On the Loss of Marbles

Last Friday at ComedySportz, the Horned Toads faced off against the Penguins, in the opening salvo of the improvisational dance-off called March Madness (at CSz). Alida Vitas-Dow, Keith Whipple and I valiantly challenged the vastly talented and bespectacled team of Ross Bryant, Bob Ladewig and Rebecca Hanson, a veritable stew of quick wit and quicker reflexes. We lost the first round, Rap Line. I got out on my first rhyme, a slant rhyme I knew I could not get away with, not under referee Sam Super's watchful eye. What can I say? I used to have a superior, ironic diffidence toward rap. I can't hear lyrics that well to begin with, so when it comes to angry people spitting them at me, I'm totally lost. Unfortunately, ComedySportz in general and Cayne Collier in particular would have none of that and one workshop taught the tricks of the trade that people enjoy about rapping. Now, I've lost the arrogance, and listening to myself trying just makes me sad. Pity you can't regurgitate that apple from the Tree of Knowledge. You just walk forward, cold and naked and unable to even rap about it.

So, losing that round gave us the chance to play Five Things, the gibberish/mime extravaganza that pits the players against the normalcy of the audience. Every audience, after realizing that it can not only sit and be entertained but also participate in its entertainment, really tries to stretch during the Five Things round. What do you replace the ice in ice skating with? If you're 65 percent of audiences ever, you'll shout "Jell-o!" ad nauseum. You might also choose quicksand, lava or acid, but players learn the shortcuts quickly. Guessers learn to watch for the characteristic wobble of Jell-o (which inevitably receives the additional lay on of a flavor that would never be a flavor, like "cat" or "envy"). The challenge comes when audiences are just... strange, often without even realizing it. Tight knit groups sometimes bring in their own in-jokes that really, truly stump a guesser. Five minutes goes by quickly when you've got fifteen to thirty guesses to make and excruciatingly slowly for audiences watching a player get stuck on one.

The word was "marble". I don't remember what it modified, but I chose to set it up by showing your classic Renaissance artist chipping away at a block until a David emerged. Keith, our guesser, guessed Venus de Milo, then granite, two separate guessed that ate up about thirty seconds. I was stumped. How to indicate igneous rock? Alida came to our rescue, recovering my fumble by indicating the classis kids' game, on the ground, shootin' aggies. Keith got it. We got four out of the five.

We still lost.

So it goes. The next day, Brandi and I drove down to Starved Rock, the Illinois state park famous for the legend of a group of Native American warriors chased down and bottled up at a high place until they starved to death. Not exactly the stuff of your usual two year wedding anniversary, but the veracity of the legend is lost to history. Today, people go to the park and nearby Matthieson State Park, Utica, LaSalle and Peru to get away from the big city and by "people" I of course mean "us" or, more correctly, "we". "We" hiked a pair of trails, squeezing in what we could before the sun went away. Several striking things: an enormous Elm tree trunk, cut crosswise and on display at the visitor's center, showed a survivor of time's ravages that knew America at the time of the Civil War, casually absorbing a bullet at some point and shading its rivals out in a thirty yard blast radius of dense foliage. It died of Dutch Elm disease, a fungus carried by beetles, the low making humble the mighty. We stood on the stump and felt the emptiness. Twilight and space yawned.

At Lover's Leap, a rocky cliff opposite Starved Rock on the bank of the Illinois River, we took pictures, one self-timed and another by a friendly group happening by at the right time, clowning around as if we were to leap to our doom. We survived. I got a lot of air in the self-timed shot. Brandi jumped early and looks like she is just standing awkwardly. In the other shot, I picked Brandi up, wedding night threshhold style. She looks much more convincingly terrified there. There, the emptiness is much more beautiful, a sense of possibility instead of loss. Vistas like that consume my imagination, and I'm richer for it.

Then, at some point along the way, I lost my ATM card. Possibly before or after the wine tasting. On the way home, little stuff kept disappearing. A Transformer we got at Wal-Mart. My shoes. My pre-Oscar calm. My marbles.

Silly, silly me.