I was at the Azteca Restaurant in Redmond, WA when the news came in about Osama bin Laden’s death. Every other Sunday the Puget Sound Comedy meetup group gets together there for Improvisation and Stand-up Comedy.
Half of the restaurant patrons were at the bar glued to the television news. The rest of us were in the back of the restaurant doing improv. Just as a newbie and I were getting into a delightful interaction, a frantic patron ran up to us with wild eyes and a tight face screaming for us to stop the scene. He looked like an extremist. It seemed like the microcosm of the macrocosm –– people going about their lives, enjoying each other when hysteria from the media infects one of them.
What do you do? Do you get caught up in reaction and spread fear or do you acknowledge the situation and keep your wits?
I took the microphone for the first time Sunday night. My first stand up routine came to me in the moment as I talked about people being puppets of the media –– a surreal evening for sure. As I related how easy it is to control people when they’re afraid or angry I envisioned ‘the man’ coming out of the TV screen moving hands of the patrons with strings attached to rods. Sure enough, the people watching TV were freaking out… some looking afraid, some looking angry.
Two worlds were happening at once. In the distance, I saw the group watching TV and in front of me, my own little group of comedians. One guy in my audience started nodding as I questioned what was happening. I got a few laughs for the first time at open mic and eventually turned the microphone over to another comedian. He picked right up on the whole conspiracy theory and talked about villains in comic books and how there can be only one… He went on to name how we had four of them right now and that’s just too many for a good story to work.
There are many voices in the world. Which one does the most good with the least harm? Your ability to take yourself lightly is a skill worth honing in the years to come. Be aware of what’s happening and have compassion, but don’t let yourself fall into reaction mode. Keep your energy high. We need more children of the revolution like in the movie Moulin Rouge. Their mission was to focus on beauty, truth, freedom and love.