Last Thursday was the last Fools show for the year and, more sadly, the last show for my TWELVE seniors. I love this group. We had fourteen Fools in all, and in that group of twelve seniors, I had one four-year Fool, three three-year Fools, four two-year Fools, and four one-year Fools. It was a very tight group, and had lots of energy. They also were willing to try almost anything, so I was able to introduce five new games for this show, several of which were full of very physical comedy. I am proud of the group.

It was a long show – eighteen games that took an hour and forty-five minutes. I let the Fools pick two games they want to be in, and this show there was very little overlap, so we had a lot more games than normal (twelve games for a show is pretty typical). We had a slight disadvantage of performing between the two weekends when the musical was playing. Because of scheduling, this could not be helped. For my purposes, it presented a problem in that the stage extension we normally use to get close to the audience had been taken down for the pit orchestra, and the instrument stands were in that space. So, we were further away from the audience than normal, which means you have to have more energy to keep people engaged. In that respect, things went fine – the show was pretty high-energy. There were some occasional lags, but overall things went well.

The games went well also. I had lectured the Fools very sternly that I did not want to hear the word “no” in the show. “No” in improv generally undermines the comedy, and makes scenes much weaker. I was very pleased that I never heard “no” all night long, and I even saw a few times where the Fool in question would think for a second and then plow ahead with some sort of “yes.” It was a good time.

We had a very good audience – lots of college-aged kids were back, and they were enthusiastic. We probably had around a hundred people in attendance, and they laughed a lot. They also were pretty quick with suggestions – we are getting enough repeat customers that they come up with fun ideas.

I was also happy with the last Fools-only game of the evening (we end all shows with a game that the audience can join in on). It is a Fools tradition that I pretend to throw a party for the seniors, and all my seniors have strange quirks or personality traits. This year, it meant a party for twelve, and the game is supposed to be for three or four. In order to keep things straight, I had a junior throw the names and quirks up on a screen for the audience to see, and I think that helped. Some of the guests at my party were a pirate, a man who thought he was James Bond, the Queen, a girl who was scared of party food, a guy who loved rabbits, and a woman who thought she was a potato. It was a fun skit, and I got nine of the twelve with no help. The scared-of-party-food and the potato both threw me for a bit of a loop, but we got off stage fairly quickly.

I will miss this group of Fools. Because the program has grown, it seems very unlikely that I will have any more three-year Fools, let alone a four-year Fool. I am very proud of the work they put in, and the product was much fun to be a part of.