About a two weeks ago, someone posted on the message board of improvchicago.com a question about what shows or things influenced your sense of humor or style; whether it was in sketch form or your way of approaching improv. I thought that this question was cool because it is a coal mine, if you will, and the value mined would be understanding of how your style was made. It would also be an easy way of getting two things that I want to get out of writing these little confession: letting you glimpse into my life and getting me to understand myself a little better.

I was into Legos a lot when I was a kid. I loved being able to build cars, building, whole cities out of toys. This could be a sense of creation; but riding along side of my thrill of building, came the thrill of destruction: I would make up huge battles between my Lego men (female Legos came years later) and many explosion, chases, and fights would happen. The battles would start in my room, continue down the hallway, down the stairs, and would probably end on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. The progression of the war could be seen just by walking from the kitchen back to my room, hundred of little blocks and body part of the Lego people strewn about like flower petals in a wedding ceremony. Then I would gather all the pieces, rebuild all the stuff, and do it all over again. I can remember hours spent just on the carpeted stairs and doing slow motion truck crashes, ripping pieces and chucks off as they hit a step, adding all the sound affects as it went. It is easy when I look at this activity, which I loved to do, to see where the beginnings of my love of storytelling came from.

In the same vein, I would also love to do the same thing with my Star Wars figures, micro machines, Transformers, and GI Joe figures. Micro machines was the oddest I think in that my sister and I would anthropomorphize the cars and make soap opera type stories while playing with the very tiny toys. I think this is where I got my story telling roots. My sister and I would do these stories so often, usually doing stories of someone getting recruited into a top secret military spy agency or gaining super natural powers, that we found out that exposition is boring. Then, when I would watch Le Femme Nikita wannabes I would get bored because my sister and I would have done the same story before, and usually in a better way. It's an odd thing to realize that at 10 or 11 that you are a better storyteller than those that were getting paid to put these things on TV.

I love Calvin and Hobbes, Farside, Peanuts, and For Better Or Worse. These comic strips in the newspaper were and are great. At the time I wanted to be a cartoonist when I grew up and wanted to draw and write as well as these strips.

I love the slow pace and low energy of the Peanuts. I rooted for Charlie Brown- to kick the ball Lucy held but knew that he should never kick it, to ask out the red-haired Girl, to finally win a baseball game. I love Snoopy, who doesn't? Trying to shoot down the Red Baron, being Joe Cool, drinking Root Beers, his friendship with Woodstock, they are all what make Snoopy just great. I also really liked the animated features of the Peanuts: where Snoopy goes back to live with his first owner ("Snoopy Come Home," I believe), where the gang goes over to France, the Spelling Bee one that Charlie Brown enters, and, of course, the Christmas Special one.

I love the weirdness of Farside. I love how all the women are the same shape and load of people where those dorky 60's glasses. Right now I'm a chemist at a lab and I appreciate it for its pinpoint accuracy in some of the people that inhabit the science world. I also like how it only uses one picture and a caption to reach the joke. "Brevity is the soul of wit;" and Farside demonstrates it the best.

For Better Or Worse isn't a particular out-loud funny strip but I like it because no other strip is like it. The characters age as time goes on and that is great. I am about the same age as the big brother Mike character and it was cool to see him going through high school and college when I was. The thing about this strip is that it is so true that it is scary. Sometimes a really funny thing will happen, and I will chuckle, but for the most part, I just like this strip for its originality.

Calvin and Hobbes is my all time favorite cartoon strip. I can identify with Calvin in his imagination. I was never as much of a troublemaker as Calvin but I do enjoy the thrill of being a little mischievous. When I was young, I had a whole crap load of stuffed animals. I named each one, gave them their own personalities, and sometimes would spend my moments before sleep praying and hoping that they would magically turn alive so I could talk to them. I love Calvin and Hobbes because the story lines were great and funny. Plus, the artwork that Bill Waterson would do was just great. I don't think any cartoonist has equaled his amazing artwork ever since. Plus, he was the one who pushed the boundaries of the boxes-in-a-row format. He made it so that the comics, especially the Sunday comics, were more like a comic book in that the boxes could be anywhere, even overlapping each other. It's this type of originality that I admire.

Another thing that influenced my life was the Toys R Us commercials where the kids would sing, "I don't want to grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid�." The line, "I don't want to grow up because if I did, then I couldn't be a Toys R Us kid" really affected me. I too didn't want to end my childhood and maybe that's why I was so reluctant to look at prospective colleges and to start to study for my MCATs. My childhood was a happy one and I didn't want it to end. The thing is that I've learned, is that I can still be a child at heart, but now I enjoy being an adult. Being an adult is fun. I get to cruise around at 70mph in my car, I don't have homework, I can stay out late at night, I can watch R rated movies (and X-rated if I so pleased), I can drink alcohol legally, there is just so much more I can do. And I can act like a kid, which is probably why I love improv so much. Plus in improv, we are taught that all choices aren't wrong or shouldn't be judged, but accepted and played with. In that way, I don't have to worry about peer judgement, I can just do silly things and my friends will make it golden.

There were also a few movies that influenced me growing up. One of them was D.A.R.Y.L. A boy with computer chips in his brain, who was super smart and adept at sports, and one of a kind, that really appealed to me. I wanted to be a data analyzing robot youth life form too. Or maybe a cybernetic robot with human flesh on the outside, like in Terminator. Or maybe aliens from another world who had supernatural powers like in Escape from Witch Mountain. Basically I wanted to be special. To be different. For some reason I have a love-hate relationship with normality. I want to be different, but also part of the crowd. To some people, I want to be seen as a normal guy, but I also want them to see something special in me. It�s a very weird and way too big of a concept to really explain, but just know that I want to be the same and different at the same time.

One thing that makes me an odd person is that I get antsy quite often when I'm by myself for long periods of time. I can also sit and watch TV for hours on end. However, if I get the tinge of boredom, sometimes I start clapping my hands in weird rhythms or dance around without any music just to get rid of my excess energy. Sometimes I act like terrorists have just entered my apartment and are shooting me, so I act like I'm getting shot. Sometimes this is done in slow motions, moving body parts like they are getting pierced with bullets. Sometimes I do this in fast motion, just basically doing death scenes over and over again. I will act like I get shot and fall back onto the couch to break my fall. Doing this makes me feel like a stunt man and it is so much fun. When I was in college, I got involved in stage combat and even got myself certified as an Actor's Combatant in unarmed, rapier and dagger, and quarterstaff. I really like stage fighting, because then I can act like I'm beating up someone, and getting beat up myself, without the real pain.

When I was younger, I had a problem of slurring my words. People couldn't understand what I said and I would have to repeat myself. Also, my dad has been getting progressively hard of hearing, as he has gotten older. So, growing up, I would often hear, "huh?" and would have to repeat myself to him. I hated to repeat myself, in both cases. I hate telling the same story over again in general. Like when I came back from Europe in the summer of '94, I got tired of telling friends the places I went to. I would have preferred to gather everyone I knew and tell them all at once so that I wouldn't have to repeat myself. Before I got into theater, I thought the notion of doing the same lines over and over again, day after day boring. I like improv better cause every time you did it, it was different. It wasn't until later did I realize that in scripted theater, that every time you do it, you are doing it different cause you can say the same line hundred of different ways, and you can react off of your scene partner in different ways because they also say the lines differently.

Another thing- and the last thing for this entry- that affected the way I look at things, was the impression that the world revolved around Chicago. The movies Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club were both set around Chicago. I grew up in Schaumburg, which is a suburb of Chicago so I loved it when movies were set around Chicago. I also heard that most commercials are targets for Mid-Western America and they also use actors who speak Standard English which people in the Mid-West speak. Plus, in The Princess Bride, the room that Fred Savage's character lived in, looked a lot like my room. And I heard that Cubs fans were everywhere, and some were fans even though they have never been to Chicago. So all of these things helped me to think that Chicago was a great city and maybe that everything was geared for me. A silly concept I know but when you are young, you notice these things.

So, the seeds in being drawn to improv were sewn long ago in my childhood, and looking back it seems inevitable that I would fall into it, but growing up, before I found improv, much stress was generated in trying to figure out where I wanted my life to go.