Kansas City Improv Festival 10

Sure, that might be enough for the common person, but you have discriminating taste and want more (greedy, aren’t ya?). What else will Tantrum be bringing to the table? Beauty & The Geek, of course! Reprising their monologist roles will be Massive Tassel‘s own Kim Carrington and Tantrum fan-fave Kevin “DILF” Dilmore (newspaper writer, Star Trek author, life/love guru). You read that right, we’re ramping it up with two monologists for this festival performance. Where can you find all this excitement?

Off Center Theater
3rd Floor, Crown Center
2450 Grand Boulevard
Kansas City, MO 64108

– Buy Tickets Online –
Or call 816-842-9999

Do not miss out on this weekend and plan on making it out to see SNL’s (and hometown KC boy) Jason Sudeikis with Der Monkenpickel the following weekend. Two amazing weekends for so little money – it’s a sound entertainment investment and, dammit, don’t you deserve it?

Thanks to Grooveshark, I’ve been listening to Your Vegas – a band formerly from Leeds, England – at work nearly every day. Thanks to YouTube, you can catch many of their songs arranged acoustically. For those unaware of Grooveshark, it’s a bit like the old Seeqpod. You can find a good deal of artists and their catalogs. Even some of their rarities/B-sides (for those who remember what those are) are available. You can simply create and save a playlist of songs or use it as a jukebox. If you become a VIP member, I believe you can even use Grooveshark on your phone as an app. Give them both a try and let me know what you think.

The first task up was to find a way to minimize customer service calls and with a few changes to some of the website’s pages, it’s gone down at least 5% over the first month. Is that good? Anything that reduces my interaction with an online customer is a good thing in my book. Time will really tell, but that means there needs to be some sort of means to measure it all. So that’s what I initiated – via a simple Google doc – a way to track order issues, shipping issues, product questions, and more importantly volume percentages of emails to orders, order issues to email, derived orders from product questions, and more. It’s a manual process at this point, sadly – don’t get me started on that – and it adds more to my workload. Fortunately, the little things I’ve been able to do on a daily basis have allowed me to become more efficient in taking on these new tasks and more in the same amount of time. The downside to all these numbers and projections is seeing how ineffectual I am.

I have taken a small amount of pride in delivering what seems to be a better customer experience, but that isn’t translating to greater sales. Charting the numbers thus far shows how minuscule my efforts are to the bottom line whether it is to an initial sale or to repeat business. Granted, the time frame for my sample may be too small for an accurate representation, but that doesn’t help my psyche. Throughout my adult life, I’ve tried to adhere (not adhesed, Ash, it’s not a word) to a simple mantra: Always do your best; be the best person you can possibly be and the rest will follow. The disturbing part is that these paltry figures are documented evidence shared with my manager and others in the company. The numbers, staring at me from the Google doc, mock me on a daily basis and I’m just not sure how to reconcile myself with that ineffectual feeling. Oh, if only it was that fresh feeling, but I digress. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I can feel this is spreading to other aspects of my life and I’d really like to nip this in the bud immediately. Maybe I’m just focusing too much on the cold, hard numbers and should try to see how my efforts are impacting in other ways. Any advice?

MS 150 Benefit Show - Be There!

For more a more personal look at Kristen, head over to tantrumkc.com.

8pm Friday, August 13
Westport Coffeehouse Theater, 4010 Pennsylvania
Tickets: $20 (no discounts or passes will be accepted for this benefit performance)
Call 816-678-8886 for reservations.
Will almost certainly contain adult material.

Caliente!

A Memoir Of The Craft

Is “cardinal sin” perhaps too harsh a term? Maybe, but Stephen King’s “Hey, you might want to do this” just lacks panache. Stephen King believes a writer should read as much as possible, wherever possible, and whenever possible. He details many of the instances where he can be found with his nose in a book and, no surprises here, they don’t necessarily include the bathroom. He makes salient points for developing your style by knowing how others present their material so you may find your own voice. It makes perfect sense and it’s advice I’ve been trying to follow.

I don’t want to spill everything out here, because honestly, the book is an excellent read and well worth your time if you have any desire to hone the craft of writing or enjoy anecdotes from one of the horror genre’s favorite sons. I knew I was going to enjoy this book when I read the second foreword:

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do – not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.

One notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course it’s short; at eighty-five pages it’s much shorter than this one.) I’ll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is “Omit needless words.” I will try to do that here.

So what does this all have to do with the title of the post? Simple. Like many professions, you rely on your toolbox to provide you with the necessary means to perform your job. Perhaps it’s tools in the literal sense, but it may also be used in the figurative sense as it simply refers to the devices you utilize to perform your desired job. So, as Mr. King details the elements of a successful writer’s toolbox (read the book for specifics, seriously), one can find a correlation to an improviser’s toolbox.

The particular piece that is of importance to improvisers – moreso the fledgling ones, but veterans can benefit from as well – is the absence of pre-determined plot. Notice it doesn’t say lack of plot. Honestly, how interesting is something – a book, a movie, a play ,etc – if nothing ever happens? That’s not how he prefers to operate. For Mr. King, he prefers to take a situation and place his characters within it and then see how they deal with it and each other. He doesn’t have an outline that takes his story from A to B to C and so on. How stale! Everything flows from the characters and how they react to each other, often producing surprising results. This is the crux of an improvised scene – how do we as improvisers take a situation and filter it through our characters to provide results that are not only surprising to the audience, but to ourselves as well? For example, with Tantrum’s last performance, I don’t think anyone could have predicted that the notion of the monologist’s serenading her future husband’s voicemail with a silly song would turn into a scene about Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler’s early romantic trysts. No one on stage knew it was about to happen, but the scene was played with honestly and sincerity and the audience was so surprised that they had no other recourse but to laugh.

Beyond the writing tips and improv correlations is a book that offers an entertaining look into not only the ideologies of a writer, but childhood anecdotes and the harrowing time of a family man. The final chapter details the events surrounding his accident just over a decade ago and I found it to be quite moving. Check it out.

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Leave it to Willy Shakes to provide me with perspective. This feeling, persistent and powerful for far too long, hearkens to mind a conversation seemingly a fortnight ago. Are you in or of this world?

See the whole glory!

If you’d like to know more about Bryn, head over to the Tantrum site to check out her bio and answers to Tantrum’s 7 Questions. It would be great to see all of you loyal readers this Friday night – we haven’t seen you at a show in ages!

8pm Friday, July 16
Westport Coffeehouse Theater, 4010 Pennsylvania
Tickets: $10
Call 816-678-8886 for reservations.
Will almost certainly contain adult material.

No, YOU'RE fired!

So, was George good or bad for baseball and the Royals? My answer would be yes. Surprised? George Steinbrenner was responsible for ushering in the era of ridiculous player signings dating back to Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson. So, on the one hand we have him to thank/blame for the age of the spoiled athlete/free agent – the epoch of buying championships. On the other hand, without him, small-market teams wouldn’t be reaping the benefits of the Yes Network and the millions it has poured into the revenue sharing streams in an attempt to make smaller market teams more viable. On the one hand, he provided seven world championships to the city of New York with a seemingly megalomaniacal drive of World Series-or-bust mentality. On the other hand, he also set standards of appearance and conduct for players so ridiculous that he was lampooned by the Simpsons in their heyday. He built an arguably consistent brand out of the (effin’) Yankees and provided a central figure to focus a non-New York baseball fan’s rage. I don’t know a true Royals (or any other AL team) fan who doesn’t despise the Yankees. Steinbrenner built the AL “evil empire” – a prototype that would eventually be mirrored by Boston. He embodied everything that is good (tradition, pride, striving for excellence) and bad (buying championships, fostering player greed, fickle management) about baseball. Regardless of whether you loved or hated the man, his larger-than-life personality will certainly be missed.

Continuing the theme – Avenged Sevenfold’s A Little Piece of Heaven…

First things first, if you’re easily offended don’t watch it. There’s adult language, adult themes, and classical music – plenty for all to hate… or love as the case may be. The subject matter isn’t for the faint of heart as it deals with murder, necrophilia, and everlasting (zombie) love. Now you don’t know whether you want to watch it or not, huh?

After reading through many comments on YouTube ranging from the simple “I don’t get it” to the typical name-calling zealots crying foul, I want to say, “People, relax and think a moment.” It’s just a story – a love story, in fact. Granted, it’s a very dark, twisted, and graphic love story set to a dynamic score. Still, a tuneful tale nonetheless. When Romeo and Juliet debuted, do you think that the audiences at the time weren’t shocked by all the duplicity and death? Do you think a modern audience bats an eye at it now? Time moves on and stories evolve to evoke a similar emotional echo. Should every story be as dark as this one? No, just as they shouldn’t all be hugs & puppies. There can be no light without the dark.

For those damning the band for writing this song – or their fans for enjoying it for what it is – think a moment. They aren’t advocating this behavior you find so repulsive. They are simply holding the mirror up to society and commenting as they should. If you disagree with that statement, we have more to discuss than I care to devote space to at the moment. Also, I would like to say kudos to the filmmakers who took the original and tweaked it to keep the gist and still achieve something different.

Back to the theme – Josh Joplin’s Camera One…

So much of what I love about this song lies in the imagery and what is not actually said.