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

The Best Dollar I Put Down Someone's Pants

He was standing on the porch and he was all by himself, having pulled himself away from the jammed packed room of people partying and drinking after their last show. All by himself, smoking a cigarette. I saw him through the kitchen window of Jim Kopsian's home. All by himself. Smoking a cigarette.

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My relationship luck up to this point (only at twenty) was pretty dismal: First guy I dated asked me almost like I was a family member (starting my new moniker of "Matron Personality") if it was cool to date this girl, as I was going on the road for three months with Geese Theatre.

He was too afraid to say the words: I think we should move on. So to make it easier for him, I did it for him...

I think you are saying you want to break up, and that is cool. I am going to be gone and she seems like a nice woman. Hey! Bring her to the Goodbye Party! Love to see you cats! A nice soothing Matronly move with all the class and tact of a forty year old woman used to having to say Let's Move On.

I was about to turn nineteen years old.

The second, and to be as kind as I can be, Off Kilter Relationship (if you could even call it that), was with The Man Almost Twenty Years My Senior. If I learned anything from that relationship it was this: Guys that much older than you are in actual fact ten tears younger and can't function around people their own age.

When my mother met him originally (at the Bon Voyage Party before my first tour to Ohio Prisons), they stood in the kitchen and it became a miserable snarky dance between these two. My mother knew something might happen between the two of us, and they were only a few years apart in age.

My mother (after dropping off luggage she knew was three sizes too big to travel with on a bus, but included the receipt in hopes I could return it for actual cash), walked out of the Ferret/Dog Hair smelling apartment of Geese Company.

Me: Isn't he great?

My Mother: There are a lot of things I can call that man. Great is not one of them.

Decades later, no truer words could have come out of my mother. If it had a hole, this man was in it. He convinced me that this was completely normal behavior and yet if I pursued any other man on the road? It became a Training Session on Mental Disorders for me. Something was wrong with me.

Once on the bus, we were laying head to toe. I went to tickle his feet playfully.

He took his leg and started to violently kick me in the stomach with it. He then laughed about it heartily later with members of the company. At that point, everyone was too afraid to not laugh with him. I escaped without injury. Physical injury, anyway.

At the end of a Geese Company tour I stood in front of this man as his Bipolar disorder (or whatever else his aggressive behavior could be chalked up to) was in full swing, insanely angry with me for leaving behind a tuxedo coat he had wanted to keep, after I had cleaned the entire bus by myself, top to bottom. (Years later, that same insane, aggressive behavior would land him in a filthy hoarder-like apartment covered in dust, the smell of dog piss, a completely fucked up dog he made that way, and a bevy of open pill bottles all over his bathroom sink.)

It is indeed still as crazy as it sounds. He was screaming in my face over a used and beaten Tuxedo Coat. I told him calmly I would just walk back to where the bus was parked and pick it up so he could have it and in return, bring it back on the bus the next tour. This, made him angrier. Angrier because I was so calm about it.