Wiffle Ball Improv
[ Image: wiffleball.png ]
[ Image: wiffleball.png ]
From an email to Rob—You and I and two others were trying to get good as a wiffle ball team. We were working from a wiffle ball script you had written. We would meet once a week to rehearse. The place we met was the yard of my family’s old farmhouse at the bottom of Road D hill.
The other two in our team/cast were your tall acting friend Peter (whom I knew in the late 80s) and your writer friend George Melrod. George was very short. I think this comes from there always being a short, wisecracking, witty kid in any movie about a kids’ baseball team, and George, of course, is a wit.
I had become frustrated with these sessions. It was starting to seem too much like theatre and not enough like wiffle ball. For one thing, when we played we would all stand one foot apart—pitcher, batter, catcher and outfielder all standing in a sort of huddle. The batter had no room to take a swing and, in fact, almost no time to see the ball come at him from the pitcher, a distance of about six inches. It boiled down to the pitcher bouncing the ball off the batter’s upraised bat, and everybody lifting their feet up and down for a few seconds to symbolize running.
It was too stylized for me. Unlike you other three, I wasn’t a full time actor or writer. I thought I might have a little talent as a wiffle ball actor, but not as much as I might have as an actual wiffle ball player. I decided to shake things up.
This is where the story gets slightly interesting.
“Here,” I said, taking the bat and backing way up from you, the pitcher. I put about 15 feet between us, and I told George and Peter to back up also and spread out. “Now you’re going to see some wiffle ball,” I said.
You threw me a pitch, and I missed. You threw another one, and I missed that, too. I wasn’t liking this much better than the acting. I wanted a chance to shine, the way you other three kept shining when we were playing wiffle ball from a script and in a huddle. But one more strike and the chance to play the game my way would be over.
You wound up for the pitch. But instead of pitching, you produced another bat and hit the ball yourself—more stagecraft. The ball whizzed over my head and then, in midair, exploded—but inside the ball was a bird, and the bird continued the ball’s flight, but at ten times the speed, shooting skyward and out of sight.
Improv wiffle ball!
“Fly ball!” exulted George—being witty, you see. He seems to have been in the dream mainly for that one line.
You yourself were dumbfounded. You had secretly replaced the ball with an egg, wanting to see the look on my face when, I guess, I had egg on it. The ball exploding and becoming a bird was news to you. It was Peter who divined the truth.
“It was a poisoned egg!” he shouted. “Poisoned to keep the bird population down. You picked up a wild bird’s egg, and hitting it caused the bird to hatch prematurely. Hatching under those circumstances, naturally the bird would keep flying!”
It only made sense if you really wanted it to. The whole thing gave me a miserable feeling. I said, “Guys, I’m very cramped from sitting at my desk all day. Look at me, all hunched and crabbed. Carry me to the porch.” The three of you did so. “Now lift me straight up,” I said. You and Peter did most of the work, but short George helped, too, getting my ankles in a bear hug and lifting mightily. I reached overhead and formed my hands into pseudo-claws, as if I were hanging from a beam, and said, “Okay, let go now so I can hang and stretch out.”
The three of you released me and there I stayed, hanging in midair from an imaginary ceiling beam. Good acting for a beginner, yes?
No one was impressed. It was supposed to startle you guys and make you marvel, but it didn’t. I have antigravity powers in many of my dreams, and people rarely think much of it. I didn’t really expect that you, Peter and George would be any different. Consequently, I had added another “gag” to make it go over—instead of my cramped body stretching itself out to hang vertically, it remained cramped!
That was supposed to be the joke. Like in “Dumber and Dumber” when Jeff Daniels remains frozen in a sitting position after riding up the mountain on the back of a motorbike, hanging onto Jim Carrey’s back, frozen solid, as Carrey dismounts the bike. But I didn’t get a laugh.
The whole thing annoyed me so much I woke up and took a pee. Or maybe it was having to pee that annoyed me, and the annoyance created an annoying dream. Will we ever know for sure?