Simone Said It Was Just a Class

October 26th. Here is exactly what happened: Simone mentioned, at the end of a Tuesday session three weeks ago, that there was an improv class at the community center. She said it the way she names things, without recruiting, without 'we should,' just the fact of it landing between us while she was lacing her shoes. I said something like 'hm' and then, apparently, I looked it up, and then I registered, and this is the part I cannot fully explain.

The room had folding chairs stacked along the walls and fluorescent light that made everyone look like they had just received news. There were eleven of us. The instructor used the word 'yes-and' approximately forty times in ninety minutes, which I understand is the point but which did not make it easier to hear. The first exercise involved finishing a stranger's sentence and I finished it wrong in a way that was somehow also correct, which is, I think, the entire thesis of improv, and I did not fully understand this until I was already doing it.

Somewhere in the middle of saying yes to whatever I had just committed to saying yes to.

Simone was, characteristically, fine. Not effortless, she had a moment in the second half where I watched her actually think before she spoke, which is the opposite of the instruction, and she knew it before the instructor said anything, and she course-corrected in real time. That was interesting to see. I have watched Simone at open studio, at pottery, at climbing, and she has a specific posture she gets when something is harder than she expected and she is deciding whether to be annoyed or interested. She went with interested. I filed that away for later.

We sat on the floor afterward while everyone else filtered out and did not say much for a few minutes. The prints are still leaning against the kitchen wall. Gerald has a new leaf. The draft-folder sentence is still there. And now there is also this: the memory of standing at the front of a room with no script and opening my mouth and finding out that something came out. I don't know what I expected. I don't think I expected it to feel like that.

The moment I stopped trying to do it correctly.