What can I say? It’s been a bit of a $h177y week. Trauma guilt (see comments on that post if you want to hear about the new turd that dropped this week) is a dirty job. Dirty jobs call for Dirty Jobs.
I’ve been watching a lot of reality t.v. this week because that’s where my brain is at. I have been gravitating towards things that are less about people – because eff people – and more about the situations they are in: Naked and Afraid (survival skills), Deadliest Catch (crab fishing) and Dirty Jobs (hopefully self-explanatory.)
I just learned from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs that, in the historical Middle East, bedouins would consume fresh camel dung as a treatment for dysentery. Apparently, it was kind of like an old-school fecal transplant: top up the substandard human gut bacteria with some powerhouse camel bacteria and kick dysentery’s @$$ before it kicks your own. (Note: this only works with fresh camel dung. Using the older stuff just leads to more problems!)
I buy the concept. I do have to wonder who in history, however, first came up with that idea in the era before you could test such things in a sterile lab environment without any actual consuming required. Who was that human who first looked at the wrong end of a camel and asked, “I wonder what will happen if I eat the things that came out of this animal’s butt? Oh, hey! Maybe it will make things no longer come out of my butt!” This feels like it should have become a cautionary tale for a girl who claims to be down to try anything once that there is sometimes such a thing as being too adventurous.
That said, our assignment for Improv class this week is to be incredibly mindful of how we do everyday activities. Like, how we don’t grab a wine glass with a fist like a cup. We don’t even truly grab our cup like we often pantomime that we grab our “cup.” We actually flip our hand upside down and hold a wine glass underneath the wide part of the glass. We do ham-fist our mugs, however. It’s the little details like these distinctions in object work in Improv that really distinguish the professionals from the amateurs. Realistic pantomime is so much more believable than sloppy pantomime. Immersion is so much more fun for an audience than constantly breaking the Fourth Wall. Our assignment is thus to slow down and really pay attention to how we do the things we do each day. Mindfulness: it’s not just for trauma drama anymore.
Given that it is also IBS Awareness Month and I have already once legitimately performed in a scene wherein I was acting as someone straining on the toilet* for most of the scene, I have to wonder how far I should take the method acting?! Is there ever a point in bathroom humor where the pantomime becomes a little too uncanny valley? I mean 10-25% of us have been there. Probably more of us have if we’re spoonies. Ehlers-Danlos and other disorders come along with gut motility issues as a buy-one-get-one-free.
Is it funnier for an IBS-sufferer audience member to see the pantomime done well? Because on stage, at least, it isn’t them languishing in the compromising situation? Or does it just make it sadder to see it done wrong anyway? An actor doing it wrong implies they don’t have the lived experienced to do it right. It implies that even after the actor completed a specific assignment in which they observed how they completed everyday activities, they still never had the opportunity to “experience” what realistic bathroom distress looks and sounds like? I’ll never know. I have had the recent opportunities to observe the real situation in action. I “pushed” my limits in the name of accuracy on the throne and on the stage…
However, if there is a line for realism in Improv potty humor, I’m pretty sure that it stops somewhere around camel dung as a treatment for dysentery. The fact that I now know that fact might very well show up in one of my Improv scenes someday. We are encouraged to draw inspiration wherever we can. I will not, however, be observing how to pantomime that action realistically.
Happy Saturday everyone. Hoping your week ahead – like your stool – passes quickly and isn’t too hard to handle! In honor of IBS Awareness Month, which has periwinkle as its color, “digest” these three offerings and find the mistakes. There’s a periwinkle-and-brown Where’s Whoopsie for the awareness campaign, and I include two others that have brown and yellow. Because why not? When have I ever quit while I’m “behind”?
*For anyone wondering: the Improv game in which I engaged in some potty-mouth humor was a freeze-type game. Actors waiting in the wings would watch a scene until the on-stage actors naturally contorted into some sort of crazy physical pose, then they would call “Freeze.” They would tag out the actors, assume their poses exactly, and start a brand-new scene starting from whatever those poses suggested. I had been partially squatting and looking angry – about to rush a dude in a bar – at the time freeze was called. The replacement actor went with the other obvious solution for what two folks near to each other, squatting, and looking stressed could be. The new scene with him and me involved him coaching me through a “difficult food baby delivery” like a Lamaze coach. I just had to “go with it” it, as they say…
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Need a recap of anything I’m talking about in any post? Check out the Glossary of Terms.