Improving through Improv

The Boys of Summer roll along, but we need your help to complete this year's journey. Please see our site for the latest on how to contribute. Thank you!

Day two of our journey to Los Angeles included a pair of interviews I felt were very important to our story. The first was with Rob Belushi, son of Jim Belushi, and a man I consider to be a good friend after spending time studying improv with him at Las Vegas’ wing of Second City. My dad and mom wondered aloud what Rob’s added value or pertinence to the documentary would be – not as a person, as they didn’t know him, but in a "what’s improv go to do with it?” sense. Improv is a faith-based performance exercise. You have to walk on to the stage believing you and your stage partners have enough with just what you have (which is just you). You have to connect. You have to be truthful. It helps greatly to give a lot more than you take. In the words of Jim Belushi (according to Rob), “the guy who gives the most wins”.

My line with Rob was to have him talk about his experience as a performer and teacher and draw a line between improv, faith and health. 

“One of the core principles is to say yes,” Rob said. “As we become older we become more comfortable with a certain way – our daily experience levels tend to shrink. By saying yes, life can continue to surprise you.” 

He also talked about fear, as a personal motivator for him and what it’s like to be on stage, wondering if what he’s doing will be funny or work on any level. 

“[It’s important] to not let fear totally destroy your ability to participate in things”. 

That one hit home in a number of ways for me and my dad, too. Dad doesn’t like the attention on him or his Parkinson’s so he tends to shy away from some social situations. It isn’t that he’s a recluse, but, at the same time, he’s inclined to stay in an increasingly shrinking comfort zone. That’s one thing I worry about quite a bit.

“What we learn in improv [about fear] is that it’s going to be okay,” Belushi said. “Just keep taking specific steps and making choices and it will lead you somewhere that you couldn’t see over here.”

One of the things Rob does in his class to set his students at ease is give up something personal about himself, often something personal.

“There’s a feeling of ‘we don’t have to be perfect here’,” Belushi said. “We’re just trying to be real.”

He made another interesting insight when he talked about how in creating an improv scene, performers often have to take on unsavory roles or characteristics because that’s what their partner has given or labeled them. It’s by saying yes to these things that the performer earns the audience’s applause and laughter. This applies to life off the stage, too.

“I think when people are struggling with health, mental health, addiction, the main instinct is to isolate,” Belushi said. “It’s a form of denial, of shame, of being overwhelmed, hopelessness, despair – all of these things make you want to remove yourself. An improvisational coach would say to wear these types of things with a badge of courage and fully engage more. The ‘scene’ of your life is being shared by more people than just you.”

The Boys of Summer roll along, but we need your help to complete this year's journey. Please see our site for the latest on how to contribute. Thank you!

You've got to have faith...or do you?

After our meeting with Dr. DeMartino today, my mom, dad and I talked about faith. Faith comes in a lot of different colors, shapes and sizes. The degree to which one has faith and in what are interesting considerations. Ten years ago, as we began the journey of the original “Boys of Summer”, I asked my dad what faith was. He said, “Faith means that I believe I have what it takes to get the job done”. That definition speaks toward faith in himself. His body has failed him to various degrees over the last ten years. Some of it is just getting older as he looks at 70 on the fast-approaching horizon; much more of it, I believe, is due to Parkinson’s Disease. Being robbed of something that you hold faith in has to shake you.

 

My dad doesn’t hold much interest in religion. He was raised Catholic and, along with my mom, raised my sister and me as Catholics. When my mom left the church, somewhere in the 1990’s, my dad left it, too. My mom says she continued to question and develop a new faith toward God and Jesus Christ as she needs to understand that. She goes to church again, today, with great passion and faith, though it’s not Catholic. My dad still doesn’t go and doesn’t seem to have any interest in it. I left the church when I went away to college. I still remember taking a mythology class and having my mind blown by the stories from other cultures, some similar, some not to the Catholic faith, many of them predating the teachings in the Bible by thousands of years. This revelation, alone, isn’t to say one is more correct than the other because of that information, but because the faith was presented to me as a closed system, with other belief systems being unquestionably wrong, this was earth-shattering to me at the time. Just recently I began to go to church again, largely for my children and my family. I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit.

  

Back to my dad and his faith: the other night we went to the Zen Center in Las Vegas. I’ve suggested my dad should incorporate meditation into his life for a number of healthful and quality of life reasons. There are an increasing number of scientific studies that point to the validity of meditation as an exercise that increases brain activity. As my dad is dealing squarely with a neurologically-based disease, so far as we understand, meditation seems like a good fit.

At the Zen Center, my dad asked the Zen Master, “If I commit seriously to meditation, what can I expect to get out of it?” Whether or not my dad knew it, he’d stepped right into a zen trap. It is in the wanting of anything that one gets lost. The Zen Master brought up the metaphor of the mind being a glass of dirty water. Through the process of meditation, one can help the sand and dirt settle to the bottom of the glass, adding clarity to the water. One cannot remove the sand itself. How can one do this? How does one know meditation “works”? It is in the doing. As my dad is a logically-minded person, this didn’t sit well with him. I offered to send him some of the science-based articles on meditation to see if they would offer him encouragement or peace of mind to continue on this unknown path, in the absence of faith. He said yes. In case you’re interested, those articles can be found here.