yes please(37)
The doctor sat me down in front of a neon green graph showing my sleep pattern. Even to the untrained eye it didn’t look good. It looked like a bad polygraph. It looked like I had been constantly lying to someone as I slept. He asked me how many times a night I thought I woke up. “Four?” I said. “Sometimes five?” He told me I woke myself up twenty to thirty times a night. I had mild to moderate sleep apnea and I was only reaching REM sleep for a few minutes at a time over the course of a few hours. I nodded my head. This just confirmed what I had always known: I was a bad sleeper. In some ways I was disappointed. I had hoped he would pull me aside and say, “You are the worst case I have ever seen. It’s a miracle you do all that you do. I am sending you to a Hawaiian sleep rehab immediately.” Instead I was handed a CPAP machine, which stands for Compression Something Amy Poehler. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. I just stared at this crazy mask and accompanying gurgling device next to it and just couldn’t wait for the instructions to be over. I looked at it the same way you look at a plate of vegetables. You know it’s good for you but most of the time you don’t feel like it.
I have a boyfriend who knows how to settle me. He puts his hand on my chest and tells me boring stories. He promises me we can stay up as late as I want. On one of our first nights together I woke up apologizing for my snoring and he pulled out the two earplugs he had worn to bed so that he could hear what I was saying. It was one of the most romantic gestures I have ever seen. I know I should wear my crazy breathing machine but I just can’t pull the trigger. I wore it religiously for a short time and then stuck it in my closet to gather dust.
I know I should use it. I’m working on it. I’m a bad sleeper; I told you. Until I commit to the machine, I will try strips and mouth guards and special pillows. I want to sleep. I do. I want to go gentle into that good night, so help me God.
? Liezl Estipona
how i fell in love with improv:
new york
? Liezl Estipona
I HELD A MICROPHONE AT LUNA LOUNGE AND REPEATED INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AUDIENCE. It was a warm summer night in 1997 and the New York street sounds bled through the doors and onto the stage. I was twenty-six years old and supporting myself doing comedy.
The UCB was guest-hosting a Monday evening show and the audience was stoned and happy. They were happy because they had seen great comedy with young talent: The State, Marc Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Zach Galifianakis, Louis CK, Jon Benjamin, Jon Glaser, and Sarah Silverman. They were stoned because we had brought weed for the entire audience and bullied people into getting high. We handed out joints and coaxed people into digging their own one-hitters out of their backpacks. Being asked to host a Luna Lounge show was a big deal. We had worked hard on our introductions and bits in between guests, which included handing out weed and potato chips. This was a pre-9/11 New York where no one had yet heard the words “Homeland Security,” but it was also a Mayor Giuliani New York, where there was artistic pushback against the feeling that our rights were being slowly limited each day.
I had arrived in Manhattan in April 1996, a few months after a major blizzard that forced residents to ski down Fifth Avenue. We had come out to New York once to do a showcase while we were still living in Chicago, and performed at a cabaret bar in the West Village called the Duplex. I don’t remember if anyone was in the audience, but the proprietor was not too thrilled with this loud Midwestern sketch group and their giant bag of props. More than once we were told “This is not Chicago!”
Besser and I found a street-level studio apartment listed in the Village Voice on the corner of Bleecker and Tenth Street. The West Village still had a tiny bit of edge, and our studio apartment was sandwiched between a store called Condomania and Kim’s Video, a hipster record outlet that was notorious for its slow and grouchy employees. The apartment had bars on the windows and looked out onto garbage, and when we first arrived there were twenty people in line to rent it. We hustled to meet the horrible landlord and I called our parents to cosign from his cluttered and disgusting office. I have a vague memory of this millionaire slumlord standing up behind his mess of a desk and saying, “Let me take a look at you.” I may have even spun around for him. Each evening Matt and I would roll our change and throw pennies at the rats outside our windows. We put bowls over our stove at night so the mice wouldn’t come up through the burners. Once I pulled back the curtain and locked eyes with a masturbating Peeping Tom, and he just waved at me like someone saying farewell from the deck of a ship. It was the closest I have ever felt to Patti Smith. I loved it.
Much of our first year in the city was spent lugging props. New York was great for purchasing last-minute dildos, nitrous, and cap guns. UCB shows had evolved into a mix of sketch and improvisation, and we would roll out giant monitors to play our videotaped bits. This was before you could check out a person’s entire career on YouTube. Important people had to come to see you live, and we would wait for network executives to show up, masking tape over their seats Waiting for Guffman style. We came to town with two shows we had already been performing in Chicago, humbly titled Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. These shows were made up of sketches and videos and improv. I was playing girl scouts and old men and everything in between.
The four of us (me and Ian and Besser and Walsh) performed sketch at black box theaters like KGB Bar and Tribeca Lab, and after paying a rental fee and buying props, we lost money on every show. Most of those early shows had an audience of ten: five nice friends, two strangers, one crazy person, and a set of parents. We started doing open mic nights at places like Surf Reality and Luna Lounge, where we met other performers like us. We would spend the day wearing giant cat heads or dinosaur masks, harassing people with bullhorns in Washington Square Park and handing out flyers to our show. We spent the nights performing and writing and dreaming and scheming. It was sketch and improv 24/7. We had no one to take care of but ourselves.