Last night I attended an intro class on stand-up comedy. It was offered by Jen Dziura who is performing in the area tonight.
I attended the class the class for a number of reasons:
* I love hearing about people’s process of writing new material. Even if stand-up is very different from what we do, I always seem to learn something new from someone else creative process.
* It was a good opportunity to force myself to sit down and do some writing myself.
* It was a chance to support Jen. Last night is the first time I met her in person, but have read her blog for more than a year. I am always very impressed by people who are willing to follow their dreams, and to do it in very creative ways. She works very hard on her craft as well and sharing it with others. Even though it was the first meeting, I have admired her for a while.
Any of those reasons would have been worth the $20 to get in the door. But there was something that topped it all.
One of the first exercises we did was talk about our lives and Jen helped us find the topic areas that might be funny to talk about. (Ex: One of the women in the class looked like Gillian Anderson and talked about how geeks have tendency to hit on her.)
There was very unassuming African-American woman in the class who was in her 50′s. She was not a natural on stage, but she was a very funny story-teller. At one point she was talking about (with all the sincerity in the world) the heart attack she had when she was 38. At one point in her life she worked in medical field. The conversation went something like this:
Woman: When I had the heart attack they found me on the toilet.
Jen: You had a heart attack on the toilet?
W: No I had the heart attack on the couch.
J: Then why did they find you on the toilet?
W: I had seen people die before. When most people die they crap their pants. I was sitting on my white couch and I knew if I died they were going to need the couch. So I drug myself to the bathroom. That way if I crapped myself, I would be on the toilet.

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