Musings of an Honourary Canadian

Based on an Australian hit, and hosted by David Alan Grier, "Thank God You're Here" has improv actors put into costume, pushed through a door and thrust into a set with unfamiliar characters and situations.

I've seen bits of the Oz show on Youtube and it looks interesting.

Monday: travel day back from OGWW '05 in Toronto. Which meant a 2-hour drive from the Austin airport back home, after a full day of flying. (My sister, when bringing my car to he airport for me to drive home, parked in the $9 lot instead of the $2 garage. Thank goodness I still had some US money left!)

Tuesday: sleepwalk through work. We have three new cities' databases to work through. My boss was on vacation this week so I had to cover for him as technical support point person.

Also Tuesday: lil_ms_drama took improvwheels off life support (Cliff stopped breathing right before Improvaoke on Friday night due to a heart problem. Full story here.)

Wednesday: While I was at lunch, my assistant quit. She was overqualified for this job, and we speculate she took this job to have a job until she found the job she really wanted. Also while I was at lunch, a problem with one of our DOT contracts blew up and I had to take on that work. Also went to Angleton for improvwheels' family visitation. lil_ms_drama is devastated, as you might expect, but was holding up pretty well.

Thursday: Continued full tilt on DOT project, went to Angleton for improvwheels' funeral.

Today: Wrap up my part of work on DOT project, handing the rest back to my boss to finish this weekend. Collapsed in tired heap at home.

It's just not Friday night without improv. lil_ms_drama told me she will keep the troupe going, and that we'll be back on stage in a couple of weeks. I expect she'll need more time than that. In either case, we're all standing behind her.

I will force myself to sleep in tomorrow.

Last night's show was good. We did our usual longform followed by a freeze-tag/montage. Light crowd, which was to be expected considering we were the first act, and that we were on at the incredibly early hour of 6 p.m.

Afterward, we (several of us) saw ImprovOlympic's The Reckoning. Then I caught my train and went home.

Today? Catching up on sleep, and hitting Movie Trading Company in Plano to spend entirely too much money...

I'm in town for the Dallas Comedy Festival. My troupe, the Young Urban Comedians Club, has two performance slots:

Thursday night at 8
Friday night at 6

both at the Dinosaur Room at the West End Marketplace. Shows are $10 each.

Hope to see you there!

improvwheels and lil_ms_drama, you'd be interested in this article. I've been to the Bad Dog, and the space is nice. They do what they do well.

Vancouver has one. Winnipeg has one. New York and Chicago have several. Toronto has had one for two years now, but many people don't know about it. Yet.

The Bad Dog Theatre belongs to a rare breed -- it's the city's only space dedicated to improv, the art of performing without a script in front of an audience. The non-profit theatre has done what many arts groups only dream of: turning a small storefront on the Danforth into a theatre with two performance spaces where they run several shows a week and a range of training workshops. And the theatre, which celebrated its second anniversary with a bash this past Saturday, has become a hub for the local scene.

article continues...