Thank You, Red Ball!

Over the past several years, I've found that most of what I write ends up being about improv somehow. No matter what I sit down to write about, I use improv vocabulary to help me understand it.

So I've started writing about improv at a new blog called Thank You, Red Ball! The name of the blog is from my favorite improv warm-up, which is all about cultivating gratitude.

Regardless, I have thus far written about:

How improv helped me recover from dysfunctional churches
How much I like cake
How to be a jerk and have no fun ever
How depression effected my playing and faith
How not to be a good team
How improv helps me understand church denominations

If faith/art/play intersection is your thing, come say hi!

Edit:
My friend Rachel asked how this is different from my regular blog.

The answer is: It's more focused, mostly. 

I know that when I subscribe to an RSS for a specific kind of blog, I get frustrated when the writer posts things unrelated to the blog's purpose. If it's a crochet/knitting blog, I don't want updates on how potty training your toddler is going. If it's a theology blog, I'm not interested in pictures of your dog. 

(It's totally different with friends' blogs, when I'm interested in the person rather than the topic. I enjoy reading what's going on in my friends' lives and brains and Instagrams.)
 
Thank You Red Ball is a topical blog focused on improv, so it won't have anything about books I'm reading or things going on at church if they're not directly related to improvisers.

Is this not how everyone else plays?

My friend Liz has a YouTube series called How To Liz, in which she plays a character named Liz.*

I went on HowToLiz this week, though, to teach her how to play Words With Friends:



I think "defenestrate" made me crack because I had just sat in on Molly's Latin class, in which she taught some third graders about cognates of fenestra (window).

In real life, Liz usually beats me at Facebook's Words With Friends, which is essentially online Scrabble. I forget about playing on tiles that are worth lots of points and just focus on making any ol' word.

Liz's version is actually kind of hard. It makes me think of the improv game, "Malapropism," in which you point to things and say what they're not. It stretches a muscle in your brain that's easy to neglect -- the muscle of naming what is possible instead of what is obvious. That is a particular strength of Liz's.


*It's a little like how Stephen Colbert plays a character named Stephen Colbert, except that Liz hasn't bought a SuperPAC. If she did -- she does know about politics -- she would probably spend most of the PAC money on temporary tattoos.