Yes Please (20 page)

What I should have said was “Throughout my life I have been told I snore so loudly that it sounds like I am dying or choking. I come from a family of snorers and we all used to record each other to show each other the damning evidence. I am convinced my body is trying to gently strangle me to death.”

I was led into a small room that looked like the weirdest Holiday Inn you have ever seen. A bed and a lamp did not distract from the multiple pulleys, wires, clips and clamps. I was hooked up like a puppet while I continued to make small talk with the technician. He had a terrific bedside manner, which is extremely important when you are the only man on duty in a weird sleeping center. I cracked bad dirty jokes as he hooked me up with electrodes. I sheepishly asked him about his kids as he showed me a crazy breathing machine he would try on me later. He turned off the light and shut the door and I laughed out loud. “There is no way I can sleep here,” I thought. And then I fell asleep. Eventually. The rest was all weird memories of being nudged, hooked up again, and turned over. I was gently woken up eight hours later and felt like shit, which was disappointing. I think I had expected to feel terrific, or at least pleasantly buffed and shined. He told me the doctor would read my results and come speak to me. I asked him if I had snored. He gently nodded and said, “A little.”

The doctor sat me down in front of a neon green graph showing my sleep pattern. Even to the untrained eye it didn’t look good. It looked like a bad polygraph. It looked like I had been constantly lying to someone as I slept. He asked me how many times a night I thought I woke up. “Four?” I said. “Sometimes five?” He told me I woke myself up twenty to thirty times a night. I had mild to moderate sleep apnea and I was only reaching REM sleep for a few minutes at a time over the course of a few hours. I nodded my head. This just confirmed what I had always known: I was a bad sleeper. In some ways I was disappointed. I had hoped he would pull me aside and say, “You are the worst case I have ever seen. It’s a miracle you do all that you do. I am sending you to a Hawaiian sleep rehab immediately.” Instead I was handed a CPAP machine, which stands for Compression Something Amy Poehler. I don’t know. I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. I just stared at this crazy mask and accompanying gurgling device next to it and just couldn’t wait for the instructions to be over. I looked at it the same way you look at a plate of vegetables. You know it’s good for you but most of the time you don’t feel like it.

I have a boyfriend who knows how to settle me. He puts his hand on my chest and tells me boring stories. He promises me we can stay up as late as I want. On one of our first nights together I woke up apologizing for my snoring and he pulled out the two earplugs he had worn to bed so that he could hear what I was saying. It was one of the most romantic gestures I have ever seen. I know I should wear my crazy breathing machine but I just can’t pull the trigger. I wore it religiously for a short time and then stuck it in my closet to gather dust.

I know I should use it. I’m working on it. I’m a bad sleeper; I told you. Until I commit to the machine, I will try strips and mouth guards and special pillows. I want to sleep. I do. I want to go gentle into that good night, so help me God.

© Liezl Estipona

how i fell in love with improv:

new york

© Liezl Estipona

I
HELD A MICROPHONE AT LUNA LOUNGE AND REPEATED INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AUDIENCE
.
It was a warm summer night in 1997 and the New York street sounds bled through the doors and onto the stage. I was twenty-six years old and supporting myself doing comedy.

The UCB was guest-hosting a Monday evening show and the audience was stoned and happy. They were happy because they had seen great comedy with young talent: The State, Marc Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Zach Galifianakis, Louis CK, Jon Benjamin, Jon Glaser, and Sarah Silverman. They were stoned because we had brought weed for the entire audience and bullied people into getting high. We handed out joints and coaxed people into digging their own one-hitters out of their backpacks. Being asked to host a Luna Lounge show was a big deal. We had worked hard on our introductions and bits in between guests, which included handing out weed and potato chips. This was a pre-9/11 New York where no one had yet heard the words “Homeland Security,” but it was also a Mayor Giuliani New York, where there was artistic pushback against the feeling that our rights were being slowly limited each day.

I had arrived in Manhattan in April 1996, a few months after a major blizzard that forced residents to ski down Fifth Avenue. We had come out to New York once to do a showcase while we were still living in Chicago, and performed at a cabaret bar in the West Village called the Duplex. I don’t remember if anyone was in the audience, but the proprietor was not too thrilled with this loud Midwestern sketch group and their giant bag of props. More than once we were told “This is not Chicago!”

Besser and I found a street-level studio apartment listed in the
Village Voice
on the corner of Bleecker and Tenth Street. The West Village still had a tiny bit of edge, and our studio apartment was sandwiched between a store called Condomania and Kim’s Video, a hipster record outlet that was notorious for its slow and grouchy employees. The apartment had bars on the windows and looked out onto garbage, and when we first arrived there were twenty people in line to rent it. We hustled to meet the horrible landlord and I called our parents to cosign from his cluttered and disgusting office. I have a vague memory of this millionaire slumlord standing up behind his mess of a desk and saying, “Let me take a look at you.” I may have even spun around for him. Each evening Matt and I would roll our change and throw pennies at the rats outside our windows. We put bowls over our stove at night so the mice wouldn’t come up through the burners. Once I pulled back the curtain and locked eyes with a masturbating Peeping Tom, and he just waved at me like someone saying farewell from the deck of a ship. It was the closest I have ever felt to Patti Smith. I loved it.

Much of our first year in the city was spent lugging props. New York was great for purchasing last-minute dildos, nitrous, and cap guns. UCB shows had evolved into a mix of sketch and improvisation, and we would roll out giant monitors to play our videotaped bits. This was before you could check out a person’s entire career on YouTube. Important people had to come to see you live, and we would wait for network executives to show up, masking tape over their seats
Waiting for Guffman
style. We came to town with two shows we had already been performing in Chicago, humbly titled
Millennium Approaches
and
Perestroika
. These shows were made up of sketches and videos and improv. I was playing girl scouts and old men and everything in between.

The four of us (me and Ian and Besser and Walsh) performed sketch at black box theaters like KGB Bar and Tribeca Lab, and after paying a rental fee and buying props, we lost money on every show. Most of those early shows had an audience of ten: five nice friends, two strangers, one crazy person, and a set of parents. We started doing open mic nights at places like Surf Reality and Luna Lounge, where we met other performers like us. We would spend the day wearing giant cat heads or dinosaur masks, harassing people with bullhorns in Washington Square Park and handing out flyers to our show. We spent the nights performing and writing and dreaming and scheming. It was sketch and improv 24/7. We had no one to take care of but ourselves.

It was an interesting time to be doing comedy. Stand-ups had ruled the eighties, with some of them, like Roseanne Barr and Jerry Seinfeld, parlaying their success into eponymous television shows. The nineties were still a time when comedy could make you big bucks if a network wanted to give you a “development deal.” But that was for the select few. For the rest of us, there was a movement happening in New York and Los Angeles, a wave some were calling “alternative comedy.” To some, we seemed like a bunch of green-apple performers reading half-baked ideas out of notebooks. But we knew it was something else. People were trying things out onstage and mixing everything together in an exciting soup. Stand-ups were incorporating music, performance artists told jokes, musicians wrote sketches. Small theaters were offering “alternative” nights, and audiences were treated to performers who were totally different yet tonally compatible. Anything seemed possible. Michael Portnoy (aka Soy Bomb) would contort his body to music and then Sarah Vowell would read a story and then Dave Chappelle would tell jokes. It felt like a language I understood and comedy I could participate in. My improvisational training had prepared me for this. I met Janeane Garofalo at a book club with Andy Richter’s wife, Sarah Thyre. I loved Janeane’s stand-up and her work on
The Ben Stiller Show
and in
Reality Bites
. We would walk all over New York and talk about life and art and politics. I would fight the urge to call her my idol and slowly we became close friends. Being in New York felt alive and weird and new.

“The show is not over!” I shouted into the microphone to the young and buzzed Luna Lounge crowd. We announced that we were all going to head across the street for the finale. Once again, the UCB was taking the audience outside. Cynthia True, our good friend and a comedy writer for
Time Out New York,
was going to stage an event. She would be walking down the street naked in an attempt to raise money and protest her rent increase. What had started as a gentle dare was now going to be a Lower East Side happening. We spilled out onto the sidewalk and I raced around the corner to help Cynthia prepare for her bold strut.

In those first few years in New York we had been lucky. Our second year in the city we found a small dance studio called Solo Arts and made it our de-facto home. It was a five-story walk-up with a wonky floor, and my brother, Greg, served as our bartender. We programmed shows five nights a week and taught classes to pay the rent. At night we drew crowds with our free show,
Asssscat,
a completely improvised show where we would get an audience suggestion that would inspire a monologist to tell a story, and we would improvise off of those stories. The title
Asssscat
came from a scene where Horatio and Besser and McKay and others were bombing so badly that they started loudly saying “ass cat” in a singsongy voice. The word represented a giant fuck-around; a night where anything goes. We did two shows every Sunday. It was the closest thing I had to church.