The Lindbergh Babies

Check out The Cradle for the official word on the secret origin of the Lindbergh Babies. Read on for my own take.

If Del Close is the Ted Kaczinski of comedy, Melanie Blue is the unshaven Moroccan terrorist, beard from chin to forehead, shouting in a language no one on the 747 understands. She hasn't pulled out a gun yet but everyone screams nevertheless because she just pulled open the emergency exit door 30,000 feet off the ground. Everyone hangs on for dear life as the plane tries to turn itself inside-out.

I know what I'm talking about, believe me.

Talking to Ourselves ended suddenly, in its seventh show, because ImprovOlympic had promised the Del Close Theatre to a sketch comedy group suddenly in the process of suing for the space. Charna knows when to roll 'em and when to hold 'em.

It was a somber time. Although the first downstairs show felt magical (my first "perfect" show, where audience energy never has a chance to die), none of the upstairs shows following it had measured up.

Perhaps we'd been doomed from the beginning - we'd started the upstairs run baptised in one of those bastard twice-a-year rains that pours buckets of water on your head without end. Everyone arrived soaked. Ike showed up in black jeans that looked like a pair of leather pants.

Brendan Gardiner became a hero that night.

While waiting for a Mystery Machine show in the Cabaret downstairs, Brendan wandered up to check on his pals and have a look at this hot shit cast. Instead, he found us shivering and wet, our umbrellas and taxis and public transport having failed to protect us in our journey to IO. Eric hopped out of his cab five blocks early because drivers in Chicago for some reason clump up in the rain, and he figured he could walk faster and cheaper than the jammed traffic ahead. He might as well have swam the half mile.

Brendan knew what to do. He gathered all the wet clothes the cast was willing to part with (we weren't that comfortable with each other yet), stuffed them into a garbage bag, then leapt into the monsoon to run/be blown two blocks to Laundryland. Four bits got him a dryer and he heroically waited, soaked but stoic, until the smell of cooked cotton told him Ike's pants were done. He fought his way back up the street and returned our clothes to a hero's welcome.

We performed that night to an audience only slightly larger than the cast (16 people... 17 if I'd been able to reach Noel Dineen, whose answering machine died). Audiences got steadily better. Melanie got more gruesome.

In the first half, the Babies performed the signature "double monologue" piece invented in Del's Level 5 class. We divided the cast in two-thirds, asking a third of the cast to volunteer to sit out of one or the other half. Eric usually chose neither; yes, that's my own axe I grind. Del originally had the idea to take the suggestion without the usual spotlight, "Hello, welcome to the Del Close Theatre, we are..." song and dance, so someone went out into the audience to ask for a word. Then two people meandered to the center of the stage to deliver monologues that, at some point, transformed into scenes. Then it happened again. And again. And again. The energy of the piece demanded constant attention - allow it to dip too far and you have a situation similar to the final stages of Ebola, that is, as Richard Preston describes it in The Hot Zone, you "crash and bleed out". We didn't have the skills to handle it then and often fell into "Living Room-itis"*.

*

Valhalla then did The Living Room in the same theater the night before, for an impressive run of almost a year and a half. While talented and genuinely snappy, they tended to prefer sitting and drinking to doing scenes. Audiences quickly realized they paid seven bucks to see someone else's friends shoot the shit when they could watch their own for much less. That said, I did see one of my favorite shows ever when Matt Chapman spontaneously called back an electric chair in the middle of another scene. Of course you have no idea what I'm talking about. Curse of improv.

Those early experiments defined the form as we play it now, mainly two double monologues, two scenes, then another set of double monologues, and scenes to the end. Or, "2-2-1" as we used to say in warmups. We also break it, from time to time, just to keep us on our toes.

Melanie was the second half.

She kept us on her toes.

Compared to the first half, the second half of Talking to Ourselves followed a simple formula. We took a suggestion, keeping it casual and refusing to do the faux conversational, "welcome back," and Melanie began a series of monologues in the style of The Armando Diaz Theatrical Experience and Hootenany, with two exceptions. First, the Lindbergh Babies played scenes based on the suggestion, not on the monologues Melanie generated, and second, Melanie often jumped into said scenes, playing Devil's Advocate or, more rarely, a cat. How odd that so simple a plan could generate so much hate.

I believe part of the popularity of the Lindbergh Babies following that run stemmed from an audience universally united against Melanie Blue. On the very first night, a stray cough or perhaps muttered comment caught Melanie's attention in the middle of a monologue about her boyfriend in jail, or perhaps a jaunty slice of life from the heroin days, and Melanie stopped to glare. The audience then made the mistake of believing it had paid seven dollars to be entertained, and the cough, or comment, turned into a disgusted grunt. Melanie invited the gentleman on stage to discuss it, or perhaps to perform in her place. The gentleman demurred. Simultaneously, we all let out our breath; nothing ruins a show faster than blood.

Other things Melanie did on stage to piss people off:

1. Tie her shoes (and glare).
2. Criticize players onstage.
3. Stop scenes arbitrarily and frequently.
4. Glare.

Fans of The Armando Diaz Theatrical Experience and Hootenany are no strangers to discomfort. Miles, in the role of Armando, has alienated more women than Rush Limbaugh on a Feminazi rant. But we walk out reasonably amused because other players can respond, venting pressure and averting a nuclear meltdown. Miles thought he fathered a child? Great, let's see a scene where the child asks his father, a clown, where he came from. The clown's instincts tell him to amuse the child, so he builds pornographic balloon sculptures to explain the birds and the bees. Later in the show, the ringmaster and elephant simultaneously claim parentage. The tigers get custody. The clown blows up another balloon child. Amusing? Of course!

How about another metaphor to help us understand the not-so-fine line between punishment and abuse? Say your little brother tells you to sit on this pillow stuffed with broken glass. You do and you cut your ass. Maybe you go to the hospital. Your only crime was ignorance, but it's still punishment. Didn't you hear the pillowcase jingle? Abuse: your brother puts his finger on your forehead and won't let you get up. The more you struggle, the more the pillow slashes your butt to ribbons.

Eventually, we had to make fun of Melanie. She pushed first, Mom. Sean Simon, an original member now in Los Angeles, answered one of her rhetorical questions, and, when he came out to confront her as she had done in so many of his scenes, Melanie ignored him. Cesar pulled him gently back. It got laughs. Melanie felt the alienation and stopped warming up with us in the Green Room.

On the last night of our run, for all we knew our last night together, Melanie went ballistic. She interrupted every scene without tact or respect. I remember two things from the night from hell: 1) the state had released her boyfriend from jail but she didn't want to speak with him, and 2) I played a gay man in a scene with Wayne, when she asked me if I really enjoyed having a man's penis inside my buttocks. Uh, no. It's theater, I'm acting.

I can't forgive her, one year and more than fifty shows later. She'd lost her show, but so had we all. Funny, despite the fact that the Lindbergh Babies had won audiences with their patience with, and occasional humor at the expense of, Melanie, the show belonged to Ms. Blue. If she had never walked into the Level 5 class just as Del finished telling a Melanie Blue story; if she hadn't been available after our first, and what was supposed to be our only, show in the ImprovOlympic Cabaret; if she hadn't given me the damned sexy photo that graced our first poster (I had to use the computer to erase the bags under her eyes and cheeks, plus the weird fleshy growth under her armpit), the Lindbergh Babies might never have formed. (Take note, time travellers.)

So, thanks to the meddling of a girl named Melanie, the 747 dipped 20,000 feet to land in a cornfield. A few people burned alive. Others jumped to safety. Survivors to the last, the Lindbergh Babies received their payoff from the airline two months later, when "SHOW" was born, sans Melanie. But that is another story and shall be told another time.