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Last night was the decider. After my experience a couple of Friday nights ago in the improv festival that had no clear leadership, no real focus, and lots of people I didn't know playing around me, I was starting to think that maybe I'm not cut out for improv, or performance of any type. I know, I know, I performed for 10 years and was almost always nervous but I never felt like I couldn't go on because of it. Something happened after we split up. I forgot a line in a play I was doing at a community theater and that scared the hell out of me. A while back when I performed as the musical accompaniment to M's one-woman show, I had stage fright feelings, and I've felt that when I've performed with G and with other people. Though never with S.

My new goal is to get S to take some improv classes with me, because he and I have chemistry and stage presence like nobody's business, and when we're sitting around smoking weed (or not), we make each other laugh. He tends to fear the stage as a starting point (not the same as when we were making music together, for some reason), so it'll take some work, but that's my goal and my dream. But that's not what I'm writing about right now.

Last night was the first official performance by TNM improv theater's house troupe - "the standout students," as they call us, and them, the two teachers (who were both absent from the horror show a couple of Fridays ago). It went very well. The format was a little weird, unfamiliar (guests told a story and were asked questions by the other half of our troupe and we had to improvise off of what was said) but my goal for the night was merely to get on the stage and not freeze up or end up in a corner, on the verge of vomiting or crying.

None of those things happened!

TNM has another show on Friday evening, and more in the coming months; I didn't commit to any of them, and said I wouldn't, until I found out how last night was gonna go. At the end of the night, I said to T, "Okay, I'm on for Friday." She said, "Oh! That makes me so happy; that's the thing I was most interested in happening tonight."

It wasn't a brilliant show - and in fact I was only onstage a handful of times (something I discovered: with six people on a team, there aren't a lot of opportunities to be in a scene; you really have to work to get out there before somebody else does) - but it went smoothly. I played a muppet, a stripper (as S pointed out, "a Bob Fosse-style stripper"), a karaoke machine, among other things. It was fun.

Phew!