parenting as improv

yes and yes and yes and

We’re in the basement at Nana and Papa’s house trying to outzoom the zoomies before dinner.

He’s driving his new Paw Patrol car, thrashing around, careening into the table, the medicine ball, whatever stands in his way. Bang he goes into the ping pong table and oof he screams toppling over onto the floor. 

I’m nearby and say “are you okay, is your car okay?” 

“I think it’s broken,” he says back. 

“Ah lemme take a look, I can fix it,” I say, holding the figurine of one Baby Sinclair of hit network TV sitcom, The Dinosaurs, which aired from 1991-1994 on ABC. 

Not knowing Baby Sinclair’s actual voice – high pitched, manic, exactly like Elmo (which makes sense since he’s voiced by Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo!!!) – I give Baby Sinclair the voice of a 36 year old car mechanic - gruff, tired, trying poorly to hide it from the world.

I give his engine a look - yep, classic engine problem. Baby Sinclair tinkers for a moment (I am extremely good at my job) and there you go, good as new. 

He says thank you so much and drives on. 

–

I used to perform improv comedy multiple times a week, every week, for years. First in Austin, then in LA, it was a huge part of my life. Now, not so much, at least not in the black box theaters I’d grown accustomed to. Gone are the audiences of 1 to 35 people, the tech person doing lights, the other adults I was improvising with — all of that felt too mainstream. Cookie cutter. Bourgeoisie. 

This is my improv now. Avant-garde. Performing for no one and everyone. Deep Brooklyn stuff. Just me, Wilder, and the goofs.

And here we are in the primordial goo of a scene start. What happens next determines everything. Comedically speaking, one funny weird thing is an anomaly. The same thing happening twice, now that’s a scene.

He crashes the car again. “A little help here,” he screams. 

Now we’re cooking. Baby Sinclair rushes over. “Are you okay?” 

“I crashed.”

“Again??” I say, a moment that might get a chuckle from the audience were we to have one. He just crashed and now he crashed again? 

“Yep. Can you fix it?” 

I as Baby Sinclair (we are now one) take another look at the car. “Engine’s good - I just fixed that a minute ago…ooh ok I see what’s wrong - the wheels.” 

I fix the wheels and this time and ask for payment, a move I regret as soon as I do it. 

First off, I’m adding much too much mustard onto perhaps the most fragile moment of the scene. Wilder - the crazy one - has just repeated a strange behavior - crashing his car repeatedly - which is now very much our ‘weird thing.’ The entire scene revolves around this weird thing, but only if we can figure out, for ourselves and for the audience, WHY he’s doing it.

Without the why, it’s a parlor trick, absurdum infinitum, madness lacking humanity. Sociopathic, really. 

My offer, in that moment, should get us closer to understanding why he’s acting this way. But my offer, about the lack of payment, makes no sense. If he’s not paying for the labor or parts on fixing his car, why would he keep crashing it? 

Not to mention the imprint this will leave on his sponge of a brain – services rendered = payment required.

He gives me an airful of money. Genius move on his part - both payment and commentary on the payment. Comedically, the kid is a savant.

He bounces up and down on the car all herky jerky until he falls over. “A little help here,” he screams, the way an overly polite person would say it if their parachute didn't open. Nuance, he’s adding nuance.

Still, the question of why this is happening lingers. This isn’t a bad thing - the audience doesn’t need answers right away. Why is this happening, they’d ask themselves without realizing they were doing so. 

I finish with the wheels and tell him that I’m going out to lunch, so I won’t be able to fix his car again, got it? 

Yes, he says, getting back into the car and immediately crashing it into a wall. 

“A little help here!”

Now we’re onto something. Now we’ve got a scene.

I fix the car again and say I’m gonna be taking a nap, so please be careful on the road. 

He isn’t. I say I’m going out of town. A vacation. I need one, I tell him, I am so tired, I explain. 

He says sure of course and then crashes the car again and again and again.  

Now the game is clear: Guy says he won’t crash his car and keeps crashing it, thus ruining life for this poor mechanic who just wants a break.

I tell him I’m tired with an exhaustion both real and performed, the scene a mirror of our lives. He does something goofy and dumb, I ask him to stop. He says he’ll stop but then he doesn’t. We rinse and repeat.

But is that really all?

Who’s the crazy one, really?

The guy who keeps crashing or the mechanic who thinks this guy will do anything different? Why doesn’t the mechanic leave? He knows the guy is gonna crash the car again, and he sticks around?

Perhaps it is the Mechanic who is crazy. Perhaps it is the Mechanic who is Baby Sinclair who is me the dad needs the other guy who is Wilder to crash his car so there is something to fix. Because there is love in the subtext of fixing and crashing, again and again.

We’re playing 8D checkers here, entering a space only improv allows. Unlike with film or book, the suspension of disbelief in improv is only partial. We as audience are aware of two scenes happening — the characters in their world (guy and Mechanic) and the performers (Alex and Wilder) pretending to be the characters.

The way each of these leak into the other, informing and being informed in real time by the other, that’s the magic of improv. The audience gets lost in the scene while holding an awareness that there are people on stage putting that scene on. In this way, they watch two scenes, at once, and experience the dialectic magic of the two scenes in conversation with one another.

Which is basically how parenting works. We each play our roles, aware on some level that we are playing them. Testing each other, crashing and fixing cars and asking, fundamentally, one question: “do you love me?”

We keep going for another twenty or so minutes. Finally, I say “Ok I need a break, like actually.” It’s a cheap move but one that’d get a laugh on stage - the fourth wall made see-through, the line working perfectly for both The Mechanic and Alex. 

We go upstairs and he refuses to eat dinner, a game I can’t make funny because I get too frustrated. Perhaps now I am the weird one, the crazy one. A toddler doesn’t want to eat and a dad loses his mind over why. It feels similar to the one time Wilder had a meltdown in Ralph’s because I wouldn’t let him touch all the fruits.

A kid getting access to a giant warehouse full of the brightest color foods and boxes and you expect him not to want to touch everything? To not melt down when you tell him he can’t?

I am the crazy one, more often than I’d like to admit.

The best improv scenes turn this way — the crazy one becomes sane and the sane one becomes crazy. So too with Wilder and I.

We are each other’s teachers, a guy and a Mechanic, reminding the other to be goofy idiots while simultaneously knowing that there’s nothing to fix. Because the real point isn’t to fix the car - it’s been broken all along - but simply to scream “a little help here” and have someone say, “are you okay?”

comments

1. What's the weirdest voice you've ever given to a toy?

2. What do your improv scenes with kids look like? Or with other adults?

3. Do you know how to fix cars? Or even change your own oil? It doesn’t seem that hard but for some reason I hesitate.

6. Did you watch The Dinosaurs, the 1991-1994 sitcom on ABC?

7. What else is going on how are you?

9. #7 but for real.

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