The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  I started thinking about this a lot during my work with the Residents’ Association. At the end of it all, the thing that most struck me is how easy it is to get caught up in a battle mentality. You can get so swept up by the idea of winning that you end up forgetting what it is that you’re after and focusing instead on stopping your opponent from getting what they want. Just because someone is your opponent doesn’t mean that their defeat is always your victory. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that way, but at that point you’re no longer acting even to your own advantage. You’re just being angry in ways that don’t make things better for anybody.

  I think a lot of human progress consists of overcoming certain instincts, and understanding that just because someone wants something different from you, it doesn’t mean that they’re bad or that causing them harm is morally acceptable. But more important, in most cases it also doesn’t mean that you’ll be better off by hurting them. It’s so, so easy to mistake damage to your enemy as a personal gain. This happens on every level: among friends, at work, and in politics.

  I know that in law there’s a small glimmer of this. Lawyers are now practicing what is known as collaborative divorce. So, where the old model for a divorce settlement was that each party would hire a lawyer and the lawyers would do battle, the collaborative divorce model is that the lawyers and the parties try to work together to come up with what feels like a fair solution to dividing assets and child care and all that, with the understanding that it doesn’t make things better for anybody to go to war.

  30. Seeing My Friends Drunk for the First Time

  People involved in certain kinds of music and entertainment and culture—what they’re really in is the drinks business, since so much of that stuff happens in bars. So Trampoline Hall is in the drinks business. There’s more money in bar sales than in ticket sales, and that affects how a lot of these events are structured.

  When I first started my games night, something I thought was, So many of the things that happen in bars are such boring experiences, and I figured a games night would be a way to give people a more engaging experience in bars. I thought, People go to bars because they want to be around other people, but normally being in bars doesn’t give you much opportunity to interact with other people, and I thought the games nights would sort of solve that problem.

  What I didn’t understand at the time was that a lot of things I viewed as problems were actually part of the business model. So in Toronto, at least, when you go to see a band, it usually starts later than it’s scheduled to, and there’s more time between the sets than you feel you need, and it’s boring. But all that boredom sells drinks. If you make people stand around in a bar for half an hour with nothing to do, eventually they’ll buy a drink if for no other reason than that it kills five minutes to buy the drink and then it gives them something to do with their hands afterward.

  At the games night, people were pretty much fully engaged and entertained from the moment they got there till the moment they left, so they didn’t end up buying all the drinks that normally get bought out of boredom, so the bar never made any money. If the bar doesn’t make any money, the business that you’re in isn’t really functioning. I thought that barroom events were in the business of entertaining people, and they are, but sort of in the same way that television for the first few decades of its existence wasn’t really in the business of entertaining people, it was in the business of entertaining people just enough that they could be persuaded to watch the ads, which is where the actual money came from. In the same way, all the entertainment that’s in a bar is primarily there just to get you to buy drinks, and if it fails to get you to buy drinks, you’re not really doing your job as the organizer of the event.

  I’m always a little bit baffled by bars where there’s no dancing but the music is incredibly loud, and I don’t really understand why people would want to hang around and mingle in a place where it’s impossible to be heard. I suspect that one reason for that, again, is that it sells more drinks; if it’s easier to have a conversation, there’s less need for the activity of going back and forth to the bar. I don’t know.

  Drinking isn’t a big part of the events I run now, and at some events it’s discouraged if not completely forbidden. Partly, in the beginning, I was interested in how the participatory improvisation stuff might be an alternative to drinking and drugs—a way to have a raucous party where the energy came from something other than intoxicants. At that time in my life, I did go to a lot of parties and I always wanted something wild and exciting and unusual to happen, but mostly people would just sort of get drunk, and nothing exciting and wild and amusing would happen. To me, there was a real contrast between that and getting people together for theater games or even charades, where people end up doing things that really are surprising. Someone might be crawling around on the floor pretending to be a dog while other people point and shout at them, or a hundred people might be getting swept up in a sort of transcendent aesthetic experience while chasing each other around a room. These all seemed to me, at the time, like the kinds of things that drugs and parties should produce but that drugs and parties mostly didn’t.

  When I first started doing charades parties, as this sort of house party / art project with a friend of mine, we played multiple parlor games in different rooms, and I found that once people had a few drinks, they couldn’t really play the games anymore.

  I think it was the first time in my life I’d ever really seen drunk people. I’d always been one of them before. When you’re drunk and all your friends are drunk, you think you’re all really charming and funny, but at those parties I sort of thought, Well, I’m at work—so I didn’t drink. But all my amusing friends did, and seeing them from the perspective of sobriety was kind of awful. It’s not that you become more interesting and fun when you’re drunk, it’s that your perception of interesting and fun is lowered to such a moronic level. And mostly people become bad. The teams fight more with each other, people don’t pay attention. With lots of the stuff I do, I think people can’t do it when they’re drunk, and I’m less interested in it if they are.

  I used to drink a lot and do drugs the normal amount, because it made things more fun. In the end, I decided that if these things lead you into genuinely fun, interesting places, that’s okay, but if they lead you to places that wouldn’t be fun if you weren’t drunk, it’s a little bit depressing. That’s one of the many reasons why drinking isn’t as bad for young people as it is for older people. When people are nineteen, they get drunk and it really does lead them into interesting misadventure, or they wind up in a new part of town—and that’s what you want when you’re nineteen. The drugs and alcohol help make that more possible in a number of ways. When you’re older, drugs and alcohol just give you greater tolerance for a boring time.

  31. A Decision Is a Thing You Make

  A couple of years ago, I got to the point where I felt I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I was doing many projects and a lot of them were really interesting and fun, and sort of well received in the small world in which I operate, but I wasn’t making any money. Also, I had no idea what it all added up to. At first I thought I just needed to figure out how to make money and keep doing what I was doing, but then I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really know where I was trying to get to in my life, and in my working life especially. If someone had said, Where do you want your working life to be in five years? I would have had no way of answering that question. Somehow my life had got filled up with weird experiments and side projects, but there wasn’t anything at the core of it.

  I think it happened like this: In the mid-nineties, I had a job in Toronto doing Internet stuff, and I got fired from that job after trying to unionize my office, so I ended up doing freelance web development at a time when that was a tremendously lucrative thing to do. Around that time, I was also really attached to the idea of leisure, so I worked only a few days a week. I made a lot of money, I had a lot of free time, an
d I really wanted to fill it intelligently with things that were fun. Those “fun” projects eventually started to take over my life, and after a couple of years, it seemed I was working seventy hours a week, not making any money, doing things that were “fun.”

  Teaching classes in how to play charades isn’t the most practical idea in the world, and neither is running a lecture series featuring nonexperts, and neither is teaching theater classes but refusing to admit actors.

  How could any of these things make any money or lead anywhere? This worried me a lot and it was a terrible time for me in a lot of ways. After a couple of years I sort of felt like, well, I need some results. You can’t just experiment forever. You have to act on it—act on the data that you’ve gathered, or something. I felt upset at myself. I felt that I’d been foolish to imagine that somehow the answer to how I would live and work and make money would present itself if I ran around long enough doing different things.

  I decided to go to the bookstore and look at some self-help books about careers. I went and found two or three books that looked pretty good. I took them home and I read them. It was pretty exciting.

  I’m a real believer in certain kinds of self-help books. A lot of them, of course, are really, really terrible—like anything—but when they’re good I think they’re great. It’s easy to underestimate the fact that other people have had similar problems to yours and that you can learn from their experiences—and learn from people who’ve spent lots of time thinking about certain problems. A well-written self-help book can stop you from going down all kinds of blind alleys and trying all sorts of solutions that happen not to work.

  One of these books was written by a guy who ran a consulting business, and you could hire him or his folks to help you out. That seemed pretty good to me, because I liked the book quite a bit. So I called him up and I was able to work with him. The deal was that you work over the phone, and he gives you assignments, and then you do the assignments and call him back.

  What made me like his book was a section called “How to Make Decisions,” which is something that I—at that time in my life—was terrible at. And I was upset at myself for being so terrible at it.

  Basically, the chapter explained in some detail the kinds of factors that go into making a decision. It explained that first you needed to figure out what you wanted—what your priorities were—which was a process that he didn’t make out to be terribly mysterious or anything, but he pointed out that it took some time and some thinking. Then you have to collect information from the world to try to get a sense of what your options are and what likely outcomes of different courses of action are. Then he tells you how to write these things up—maybe put them in a chart. At the end of the section, what he said was: Now once you’ve done all this, make the decision.

  And I really liked that! Basically the point of the section was you can’t externalize the project of making a decision. You can’t hope there’s going to be an algorithm to make the decision for you which will perfectly rationalize it. You can be better about it and try to be better informed, but there’s no getting around the fact that you have to make a decision. That’s how a decision happens.

  That’s a really important thing that sometimes nervous people like me don’t realize—that the expression “to make a decision” is perfectly accurate: a decision is something you create. There’s an inclination to think that with enough research and thinking and conversation and information, it’s possible to determine what the correct decision is; to think that decision making is an intellectual puzzle. But generally it’s not. You make decisions. Something is created when you make a decision. It’s an act of will, not an act of thought.

  So I was very excited to do all this. I talked to the guy who wrote the book, and I decided to go ahead with this project. I worked on it for a while. I talked to him on the phone. I made lists. I had meetings with my friends—which was my favorite part. I interviewed my friends and I asked them not so much for advice about what I should do but what they thought I was interested in and what they thought I was good at and what they thought I wasn’t good at. Sometimes that would lead specifically to ideas for careers and sometimes it wouldn’t. The idea was to do some data gathering about myself and my proclivities, and it was a real pleasure.

  Generally, my friends thought I liked new things and got bored with things easily. Almost everybody in some way or another mentioned that they couldn’t really see me having a job where I did the same thing all the time, which is funny, because I’m someone who thinks of myself as liking routine. It was interesting to realize the degree to which I work and think well with other people in real time, and to understand that that’s not true of everybody. For me it only seems natural, of course. How can you come up with good ideas except in dialogue with someone else, or onstage, or in a situation like that? But I realized that for a lot of people that’s not true at all. One reason people are, for instance, well suited to being writers is that they have a strong ability, or in many cases a preference, to do their thinking alone. People talked about my ability to think on my feet. Teaching was something that came up a lot. It was interesting, too, that some people felt that I already had a career—that what I was doing was already sort of coherent and clear to them, even if it wasn’t to me.

  After a while, having worked on more exercises and having done more research, I realized I had to make a decision. But it became harder and harder to get my thoughts together. I would sit down every day to try to refine my plan, and I would just be overwhelmed with terror. I’d be completely paralyzed. I imagine this is what people must feel like when they have a dissertation that they never finish or another big project that they never finish. In this case the big project was figuring out what I should do with my life. I woke up every morning thinking, I’m terribly far behind on the project of my whole life.

  I think there was a point at which I finally wrote up a page description of a working life that I gave to this guy, and we talked on the phone, and he was like, That’s it—that’s what you want to do. Now it’s your job to figure out how to do that.

  The basic idea was a mix of teaching classes in impractical subjects with more practical applications of similar kinds of work, like doing training or conferences or those kinds of things. So when he was like, Yeah, you’ve got it, I think for about five minutes I felt really good. But then I felt bad. I was really frightened about whether this actually was the right choice. I was frightened about all the other possibilities this ruled out, which is kind of the definition of choice. It was great to have his encouragement, but it sort of felt to me like he’d made the decision himself, and I wasn’t sure if I completely trusted him.

  * * *

  I ended up seeing a therapist who was interested in professional stuff but was also a psychologist, and he had a very different take on these issues. What I learned from him was that when you’re in a situation of uncertainty that’s causing you pain, as I was in my life, there’s a couple of things you can do.

  One thing you can do is increase your certainty, and the other thing you can do is increase your tolerance for uncertainty. The stuff that I was doing with this guy was, in my mind at least, based on the idea that my goal was to completely eliminate uncertainty—that the task ahead of me was to figure out the perfect job for myself, the perfect career, and that I would then make this very difficult decision, and once that was behind me I wouldn’t have to face this painful uncertainty anymore.

  I think there’s a lot to be said for making decisions and for making choices and for introducing certainty. But there’s no way you’re going to eliminate uncertainty.

  I think realizing that was really important for me.

  32. All the Games Are Meant to Solve Problems, but Problems Are Unpleasant

  A lot of my games come from things that go wrong in my classes. I have a class and I have some expectation of how I want people to respond to some exercise, but they don’t respond the way I want them to, or they’re too s
hy, or they don’t believe that the sounds they’re making are musical, or there’s too much variation in comfort among the different participants in the class, or they’re always making the same kinds of sounds and won’t do anything different. Whenever I have a problem like this, I usually get upset, and then I have to invent a game to fix it. Usually it works, and then I’m happy. But it always seems dumb that I get upset. I wish I could somehow learn this lesson: that one of the main reasons I teach the classes is to generate new games—and that that’s one of the greatest pleasures. By far the most productive source of new games is new problems. So you’d think I’d be happy when new problems present themselves, but I never am.

  33. Home Maladies

  Every once in a while, whenever we’re cleaning up the house, Margaux is like, How come you have seven copies of The Doctors Book of Home Remedies? Please could you throw out six of the copies? And I always say, Sweetheart, no, I use them for a game. They’re for my class. I need them all.

  This game is about wholeheartedly accepting what other people give you to deal with in a theater scene. There’s a classic theater exercise where people give each other gifts, and each person is meant to give and accept gifts as warmly as possible. The Home Remedies game is just the same stupid game, except we use that book. Player one comes onstage and she says to player two, Oh, I got you a gift—and hands player two The Doctors Book of Home Remedies. And player two says, Oh, that’s so kind of you! You got me—and then he opens the book at a random page and chooses the malady that’s at the top of the page. You know, You got me diarrhea. At which point he is inflicted with the most severe case of whatever that malady is, while also expressing much joy and gratitude for the generous gift. Then the process is reversed. He says to player one, Oh, that reminds me, I got you something—and back and forth they go, happily contracting a variety of diseases. It’s a completely moronic game, but it gets people accustomed to the idea that they don’t have to run away from bad things in scenes, and it plays with the tension between delight and horribleness that I think makes up a lot of the fun of improv.