Correction: I don't like the taste of beer. That said, I have been drinking more of it than I ever have in the past few months. Now, this is not a sign of the beginnings of alcoholism, it's just a sign that I've been hanging out at bars and going to parties more often. Improv, and the theater community in general, seems to have an almost symbiotic relationship with alcohol. Whether the alcoholism begot creativity or creativity begot alcoholism is debatable, kind of like the chicken and the egg discussion. What this essay will try to do is organize my thoughts on the topic of alcohol and improv.

I'll start with myself. My taste buds are finicky, to say the least, and I do not like things that are bitter. Beer as a whole seems to be more of a bitter tasting alcohol. I say this because I still believe that I haven't tasted enough kinds to really put a stamp on the opinion that I hate all beers. I still wonder whether there is a type of beer out there that I haven't tasted which I will love. I doubt it but the possibility is out there. The darker the beer the more I hate it. I can handle ciders a little bit, but even these are kind of yucky to me.

I love wine. Correction: I love sweet wines and especially red ones. White ones are okay but any wine that is dry I don't like. Again, I have picky taste buds. I also like hard liquors. My favorite mixed drink is a mudslide. Most of the mixed drinks that are creamy or have milk in them I like. This is in part because I love milk and it is my favorite thing to drink.

However, I've seen enough movies and TV shows to know how dangerous alcohol is. My family, to my recollection, does not have any incidence of alcoholism and I haven't had to deal with it at all in my life. I haven't had to deal with any addiction in my life and I haven't been around friends with addictions that I know of. Meaning that I don't really understand what people go through when overcoming an addiction since I've never had to. I mention this because I do not want anyone reading this to think that I trivialize the ordeal of breaking addictions.

I fancy myself an observer of the world and sometimes I worry about fellow improvisers who I see drunk often. There is so much talent in the people around me and I don't want to see it go to waste. There are many reasons to drink too much: can't deal being in the same room as your ex, hoping you leave your inhibitions and hook up with someone you have a crush on [on a side note, I usually use the term "hook up" to mean just start dating or making out; your mental image may be more graphic in nature than mine], your parents are cheating on one another and you don't want to feel the pain of a lost sense of the sanctity of marriage, you think that being liked means doing what others do or expect of you like drinking, etc. There are so many reasons to drink too much and on occasion I have too. Two days before this past New Years I got the most drunk I've ever been. Why? Because I wanted to be honest and not hold back in the drinking game we were playing. Told you, there are countless reasons.

In the improv theaters around town, there is at least one bar in it or they have a policy that encourages people to bring their own alcohol. "The more you drink, the funnier we get" is the phrase I hear a lot from hosts. While this is true, it sort of short changes the players and might get people to think we are funnier than we actually are. The main problem I see is that it fosters the belief that to entertain we must be funny. However, the teams that I love the most are the ones that play the most realistically with the funny coming out of the truth of the situations. Now, I know most theaters that have a bar, like IO, make a profit because of the liquor they sell. It gets people into the theater; it drives the revenue; it's good business; it's almost like a necessary evil.

It wouldn't be a problem if drinking weren't seemingly encouraged by some. I'm going to tell stories I've experienced or heard of and say that I've only heard them all so as to protect people from being named. I heard a story about a teacher telling students to hang out after class and get drunk together to bond. I heard a story about before a team's first show, a coach gave each person a can of beer to loosen them up and calm their nerves. I've heard stories of players drinking heavily before a final show and other teams drinking before or on stage during a show. While I don't care what people do after a show, I don't like it when some drink on stage or before a show.

Others may say that a little bit of alcohol does loosen a person up and make them less afraid on stage. If someone is afraid to be on stage, then why is there this need to be on stage? Find out what is holding you back on stage and try to fix it first without alcohol. Improv is quick and fast and you have to be able to react and retain a lot of information. Alcohol in the system will get in the way of this. Yes, alcohol affects people in different ways as far as how people behave on it, but I still can't see it being that positive.

When I am drunk, I get really relaxed to the point of looking like I have no energy. I do get sleepy and I'm the kind of improv nerd that notes how my body moves when drunk so that I can duplicate it on stage if I need to play a drunk. I also get the urge to confess a lot. It's not really a lowering of inhibitions, it's more like I have an excuse to say what is on my mind. I can write it off later on as if I wouldn't have said it if I weren't drunk but I could have held it back at the time.

Recently, I went to Tavern 33 after Atticus Finch [the Incubator team I'm on] had a show at the Playground and this drunk girl come up to me and my friends and starts talking to us as if we've all known her for years. She also told me that she could take me in a fight. After she staggered away, we all asked each other if they knew her and were amused with the common remark of "I thought you knew her."

Various friends have held their birthday shindigs at bars; I did too this past year. Co-workers invite me to go to downtown bars and chill with them. My best friend held a drinking challenge at one after he challenged a co-worker of his to see who could hold their liquor the best. He won�only after about 4 shots, 2 beers, and 3 mixed drinks into it. At a volunteer orientation meeting this past week, somehow the conversation turned to how much fun volunteers had being placed at the beer tent for a past summer music festival.

The whole city seems to have alcohol on their minds or in it as can be suspected from some of the local people who regularly ask for any money I can spare. I realized recently that the ad campaigns for large beer companies are a joke since it hardly seems that hard to get people to drink your beer. Maybe it was important after the Prohibition, to get sales up, but nowadays I think that mostly the companies are like, "well, we've got this creative types thinking up funny commercials for us and they seem to like it�let's not fire them since they make us look funny."

When I was over in Europe, the only drunks in the bar were American kids my age; I was 17 when I went. Kids love the lower alcohol age limits, and they become kids at a candy store. If you can't tell, I've acted more like an adult my whole life, even when I was 8. The thing my mind focuses on is how other countries don't seem to have huge percentages of alcoholism, where America does. I think it's because of the drinking age at 21. I think it should be much lower.

The thing is that adults as a whole coddle and baby the youth too much. Maybe this stems from the fact that not too long ago adults didn't think too much of children, except as not fully formed adults. This is partly true in experience and wisdom, but wisdom seems to have been forgotten in this case. The drinking age used to be 18, but a lot of kids in high school were trying to get it before then. Since they were also newly drivers, with not much experience with that too, they didn't know how to handle them both at the same time. That's the cause, the effect being many alcohol-related deaths of underage drinkers. Congress's solution: raise the drinking age, stemming from the logic that since they couldn't handle alcohol, they shouldn't be able to drink it until they are a little more mature. However, in the past 25 years since the change of the law, underage drinking is the same, just that people are underage longer now since they have to wait longer before turning the legal age.

Why not lower the drinking age to 6? Seriously. Teach your kids to respect alcohol and drink it carefully. Then by the time they get to drive, they've had a decade's experience with alcohol. For the maturity only comes from experience and time below your belt. At least that's my opinion. And I speak from experience.

My parents allowed my sister and I to drink during holidays. Each Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, we got a bit of wine at dinner. From this we learned that alcohol is just a common drink, just another thing to choose from to have at a meal. Its wonder and mystery was gone. Plus, most of the appeal of alcohol for the youth is the fact that it is taboo. If it weren't taboo and illegal, they wouldn't do it as much, I figure. After all, most of what is expected from a teenager is to rebel, although I personally never felt the desire to rebel; again the "maturity at a young age."

The real problem with huge topics as these is that it is so huge and the suggestions to deal with it, including mine, are vague and wide sweeping. There are exceptions for all the rules. You almost need to take everything case by case to truly rule and judge on it. Even then you are judging others [which I'm guilty of too; I'm not perfect] and the only ones with the best handle of a person's limits are themselves. It's no business of mine to say you can or cannot do things. Be that as it may, I still tend to hang with people who are most like me. Maybe that's a fault, maybe that's me being socially timid, but it's my choice and I'll have to determine if it's for better or for worse. I try not to judge my friends for their choices either, just accept them for who they are. Some of them like to drink a lot, some only socially, some in small gathering, and some not at all.

I had hoped to end this essay on some dramatic point, but none come to mind.