenance, serving on committees, visiting family.) But it’s striking to me how often enjoyable things are pitched as a means to an end instead of as worthwhile in themselves.

The most obvious example is how we talk about education. One way to think about it is as an exciting adventure in getting to know the world and exploring how your brain works. But in the US we tend to treat it solely as job training. It’s that, too, but that’s such a narrow, crimped way of looking at it, and it turns one of the greatest parts of being human into something like a necessary evil.

Or the Baby Mozart craze from a few years back, when it was believed that playing classical music for your infant would somehow juice their cognitive development. Sure, maybe, but also you could play babies music because, uh, human beings enjoy music?

As someone who’s always convinced I’m in desperate need of self-improvement, I’m very susceptible to this thinking. I tend to try to justify everything I want to do as something that will make me a better person. Sometimes it requires real effort just to disentangle what I want to do from what I think I should want to do.

And so I realize that if I were smart I’d really lean hard on selling improv as making you smarter, braver, more flexible, and better at interacting with other people. Which it does, so I do mention it.

But I never want to make that the main pitch. Partly because I can’t guarantee the results, but mostly because if improv is nothing else, it’s about being completely in the moment, and trying to learn improv while continually monitoring your results defeats the purpose.

So for whatever it’s worth, I feel like my job is to create a space where people don’t have to worry about achieving or developing or enriching or empowering and can just … be. And hopefully, once they’re just being present with themselves and other people, they like the way that makes them feel.

Put another way, my job is to help everybody (including me) find their inner Joan Jett. I can think of worse ways to make a living.

Later,
John