Your laugh leaves laugh-lines, your love leaves bright bruises

I'm so damn tired of just posting about where I'm going and where I just was.

Sadly, these days that's the only thing that's changing at all. Sometimes it changes faster than it's supposed to, sometimes not fast enough.

Last weekend (?) I was in Canada and was supposed to be back there right now but the Canadian Border Authority tagged and released us with the promise that I can count on being detained and searched and, very possibly, turned away. That made going back rather... problematic.

So I was pulled off the show in Vancouver and sent to Beverly Hills instead. Fair enough.

I'm home and took a couple days off around the house to catch up on laundry, to-do lists, hugging the kids and working on the Theater - you know, the stuff that matters.

I feel like I should post something about the Theater progress since I haven't mentioned it in a good long time but the problem there is the lack of concrete progress to really report on. Sure, things have been moving as steadily as they're able, but that's far from a milestone of progress to bang on the keys about.

Instead, some updates and maybe letting some light into my brain about what we're doing and why in the hell we're doing it in the first place. I'm rarely clear on the next step as far as paperwork and sometimes I get those really bi-polar feeling moments of being incredibly sure of what we're about to do and how it's going to turn out and then the crashing in between of being equally convinced that I'm insane and everything we're about to do is going to prove it - but oddly enough, even the idea of the whole thing failing doesn't diminish how good an idea I think it is or how fun I think it'll be.

So HUGE is now officially a Non Profit Organization. That was the biggest step forward we've made lately, thanks to help from Springboard for the Arts and the legal help they put us in touch with. We got the fateful letter from the IRS that changes everything and found it surprisingly brief. But we got it.

We started writing grants, even submitted a couple. And when I say "we" I mean "Peggy" - who has been awesome, doing research and footwork and filling in the organization part of the non profit organization. Kudos.

Went in to meet with the bank before going on the whirlwind tour of everywhere and we're getting to the point where I'll be walking in to apply for some monies soon enough and then bringing those funds to someone else and promptly signing them away. Then the scramble really starts.

But at the end of the day, not much has actually happened just yet. Just more “getting ready” and generally inching closer to the ledge in fits and spurts.

But the why part has been easy, probably the only steady and consistent part.

Because it would be awesome and the Twin Cities have a kick-ass longform improv community doing some of the best work you’ll see anywhere – and no longform improv theater.

Often when I talk about it there comes this need to make what we’re doing into something adversarial, or that what we’re doing is going to be a “break” from the BNW or others – which always strikes me as strange since we do shows in different theaters with people from CSz and Stevie’s all the time and all three of the established theaters have been so totally supportive of everything we’ve done.

Sure, once we’re neck-deep in this thing I probably won’t see people from other theaters nearly as often because we’ll all be working the same hours, but that’s about the most major change I’m looking forward to.

Fact is, the community in the Cities is one of the things that makes HUGE Theater seem even remotely possible, especially when the economy is down and theaters don’t have the best track record as far as profitability goes – but knowing our audiences and the performers and the owners we’ll be working next to and with and for it seems much better than possible, it seems fairly inevitable.

And regardless of how it all ends up I know it’s going to be fun.

So that’s the what and some of the why and hopefully soon I’ll be able to tell everyone where.