Lesbian Dancing After The Show: An Improviser's Non Improvised Life

Introduction

Every time a friend asks me about my theater life, I always say the book I would write would be called "Lesbian Dancing After The Show."

Always an inside joke for the people who lived through it: My husband Hans. Those cast members from The Underground Theatre Conspiracy in Seattle. Myself:

Thank you for coming to our show! We are here every Friday and Saturday Night ...and remember, Lesbian Dancing after the show!

Another stereotype checked off for you.Lesbians dance. And they like to be announced at your show just in case the meager audience you have just happens to 1) contain lesbians, 2) like lesbians, or 3) never knew that lesbians danced.

Every Friday and Saturday night, for eight weeks. I'm somewhere in the heart of Seattle in the 90's. I wander out to the stage and look out into the crowd.

Some guy with four half-drunk drinks on the table, screams Gynecology! like a broken, skipping Tourette's record. Maybe the people seeing improv shows who so need to say this word are just on a mission. This fellow, though, has now settled in on having someone, anyone, say it besides him. Someone on this stage. Someone behind him. Someone screaming it later at his home in the hot sticky clutches of coitus.

COME ON BABY SAY IT SAY IT TO ME. GY-NO-COL-O-GEE!

It's his mantra.

A little old lady front row center. The spot that you can see the clearest from the stage. Dressed the way you would imagine someone going to see Camelot, if it were 1962. She knows where it's at. She apparently was there for Nichols and May performance in New York in the early 60's, way before The Birdcage. She regales us with this story while we're trying to get a suggestion of a location from the audience, and adds that one of our team members bears a striking resemblance to Benny Hill.

We can only pray for our fourth wall to magically reappear. And for the winds to change to a northeasterly direction, blowing away the smell of corned beef and sour cream Doritos that is coming from the Comedy Throwback Lady. She has brought her own meal. An actor's nightmare. She has made us into dinner theater.

And the rest of the room? Empty seats in a disco ball-like dance hall. I do my own improv game in my mind: Visualize the Audience:

These chairs contain busloads of nuns on a Nuns' Night Out. The back rows are a group of Rabbis on a Rabbis' Night Out. What they are doing out on Friday night? Who knows? They are being *rebels*, drinking wine and hoping to get some forbidden nun action. A gaggle of nuns. A gaggle of rabbis. This audience has become the Borscht Belt in my mind.

My mom is in this chair over here. Not yet ravaged with Alzheimer's, but still not getting what the hell I'm doing, showing up an hour late, and laughing anyway. She laughs, happy that I'm doing *something* and at least I'm not the lesbian she thought I was. Don't worry, Mom. There is Lesbian Dancing after the show.

That chair behind the pole? That chair contains someone very special to me. That chair contains my delusional dreams of one day being in New York and doing some fantastic production. Replete with a dressing room that once upon a time did not contain the supplies for the bathroom ... and with someone poking their head in like some 1930's Broadway Busby Berkeley movie, saying Five minutes to curtain, Ms. Landry. You might be nobody ... but you are going to come back home a Staaah.

Putting on the dress that Edith Head designed for Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas. The black one with the jewelry placed on the back of the dress by her ass. Ass Jewelry. Young boys would dance around me to Love, You Didn't Do Right by Me. Young boys dancing around me. Gay men dancing. During the show.

That chair is behind the pole because it does not have a clear view. A clear view of the future.

I walk out to the audience still in the police officer uniform after singing I Work for LAPD, a parody song of the cops during the Rodney King Riots. It is the last show of this run. I have said worse. I have heard worse.

Standing in that police costume. Flashback. San Quentin. Drama Therapy seven years prior. Sweaty Correctional Officer. The Guns are here. You can perform now. So wanting to hear him say Five minutes to curtain, Ms. Landry. So wanting the Black Dress with the ass jewelry. Wondering if this was the day the riot would happen and I would be found face down in a pool of blood in the prison cafeteria. With a commedia half-mask still on.

Standing on that stage in the police uniform and the smirk hits my lips like this is the first time I have ever said it. So chirpy. So alive. So damn glad to be here.

Thank you for coming to our show! This is our last performance ...and remember, Lesbian dancing after the show.

Today is the day I finally get to write a book about my theatre life.

Enjoy the Lesbian Dance. Remember to tip the wait staff at the end of this book.