I came to improv late. I didn’t act at all until 2009 and started improv in 2015. But as I delve back into my favorite improv books, I wonder what could have been.
In late 1991 and early 1992, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was laid off from my first newspaper job in the fall of 1991 and didn’t have any luck finding anything else. I spent that fall and winter coaching high school wrestling and working at a friend’s business at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, the same place I worked in high school and on breaks in college.
My parents were really understanding, but at some point I knew I had to do something. I started to consider for the first time that I might need to leave Baltimore. I had a few friends in Chicago and really started to think about moving there as the wrestling season neared an end in March 1992.
That’s about the same time all the influential improvisers coalesced in Chicago. Would I have found an outlet in comedy if I had moved there? I always had an interest, but never knew how to find a start. Would I have met someone who encouraged me to perform?
I’m not saying I would have moved to Chicago, walked into iO and ended up helping to form the UCB. I just wonder if this thing I am so passionate about now could have taken hold if I had made that move.
Instead, I got a call about a job on the next-to-last day of wrestling season in 1992. That got me up to Hanover, Pa., where I met my wife. So I have no regrets. I just wonder sometimes what that other dimension might have looked like.