WHAT I MADE IN MARCH
29 live shows
a Farewell Show
This month I left Second City! I tortured myself with this decision during the fall and made the decision in December, so I feel like I’ve mostly processed it by now. But March was a month-long sprint of trying to tie up loose ends in the building, plan my Farewell Show, invite and thank the people who helped me, finish my worm video, write speeches for everyone else leaving, and THOROUGHLY REFLECT so I could write my own speech. I was lying rigidly on the couch explaining this to my mom, who came over for coffee, and she said “Good. You wouldn’t want people to hear your speech and think ‘I don’t think she thoroughly reflected.’”
Exactly!
If you are new here, this newsletter is usually a pretty quick read, but I thought it would be apt to use this month as a final wrap-up and a behind-the-scenes look at my whole journey through the hallowed halls of the Tina Fey Emporium. So buckle up! Or see you next month for regularly scheduled programming. ♥️
MY JOURNEY THROUGH JOHN CANDY’S CHUCKLE HUT
I got hired at Second City exactly six years ago. I love the neatness of that. Four of those years were spent understudying and touring (and waiting out a pandemic) and two were spent on Mainstage.
4+2=6
Ooh, it feels so good to box it up like that. But of course the “path” was winding and uncertain, so let’s take a look.
AUDITIONING
Before being swept up into the machinery of Second City, I spent about three and half years in Chicago taking classes, producing my own shows, doing improv in bars and working as a picture framer, receptionist, coat checker, ticket taker, and babysitter.
In that time, I auditioned for Second City four times, each time getting a callback and nervously piecing together a business casual outfit and preparing a one-minute original character piece. I am so irritated that I can’t remember what my first solo piece was and I can’t find a record of it, but here is me practicing my monologues for the other three callbacks. I would use Photo Booth to record and watch back the pieces so I could trim the script and direct myself.
SHORTLISTED
For my fourth callback I bought a pair of silver Doc Martens and that did the trick. I was shortlisted.
Within that same week, I also got hired to be a writer at Jackbox Games. This was one of the most exciting and impactful weeks of my life. I am floored to think of it today, because that week defined my livelihood for the next six years.
Being on the shortlist means very little in practice; it’s a promise that you might get opportunities down the line, that you’ve entered a queue where you’ll get shuffled and stepped on and turned around, but your name is officially “in the mix.” Critically, it means you don’t have to audition again. No more improv cattle calls or forced merriment during the “fun fact” section.
It’s weird because you might get hired in the same round as someone who gets on a touring company immediately and then a resident stage and then moves to LA and is on a TV show before you even get to understudy. It’s easy to get caught up in the steps and monitoring your own speed climbing those steps in comparison to everyone you’ve ever met plus some people you follow online. It’s important to not compare yourself to other people and ha ha ha good luck with that.
To combat the jealousy and impatience and craning to look ahead, this is the philosophy I still bring myself back to:
Do each thing because you want to do that specific thing, not because it’s a gateway to the next thing. Each show, each opportunity, each class and contract—they should be enjoyed as worthwhile in and of themselves. That way you’re always doing something you want to do and you can walk away at any point without bitterness.
Which is why I think it’s worth noting that in retrospect I can break down my journey into these “steps” but when it was occurring I was trying very hard to think of each level as the final destination.
GETTING RANDOM GIGS THAT OTHER PEOPLE TURNED DOWN
For the first year on the shortlist, I did almost nothing except a few gigs that other people turned down or dropped out of, for example:
An unpaid improv set at Wizard World. The “payment” was a weekend pass to, you guessed it, Wizard World. Which I didn’t care about, but I wanted to say yes and ride in the van and meet other shortlisted people. The most important thing here is that I met my friend MJ who would become one of my closest. That night she paid $90 for a meet-n-greet with Corey from Boy Meets World and then stayed in Rosemont to go gambling with her husband and they won something like two thousand dollars so they went to Vegas and ate sushi. None of this behavior had ever occurred to me. I loved her right away.
A PatchCo in southern Illinois. A Patch is when they put together a bunch of understudies to do a Best Of show, because all three touring companies are busy. This was my first archive show for Second City and I got it because Emma Pope dropped out to join Mainstage. Thank you, Emma. I got to sleep in a hotel and wear a Britney mic.
A Christmas miracle. My first real run of shows was a Holiday Patch with Saturday and Sunday matinees throughout December 2018. I could invite friends and family and get them free tickets, so it began to feel tangible and real. After one show my parents and I got a drink at the top of the Lincoln Hotel. They told me that they used to go to Second City before they had children and they never would have imagined that they’d have a daughter one day who was up on that stage.
UNDERSTUDYING
After about a year, the casting director Claudia Wallace called me and said “We’re going to put your headshot on the wall, how does that sound?” and I said “Wonderful! What does that mean?” And she said “That you’re an understudy.” Which I didn’t totally understand because I had been understudying all along. But within the walls of Keegan-Michael Key’s Comedy Kingdom there is a distinction and we simply must respect it.
I became a very competent understudy and this was a lot of fun because the jobs snowballed and soon I was swinging in and out of Red and BlueCo. Once I did a Sunday matinee, then the next day I drove to Notre Dame and did a different actor’s role in the same show. We had a musical opener and closer, so onstage I was whispering to myself “you are Megan, you are Megan, you are Megan” so I wouldn’t sing the wrong part.
I got the chance to understudy Mainstage twice. I was so incredibly nervous the first time, I kept watching and re-watching the show—both the video and from the bench—unable to fathom that I’d be doing it later that week. My friend Sarah Drew met me in the park and we marked out the size and shape of the stage with sticks. Then I physically ran the whole show with blocking, memorizing the movements in the blackouts, where to set each chair, where to exit, as Sarah sat on the sidelines with the script and read out everyone else’s lines.
Throughout all of this bouncing around, I was still inviting producers to my indie sketch shows (shoutout Spooky Dookie) so they could see what I could do. “Put me in coach!”
Amidst the fun and adrenaline of jumping in shows last-minute, I began to yearn. There is an inherent sadness to understudying because it’s like being warmly welcomed on someone else’s family vacation, but then they keep hanging out and you go home. After about a year of understudying consistently, I ached for my own family, my own pack.
TOURING AT LAST
I was at a video game conference in San Antonio when Joe and Claudia called to offer me a spot on BlueCo. My friend MJ had been offered that exact spot earlier in the week and I’d enthusiastically counseled her to take it, but she had other priorities (money?? for a family???) and turned it down. So they swiveled around and offered it to me. I was thrilled and said yes with my whole lanyard. Thank you, MJ. Your commitment to fine dining launched me into the next phase of my career.
I went down to 30 hours a week at Jackbox to accommodate the travel schedule.
There are few things in life that you want very badly and then they are as amazing as you imagined. Touring was one of those things.
I went hiking in Boulder, CO and bought socks. I walked around Iowa City and bought a book of poems at Prairie Lights. I took scalding hot baths after every show and then slid in between the hotel sheets and the duvet like a piping hot toaster strudel. I wore black slacks held up with a thin gold belt that I originally bought in 2009 for prom.
At my first rehearsal I pitched an improv shell called Pen Pals where Olivia Nielsen and I “write” letters back and forth as an American and a European kid. Then at the end I’d reveal that I was also from the America and I’d just wanted to know what regular kids did in my hometown. Am I normal?
It went right into the show and that’s when I felt the first rush of the immediacy of the Second City method:
Writing/pitching a scene in rehearsal -> testing it that night in the set -> it works -> put it in the show
Instead of laboring over drafts of a sketch and perfecting it and fully memorizing it and rehearsing it, you throw your ideas up on their feet and see how the audience reacts. If the idea is strong and resonant, it can pop right in the show and you develop it further each time you do it, tweaking and trimming and trying new endings. This was amazing! I was so happy and excited and then something bad happened specifically to me and only me…
THE PANDEMIC
I toured for six weeks before the pandemic hit. During the pandemic I went back up to full-time at Jackbox and threw myself into designing a game and developing chronic stomach issues.
I also did something morally neutral called Lots Of Corporate Zoom Improv Shows for Second City.
Now that I’ve adjusted to the new world, it’s easy to forget how bereft I was. Theaters shuttered, iO closed, Second City was sold, my Harold team disbanded, and so many comedians moved away, including half of BlueCo. It was unclear that the world would ever return, and I spent much of the pandemic mourning my old life and trying to accept that whatever came next was never going to be like it was.
BACK TO TOURING
In August of 2021, freshly vaccinated, I joined GreenCo for a monthlong run. The audience was spaced out and masked up. We were swabbed daily. It was my first time back on stage in a year and a half and my eyes ached from the lights.
I wrote a little ditty about the pandemic for the opener and I realized months later it had the same exact melody as a Veggie Tales song about a water buffalo. I accidentally ripped off the Christian cucumber :/
I got shifted back onto BlueCo and I toured for six months. It was one of the finest times of my life.
Each place we went is stamped in my memory.
In Wyoming we landed in the Grand Tetons and two hours later we pulled off the side of the road to lay in a hot spring. That night I bought a pair of pajama pants at a grocery store. They have cowboy hats printed on them and I wear them all the time.
In Utah, the theater owner pulled a favor and got us lift tickets at Big Sky. I spent a whole day skiing alone, whispering “it’s okay to fall, it’s okay to fall” and I never fell! I blasted down the mountain, completely exhilarated. The next morning I went in the hot tub and took a photo of myself and thought “I look absolutely wretched” and it turns out I had covid.
We hiked around Virginia and Tennessee and Wisconsin. We made up songs. I wrote a scene where I played an aggressive hockey jock bragging about how the pandemic brought him closer to his family. I wrote a scene where I played a snowflake explaining to another snowflake that we can’t go back up to the cloud, we’re headed for the ground and it will never be like it was (uh oh! theme from real life!).
One rehearsal I brought in a quarter of a pitch– a Bjork-like performance artist who talked about the life of a fire escape. My wonderful director Cat McDonnell pushed me to try it that night as an improvised solo piece. I got a suggestion of an everyday object, then I became that object and spoke from it’s perspective, usually something about how beautiful and futile life is. It made me really nervous to do improv by myself each night, but it was very gratifying to push myself. It always crushed when I played a chapstick and I would spiral upwards out of the tube. And I’ll never forget the terrible silence when I became an Ugg boot in front of 500 elderly folks in Glen Ellyn and when I couldn’t land a good joke, I had to unfold myself and stand up in silence to say “thank you.”
Here I am as a tire. According to my notes, I said “When you are a tire, you are a balloon with responsibilities.”
MAINSTAGE
I was offered Mainstage in a Zoom meeting while in Cozumel, Mexico with my sketch partner Maureen. I lay on the hotel bed in my bathing suit and said “let me think about it and get back to you” even though I knew with my whole flip flop that it was a yes.
At first I tried to work out an arrangement where I’d stay at Jackbox, taking a break to rehearse and write the show and then returning once the show opened and my days were free. But when I really sat with it, I was so excited by the idea of a summer outside, no more Slack, no more one-on-ones. So I gave my two weeks. It was very hard to leave and it felt wrong. It was a fantastic, fun, stable, creative job with way better pay and benefits. And more security. And unlimited vacation and unlimited sitting down. I reminded myself over and over again in my notebook “It’s okay to leave a good job” and that sentiment has swooped down two years later to help me again today.
During Mainstage “process”—writing the show over three months—you’re at the theater during the day for rehearsal, then you do the show, then you try the newest material in the set, then you get notes, then you go home and eat a quesadilla and do re-writes for rehearsal the next day. It is a creatively fertile time that hollows everyone out into husk within two weeks. While you are a husk you get a new outfit and brainstorm show titles and take press photos and learn choreography. Then the show opens.
During my first process I got very injured. First playing soccer, then doing stage combat. I fell onstage, tore my ACL, and inched off on my behind. After the show our Stage Manager pulled the footage and everyone gathered around to watch me fall.
The knee thing was an absolute nightmare for a long time but it’s okay now :)
I’m so proud of both shows we made. Our ensemble was Jeff-nominated twice and I got to wear gowns that I had purchased at thrift stores years earlier because the deal was too good despite there being no galas on the horizon. At last: galas.
Mainstage was different than the other shows I’d done because of the RESOURCES, baby! Once your sketch was in the show, there was a team of people who uplifted and enhanced it. I wrote a scene where I played an OBGYN who shrinks down tiny and breaststrokes around a womb to check out the vibe. Our stage manager and lighting designer built out custom lights to make it look like I was zapped, shrunk, and then swimming inside a human body with a pulsing heart beat. Ditto for being splatted as a worm. A stylist picked our clothes and hemmed our pants. There was dry cleaning and a prop budget and our faces on the side of a bus.
And yet, for all the polish and flash, there were times I still found myself in my kitchen at 2AM ripping the head off a wooden mannequin with garden shears, disassembling his parts and threading some birthday ribbon through his body. Or sewing tulle onto a cotton cap at intermission. Or painting a doll to make it look more like EJ Cameron (this scene got cut). What I’ve realized is that pomp and circumstance are very fun and I love doing things on increasingly larger scales, but ultimately the work is the same:
YOU DO IT YOURSELF. Google Docs, singing into voice memos, iPhone notes in the middle of the night, writing on the bus, Photo Booth monologues, a seventh draft emailed at 3am, meeting up before rehearsal to run the song, cardboard, paper, glue, markers and tape. It’s creation, it’s collaboration, and it feels the same as college sketch shows, as high school one-acts, as childhood sleepovers. Because whether you’re being paid to make up choreo with your castmate backstage or you’re in a finished basement with your cousin, it’s the SAME THING: you are making up a dance with your friend. And that’s what the shows were, ultimately. We all made up a dance together.
OH MY GOD OKAY HOW DO I SUM IT UP
While I was on Mainstage I got knee surgery, joined the union, steamed my vocal cords, dug myself out of improv ruts, then burrowed back into them. My friend Leila took me to Ulta three times to help me pick out creams and tubes and sponges and teach me how to use them. I usually went to bed around 2am and woke up at noon.
Backstage I journaled, messed around, sent emails, theorized about the audience, made To-Do lists, dug a Thera Cane into my back, posed hypotheticals to the cast, calmed Evan down, and filled up my water bottle over and over and over.
The best days were summer days when I’d bike home in the warm darkness along the lakefront trail, stopping to swim on a whim at midnight. The worst days were winter ones when the car wouldn’t warm up and neither would the meager, sleepy crowd.
The most astounding and difficult-to-comprehend thing is how many jokes or moments from the show were carried home on the train or across state lines or on planes to become inside jokes and shared memories. For me, that’s the unfathomable bit about doing original material for roughly 1,700 people a week. I’ll never know what lasted in people’s heads and how far it went.
The most unexpected part of the job was how draining the schedule was. Before I got Mainstage, I was touring and working at Jackbox full-time and writing and producing indie sketch shows and making videos and going to sketch festivals and traveling and being mysteriously nauseated.
Once I started Mainstage, most of that had to stop, though I managed to maintain the nausea. Process is so weirdly grueling and overwhelming that after we opened each show I was burnt out and needed at least a month to creatively decompress. This past July I called it “The Grand Unclench” and I didn’t write a thing, didn’t open my editing software once.
After the show was open, apart from understudy rehearsals, my days were free. But for those nine months the name of the game was:
Preserve Thy Energy
The Mainstage schedule is 8 shows/6 nights a week. For me, this meant organizing my days so that I could be reasonably energized, clean, and mentally prepared for one or two shows every single night except Monday. If necessary, I could overexert (spend all day shooting a short film or wake up early for a trip to the suburbs for a baby shower) but those days would make the shows tough and have a lasting impact the following days, too. So it was constantly a balancing game to see what I could reasonably do and not do, both socially and with my other creative projects.
I was able to still make some videos and work on packets and scripts, but certainly I couldn’t do any other shows, see any shows, or commit to anything that took sustained long-term effort. I’m not complaining, this is the trade-off! I loved making and running both Mainstage shows. They were baked through with my ideas and jokes and personality. I got to improvise every night–my favorite!- and share my original work with people who otherwise would never find me.
But I guess I’m framing it this way to explain why I’m happy to leave. It’s actually very simple: I want to do other things.
And nothing will ever be quite like this again, which is what made the decision so agonizing. But ultimately my appetite is wider than live sketch comedy and this particular job required a lot of sacrifices that I don’t feel like making anymore.
My Farewell Set was one of the best nights of my life. My high school theater teachers came. So did high school friends, college friends, my old improv team, my parents, fellows comedians and students from my sketch class. A person doesn’t usually get speeches except at their wedding and funeral, so it was an honor to be able to hear and see myself reflected back by my cast, who I adore. I wore my silver Docs. I got to play a snowflake again. And a worm.
The next day I cried a lot and smelled my flowers and felt like this was the exactly right thing to do. It’s okay to leave a good job.
“What’s Next?”
People seem to be afraid to ask me what’s next, like it’s impolite. Don’t be afraid! I’m so excited. I’m taking a sabbatical. Or as my sister calls it: Claire’s Big Hurrah!
For the next nine months I’m going to read, write, travel, make videos, and rest. I’ll take writing and acting gigs as they pop up; I’ll travel to see friends I’ve been missing. I’ve been saving up to do this for a couple years and the day has come. Starting TODAY, APRIL 1st Past Claire is paying Current Claire’s salary and her job description is: have an adventure, become weirder, write more, make stuff.
Let’s see what happens!
If you read this far, then hello Aunt Elizabeth! Hi Caroline! Hi you! Thank you all for being here.
See ya later,
Claire
This is really an insightful account. Thank you, so much for this. I was in Chicago in the late 80’s/90’s and this is such a great account of your path. If you don’t mind, I’ll want to share this with other improvisers and students!
You've done it again, darling. I love your words