benzado

rubysneakers:

This is sounding more and more like Amy Poehler’s quote about how she treats improv as her sacred space - as her church.  I believe that so much right now.  I want to stop judging and just treat that stage and that rehearsal space with that level of commitment.  It’s also just a really useful metaphor.  Even if you don’t view the improv stage as your personal sacred space (although if you’ve been doing this for more than a couple years and you still don’t think of it that way… not quite sure why you are doing it), you would still respect it as such right?  I am not a Christian, but I still respect cathedrals as spaces.

All the good Christians I have ever known have said that a church is not a space, it is the congregation. I always interpreted Amy Poehler’s comment in the same light.

There have been two different churches in my life. My Egyptian relatives would drive over an hour every Sunday, from several different directions, to attend Saint Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. My family would make the trip only occasionally. After services everybody would gather downstairs to eat and socialize. Everybody was friendly, but almost every interaction was embarrassing for me because they all knew my name but I didn’t remember anybody else’s. I was young, shy, and saw them less than once a month.

At some point my family started attending Grace United Methodist Church in Natrona Heights, very close to our home. Here we attended regularly, and my brother and I joined the youth group and even went to a national convention in, strangely enough, Salt Lake City, Utah. It seemed like I should have an easier time fitting in, except for the fact that the rest of the youth went to one of two schools in the area, while I went to a prep school miles away. So even though I was more involved, everybody else still saw each other more frequently than I did.

In both cases, I was insanely jealous that everybody else was a part of a community and, for whatever reason, I didn’t fit into it. And I wanted it, so badly.

When I started taking improv classes, I seriously had no idea what I was getting into. Betsy Stover literally instructed us to go out and drink together after our 101 classes, because classes that socialize do better. Perhaps if she hadn’t said that, the past three years of my life would have turned out very differently.

I know now, the feeling I get when I step into the theatre and see my friends, is the feeling that I grew up watching other people have at church. It has only a little to do with the physical space, only a little to do with improv as a spiritual cult sort of thing, but everything to do with the people. Everything to do with the community. That is what makes it sacred to me.

P.S. I only quoted a small portion above. If you haven’t read the entirety of Katey’s manifesto, do it now.