Thug Life Follow Up

Collin got off the bus on time. If I remember correctly it was raining outside and he did not have an umbrella, so I ran outside, grabbed him, put him over my shoulder and ran him inside. Then the normal after-school routine began.

He took off his shoes off at the door and placed his jacket and backpack in his room. He then ate a snack at the dinner table while he did his homework. Once his sentences were done, we started talking about his day. I decided to give him the opportunity to tell me what happened.

He didn't.

According to him gym was great! They played dodgeball. Yay!

Well, after a bit him doing a little dodging himself I flat out told him that I knew. I didn't tell him what I knew. I just let him know that I knew that something happened at school and that I was ready for him to tell me about it. I assured him that he wasn't in trouble, that he had already been disciplined at school. I just wanted to hear it from him.

Still nothing. Nothing bad happened at school, and gym was still great.

Then I informed him that the behavior specialist had called mommy at work and told her everything.

His response was, "Oh? What did she say?"

Priceless.

After a couple more times of me stressing that he was not in trouble, that whatever happened happened and its over with and all I wanted was for him to tell me the truth, he broke.

His story was that he was dancing in the line while waiting to get back into the dodgeball game. His arm had "grazed" against the kid next to him, and that caused the kid to push Collin down. Collin never admitted to punching the kid in the eye. He says that he just got back up, started dancing again, and that his hand "grazed" the kid right in the face.

Sounded unlikely, but I didn't press it anymore. I was just happy that Collin finally fessed up about the whole thing. And I could tell that Collin did not want to talk about it anymore.

Thug Life

The time is currently 1:38 on Thursday, October 29th.

Collin will be home in from school in 2 hours and 12 minutes.

I am going to have a little talk with him. Apparently he has gotten himself into a little trouble today, well, thats what the behavior special said when she called Lisa this afternoon.

While standing in line for an activity during gym class, our little first grader decided to pass the time and do a little dancing. His arm then hit the kid standing next to him in the chest. That kid, not waiting for an "excuse me" or an "I'm sorry", which I am pretty positive Collin would have done, took offense and pushed Collin to the floor. Collin then reacted to the offense with defense, and punched the kid in the eye.

I should not find this funny.

But I do.

According to the behavior specialist, who we have dealt with only once before, both boys have talked it out and everything is okay. Neither of them had to leave school for the day, but instead have to spend the rest of the day in the "buddy" room. She thinks the boys are handling the situation very well. Which is fantastic.

I really don't know why I find this funny. I think its just trying to picture my boy actually taking a swing at another kid. Again, not funny, but I can't stop laughing about it. A part of me is kinda happy that he defended himself. Makes me think that any kid that watched it will think twice about pushing Collin to the floor. Way to stand up for yourself, Collin.

I'm real curious as to what he has to say about the whole thing.

Heeeeeeeey Yoooooou Guuuuuuuuuys!

For our family movie night last night we watched The Goonies. I bought it on dvd at the mall for like $3. Both Lisa and I thought Collin would enjoy it. As it was starting, we both realized that we were only one year older than Collin when that movie came out. He loved it.

The dvd came with only a few cool special features, including deleted scenes. One of the deleted scenes answered an almost lifelong question of mine. At the end of the movie when the Goonies are answering a reporter's questions, they mention escaping an octopus. Even as a kid this confused me because, well, they DIDN'T escape an octopus.

Here is the deleted scene.

Now it all makes sense. Except that if they cut this from the movie, shouldn't they have cut the line about them escaping it?

What if they would have kept this scene in? I mean, the movie is all fantasy anyway. But a breakdancing octopus? Come on Spielberg.

School Flies When You Are Having Fun

The Fall semester started in August. It is mid-October and we are already registering to pre-enroll for the Spring semester at the end of this month. Crazy. This week has played tricks on my mind. All of this preparation for the Spring (speaking with teachers, planning out a schedule, and registering) makes one think that this semester is close to being over, when in all actuality, it is only the midway point. Like I said, Crazy.

Another reason why I believe registering for pre-enrollment has played with my mind, is that I feel like I have only been pumping out projects two out of my four classes. Design Color and Typography (Type has become my favorite class so far) has been giving me the most work that lead to results. Results being finished projects accompanied by grades. Drawing and Photography have taken slower approaches. We just turned in our first project in Drawing last week, and the Photography teacher simply wants us to get comfortable with the whole photo development process before anything is due. Which is all good, I guess. I just hope these two classes aren't calms before the storms leading up to portfolio review.

And now for another one of my current Typography projects.

We had to write a research paper recently on a graphic designer. I picked Saul Bass even though I didn't know who he was. To be honest, the name stood out because of a Seinfeld episode. Kramer thought he saw Salman Rushdie at the gym and he was going by the name Saul Bass. Anywho, among a lot of design work, Saul Bass is most known for designing title sequences and posters in the 50's and 60's. Our next project, after the research paper, was to create a poster for the Nelson, as if it were holding an exhibit on your subject. The poster itself it to be strongly influenced on the subject, so in my case, Saul Bass.

Here are a few of his most famous posters.

Here are a couple of rough drafts that I have put together.

I like the second one a whole lot better than the first. Only because the second feels less like I just copied one of his old posters. After showing the teacher my thumbnail sketches for these, I was very surprised when she said that, after all of the years that they have assigned this Nelson project, that nobody had used the shuttlecock images in their posters. I found that extremely hard to believe.

School stuff

One of the classes I am taking this semester is Typography, or the history of type. It is a very interesting class and I can very much see how the knowledge of this subject will enhance some of my future projects. Here is my most recent project for this class. The object was to look through magazines and whatnot and focus on the type in advertisements. I was to then find a couple of ads that I liked and then think about how I could apply that idea to three separate panels with this specific quote:

"Great is the person who sees the need, recognizes that responsibility, and actively becomes the answer." - Author Unknown

Here is the advertisement that stuck out to me.

Here is what I was able to do with it.

Speaking of Thunderdome

This season of Thunderdome will mark the first time that I get on stage and participate in the improv madness. And I am looking forward to it. In the beginning I had told myself that I would be perfectly happy organizing everything and then sitting back and watching, or perhaps teching, or perhaps even hosting every now and then. But performing, I never thought I would do it. Mainly because I knew there would be people out there that would think it was unfair. Durning season three, there were people that quietly made it known that they were unhappy that the Trip Fives (minus me) even performed. They ended up not winning only because a handful of people that came to see them ended up not voting. To be honest, I'm happy they didn't win.

Anyway, this season we did the draft, which was what I wanted to do from the beginning. Too many experienced improvisers, that I knew would be needed to help make this a success, weren't interested in the draft. But now after three seasons of nearly sold out crowds, the draft looked like a good idea to try. My goal was to get a mix of 36 experienced and not-so experienced improvisers, and then randomly draft 9 teams of 4. I was one short the day of the draft. I had been holding out on a couple of people and hoping that I would not have to throw my own name it. I was getting so comfortable sitting back and organizing. Plus the thought of the same people who criticized the Trip Fives for their involvement. What would they say about the organizer joining in the fun. In the end, I thought "Screw it" and put my name in.

My team, Temporary Sanity, has had two rehearsals to date. We have one more scheduled before the September 19th show. My team consists of me, Jessica Robins (Roving Imp/Anomaly Orange), Wade Meredith (CounterClockwise Comedy), and Rob Grabowski (Loaded Dice/Tantrum). I have to admit, I LOVE the process that we experienced as a new group to decide on what format we wanted to do. We spent the first 20 minutes of the first rehearsal discussing formats, in which we came up with three that we would like to try. Then we spent the rest of rehearsal practicing those formats. By the end of rehearsal we all knew that one of the three formats would be too much trouble to continue. So that left us with two formats to play with for the next rehearsal.

So, of course, one rehearsal with my Thunderdome team made me very excited to be apart of this. My team is extremely fun and that's all I can really ask for. I am really looking forward to performing with all of them. It also made me really anticipate our second rehearsal, in which we ran the remaining two formats and decided which one would work best for Thunderdome. We ended up picking the format originally suggested by Jessica. It's kind of a combination of a few shortform games I have played. We'll do some scenes and the audience will vote on which scenes should be continued. Lather, rinse, repeat until there is one final scene declared the best. It's sort of a "mini-dome" within Thunderdome.

I am also excited to see the other two groups performing that night. Team Number Nine, which is Trish Berrong, Erik Johnson, Steve Jones and Nick Rigoli, was oddly the only team completely not in attendance during the draft party. They were the ninth team out of nine, and no one was there. Funny. That aside they will be very good. Trish and Steve are veterans to the Kansas City improv scene, and just the energy of the two of them being on stage together again should alone be reason to watch them. Throw in Erik Johnson (A funny man with CCC who I have only seen once but was extremely impressed with) and Nick Rigoli (One of my favorites to watch and someone who I consider to be a "secret weapon" on stage) and what you've got is a very strong team. If what I hear is correct, they should be doing a "Twilight Zone" format created and coached by Ed Doris. If Rigoli is allowed to anything Sterling-esque, the watch out.

The other team is, what I consider to be, the sole reason I wanted to do a draft in the first place. Four improvisers (in this case, 4 dudes) who have never performed together at all, and really don't even know each other. Bob Dusin, Jeremy Danner, Sean Hogge and Jim Sturgill. All four extremely talented individuals. All four laid back personalities. All four of them like beer. Their first meeting together took place at the Boulevard Brewing Company, where they did nothing but drink beer and talk improv for a couple of hours. Jealous? I know I am. The possibilities are endless on what a team like this can do. No matter what, it should be funny.

This post ended up a lot longer than I had originally planned. I guess all I really wanted to say was, in the beginning Thunderdome was something that I only wanted to organize and not actually perform in. Now that I'm about to perform in it for the first time, there is an improv excitement inside me that I rarely feel anymore.

Ha Ha Ha Ha

The title is merely me laughing at the fact that I have blogged twice in the past two months.  I find that funny.  This blog is very unimportant to me, yet I feel as if I should be blogging more.  Oh well.  I guess I'll just bulk a bunch of things together like I did in May, which happened to be one of my busiest blogging months.

So, here is more stuff.

School starts up again this month and officially begins my journey into the world of graphic design.  I will be taking four classes: Design Color, Drawing and Media Methods, Fundamentals of Photography, and Typography.  All four of these class will be crammed into a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday evening schedule, which both is cool and sucks at the same time.  I am very excited to be taking all of these classes, but due to the limited amount of class times that I had to chose from, there will be a lot of difficult planning around both Lisa and Collin's schedules.  These are the heartaches of a "one car" family.  

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Last weekend we were invited down to the lake by Lisa's Uncle Tom and Aunt Judy.  Lisa's cousin Kelly and her daughter Macy were down there too, all the way from San Diego.  Macy is two years older than Collin, so they were keen on hanging around each other.  Also Collin, the big boy that he is, was as comfortable as he has even been jumping and swimming in the lake.  

Coming in from jumping off the boat.

Being wet.  Very wet.

About ready to take a jetski ride.

Enjoying the speed of the boat.

Cousin Macy, Collin and Lisa on a huge tube.

Collin and Macy.

A funny thing about that last photo, Collin lost his second tooth durning that dinner while eating corn on the cob.  He actually swallowed the tooth.  This was a big change compared to how he lost his first tooth.  We still need to right the Tooth Fairy a letter explaining what happened.

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I have an idea for a graphic novel.  After a couple of conversations during frisbee golf, I have put together a small outline.  The outline consists of a brief description of the premise, brief descriptions of all of the main characters and some side characters, and all of the chapters mapped out with brief descriptions  of what should happen in each chapter.  I guess the next step would be to look at each individual chapter and outline those in more detail.  The outline has been shared with a couple of friends.  

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Lots of stuff going on improv-wise:  Two shows at the Westport Coffeehouse (BareTV and Improv Thunderdome), another show at the recordBar, and at the end of the month the Trip Fives are finally heading up to the Roving Imp Theater to do a show.  I'm not sure which one I am more excited about.  

The last two run-throughs of BareTV have been a lot of fun.  The concept is very different from the show we did in 2000.  And the addition of a live band really give it a talk show feel that we didn't have before.  

The first round of Thunderdome with the drafted teams was a hugh success in my opinion, even though it was not a sold out crowd.  The teams were very impressive and put together formats that were very entertaining. My team doesn't perform until September.  I have had one rehearsal with my team, Temporary Sanity, so far and it was a blast.  We spent the first 20 minutes or so talking about formats, and then came up with three we'd like to try.  Then we spent the rest of rehearsal trying each format.  The process was fun and I am excited to perform with those on my team.

On a side note, I am toying with the idea of putting Thunderdome on hiatus until I am done with school, which should be a couple of years.  Thunderdome takes up a lot of time and the whole process wears on me mentally.  However, there is something in the works that might change my idea of shelving it.

The Trip Fives will have their second show at the recordBar this month, sharing the stage with Improv-Abilities.  Our first show with Loaded Dice was big for a Tuesday night.  We had over 85 people in attendance. The bulk of the people ate and drank as well, which is a plus.  I am very curious of how the next show will go. I think it will be better than the first.

The show at the Roving Imp will be a lot of fun.  John Robison and I have talked about me and/or the Fives performing up there for a while now.  The stars have finally aligned.  We will either be performing as the Trip Fives, possibly honing the piece that we would like to present at the upcoming improv festival, or we will join a couple of the other shows that were originally slated to perform.  Either way, it will be an exciting night.

 

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And lastly, my dad bought Lisa and I a new mattress and box springs as an early birthday present for both of us. The old one was so uncomfortable.  It's very nice to experience comfortable sleep again.  Thanks Dad!