That's my improv troupe, by the way, which claimed some two dozen members. It's been my only one, for six years. For two years and change at the College of New Jersey, I practiced a couple of times a week for it. Matt and Lyndsay (there are going to be a lot of names, but they're for the record and don't need to be flow charted) started the troupe, and somehow both my brother Jeff and I got in, despite zero previous stage work. We did free shows on campus to sometimes-eager crowds, and went on the road to a handful of states, where we met equally sometimes-eager crowds. I was making friends with actors and musicians, people I never hung out with in high school. It was as good a college experience as you can get. Therefore, I had no plans to stop after graduation.
What I thought was my last show as a college student was a great one. Every once in a while, a person in a troupe has a show where everything they do just works. That person becomes the star for that night. My last campus show was my first time as this. Every scene I was in clicked with the audience, which had to be over a hundred. I did my first (and only) foray into standup with a comparison of the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway, and it killed. I went out with a big fat bang. But I couldn't stop there.
The last thing on the Mixed Signals agenda was a Communications department presentation Friday and Saturday. Mixed Signals has a very good work ethic, so we said yes to helping out, even though we just got a ten-minute spot between video presentations. I wasn't in one of the scenes, and barely participated in the other, far too crowded one.
We were a big troupe, so sometimes you could do a show where the few scenes you did didn't strike gold. That Friday was one of those nights. I had a great exit from college improv, but I kept pushing it. My farewell performance was now Man #3 in a scene that didn't even need Man #1.
Three people graduated spring 1998: Adrienne, Jeff and me. We were the first cluster of Mixed Signals to graduate from the college, and logically from the college troupe. But Scott had graduated in December 1997, and had stuck around for practices and shows. Same with Jeanette, and she didn't even go to our college any more after December 1997. The precedent was set. Once a Mixed Signal, always a Mixed Signal. All three of us stuck around.
We had plenty to do that summer. Mixed Signals had a three-week engagement at the Mill Hill Theater that August. This involved a lot of carpooling from South Orange to Trenton for Jeff and me, an hour and a half each way. The stress of all that driving (plus a leaky radiator) ended up stalling the car to the tune of $600. My reward was a series of shows for never more than ten people. (Attendance surged for the last weekend, which I wasn't able to make.)
Jeff left the troupe that September. He still wanted to keep in contact with everyone, but didn't want to become that 23-year-old who still hangs out in his high school parking lot. I felt some of what Jeff was feeling, like I was an imposter still trying to use my college ID, but all I was giving up here was some TV watching time. No one was getting hurt (aside from my car).
Unlike most of my college friends, who went being lost to lack of communication, I still saw everyone in Mixed Signals regularly. Most all of the diploma-holders still came to the practices and shows along with me, so the troupe was almost exactly the same as before. Hell, I regularly got five or ten Mixed Signal e-mails a day when something important was being discussed, just like in college. The only downside was three-hour round trips.
May 1999 marked the troupe's surprise disbanding. Matt had set up weeklong improv tours across the South, the most recent having Matt, Anne, Jaime and Vin in the van. Vin dropped out last minute. Matt couldn't do a week of touring with a three person troupe, so he pulled the plug on the whole tour. He also said that the troupe was now disbanded, since he was quitting Mixed Signals altogether.
What to do now wasn't even a conscious thought. Everyone but Matt wanted to continue the troupe, so we split up Matt's duties. Adrienne began coordinating the practices, Ken focused on the business end of things, and Jaime eventually became the artistic director.
Matt had been pushing the troupe to longform improv, the jazz fusion of the improv world, which was not winning over the college crowds. We'd have an audience of thirty at the beginning of the longform, and fifteen by the end. We weren't in love with scaring away our crowd. We switched back to short form, and the crowd swelled like an infected boil. We started busting maximum occupancy codes at every show. These weren't just friends and the theater crowd, but frat guys and high school students and people who had never met us before.
I cut going to every practice when my car started to die. None one else had skipped practices before due to distance. After I got a new car, I kept with the fewer practices, and hoped the troupe understood. When I did make it for a Sunday practice, I coincided it with a visit to my dad, who had moved to New Brunswick, a halfway point between campus and my apartment.
Ken began an effort to get paying gigs, since the campus shows were all done for free. He created Mixed Signals the LLC, and everyone in the troupe contributed $30 (even Jared, who had moved to Brooklyn after his graduation and wasn't involved any more). We were each 1/10th owners of Mixed Signals. What this practically meant was that instead of cash for gigs we got official looking paychecks, with taxes and the cost of paychecks taken out of them.
We held auditions, and brought in five new troupe members, three of which are still with the troupe today: Eric, Janine and Aaron. They weren't in the LLC, so they became our "employees" during the paying shows. Jeff moved back down to New Jersey August 2000. He saw the troupe was still having a lot of fun, and still keeping in contact with each other. He rejoined, and became a 1/11th owner of the LLC.
I began to know fewer and fewer people in the audience. The juniors and sophomores from my senior year had all graduated, so I'd only recognize one or two people out of a hundred. After the shows, I'd chat with the other old Mixed Signals, while the campus people talked to all their friends in the crowd. I got into a routine of just going to shows, and only the odd practice. Most of the other graduates hit the same stride, and with so many people in the cast a few absences weren't noticed.
One year ago all of us met at a T.G.I. Fridays to figure out what to do with the troupe. By all of us I meant seven or eight people out of eleven LLC owners. There hadn't been an occasion where EVERY Mixed Signal member could make it for years and years. We were regularly driving insane distances to be in gradually fewer games for a college troupe made up of more and more graduates. This would snowball with every graduation ceremony.
There was one possibly ugly solution to our dilemma: splitting the troupe. The professional troupe (the LLC), would focus on off-campus shows, have our own practices at more convenient locations than an unused college classroom, and build a paying audience from the crowd that currently saw us for free. The campus troupe would continue the free campus shows and recruit new members when the ranks got low.
Finding gigs used to be a side project: now it WAS the project. A regular place to play was key. The LLC was scattered across New Jersey like shrapnel, so we didn't have a base city. New Brunswick was our overall best prospect: centrally located; a population center; home of Rutgers, the biggest college in the state, packed with high schoolers, and with no pre-existing improv. We found a cabaret space at the George Street Theater that we had a lot of hope for. The manager eventually said no to our offer, but it took nine months for him to do so, during which time the hope to get it prompted a lot of us to stop looking elsewhere.
Mixed Signals was not the sole improv in my life any more. I had been begun posting on yesand.com, an improv bulletin board. That prompted me to take a few classes, make some friends, and become a member of the improv community. There were troupes being formed around me, but I didn't feel right doing anything since I was already spoken for with Mixed Signals. There was a betrayal atmosphere if someone showed interest in a troupes other than ours. I didn't understand it, but most of the troupe seemed to feel that way.
One year after the split, the campus troupe was doing great. Mel became a leading voice in it during her senior year. Auditions yielded Curt, Kim and Christina, all of whom had huge improv talent and fit it great with the other students. Shows were still getting monster attendances. The campus troupe showed every chance of being self sufficient and successful without us old people trying to keep control.
The LLC, however, had all of two shows in the past year. One was in New York, at a cabaret where everyone who showed up had to pay an arm and a leg (of which we saw a toe). The other was a YMCA show that the Y did very little advertising for. We played in a huge gym for a dozen people, half of them friends we brought with us. Troupe practices were sporadic, since half the time they'd be cancelled when only two people could make it. The practices themselves were only half improv and half us berating ourselves about not putting in the work to get gigs.
Scott dropped out of the troupe. A few months later, Tom dropped out. These were four- and five-year Mixed Signal veterans leaving the pack. Why? The fun was gone. Going a month without practice and not having shows to practice toward had replaced the joyfulness of improv.
Mixed Signals was on life support. As much as I loved the professional troupe, I saw it primarily as a way to keep in touch with people. There wasn't much chance of Mixed Signals going forward with anything improv-wise. We couldn't even get practices together, much less shows. Our target audience was already getting a great show by 'us' for free. Why were we sticking around? It was no longer fun for any of us. And our life support could go on indefinitely.
Everyone felt the same thing: maybe it was time to stop. Jaime was the first to bring it up, in an e-mail to the troupe. A flurry of responses came back within 24 hours, just like in the old days. Every e-mail went further and further with the assumption that we were done. By the time the whole troupe had gotten a say, Mixed Signals had its plug pulled. Time of death: 4/19/02.
The campus troupe is still doing strong, as ever. They've got a new catch of four improvisers in February, and I can barely remember their first names. I wish them the best of luck, but I probably won't be stopping by every practice. Hopefully Mixed Signals will be a college institution for decades to come.
There's a Mixed Signal wake party scheduled, as well as the Adrienne's birthday party, so we'll probably see each other more over the summer than we did when we still had practices. After the summer, we'll all plan to stay in contact, but without our excuse it probably won't happen with regularity. I have every intention of seeing everyone just as much as before, but I'm not putting money on it.
We tried to keep the troupe going indefinitely, and we got a four-year run out of it. No one's looking to bring us back to life this time, but I'm glad for every day of it. I might have been that guy hanging out in the high school parking lot after all, but I had great company with me.