Emcee of TEDxGreenville

For someone who has a TED Talks tag on his blog, this is exciting news!

At last night’s TEDxGreenville salon, a preview party for TEDxGreenville 2014: Unzipped, Harrison Brookie was introduced as the emcee for this year’s April 11th all-day conference. 

Harrison may be familiar to many as the ring leader of an improv group that’s become quite popular in the last couple of years. Actually, rather than a ring leader, he’s more like a comedy super-hero. By day, Harrison Brookie is a social studies teacher at Southside International Baccalaureate High School. By night, he is the Executive Producer and Artistic Director of Alchemy Comedy Theater. In between all of that fun, he and his wife Traci have a daughter and, depending on when you read this, a new baby boy. 

 Harrison grew up in Greenville and returned home in 2011, after journeying to other locales to master his education and comedic skills, to found the Alchemy Comedy Theater, which produces weekly comedy shows. Those of us who’ve caught him and his cohorts in action on a Friday night at Coffee Underground might agree that, indeed, he’s a master of his art. Come cheer him on as this year’s emcee for TEDxGreenville 2014: Unzipped, Friday, April 11, at The Kroc Center in downtown Greenville. Come early. Registration begins at 8:00 am for what promises to be our most engaging TEDx event ever!

NPR and Improv Meet where Relationships and Comedy Meet

Here is a great discussion from my old stomping grounds in North Carolina. Makes me miss WUNC a good bit. Makes me miss DSI Comedy a great bit.

Slimprov: Two Half Men Make a Full Stage

One of my more fun sets in a while on tape. Two men. 1 scene. 24 minutes.

AlchemyComedy.com

Using the Imaginary to Improve the Real

Fresh off my stint in Chicago for the summer, here's a guest blog I did for Greenville's online magazine Fete:

Teaching comedy improv classes is trying to get complete strangers to act like best friends, mortal enemies, and long lost lovers. The greatest part, is that if you challenge yourself in the pretend world long enough, it will affect your real life. That’s what we are all about at the Alchemy Comedy Theater here in Greenville, SC. Our name, Alchemy, means “the power or process of transforming the common into the special” and that’s we do every week in our classes and on stage. Like the science of attempting to turn metals like lead into gold, improvisation does not produce a tangible product. But like alchemy, whose practices help shape modern chemistry, the art of improvisation can have a profound impact on us off stage. 

The theater started 2 years ago with four founding members, Jason Underwood, Meg Pierson, Ben Burris, and me, Harrison Brookie. Since then we’ve been performing live improv comedy shows and teaching improv classes to the public every week. After our upcoming audition this September, we will number closer to 30 regularly performing and teaching members. Our August Improv 101 sold out at 14 students. We have grown a vibrate theatrical comedy community of not just fellow performers, but a supportive and challenging company of allies. 

Our shows are funny, but humor is only as good as the truth it gets at. In improvisation, we are striving for authenticity, because nothing else on stage is. It’s you and your teammates. No set. No script. No net. I spent five weeks this summer learning and performing in Chicago’s iO theater, the birthplace of long form, play-like, improv comedy. I had the pleasure of getting a workshop with the founder of the theater Charna Halpern who quoted her co-creator Del Close as saying “If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage.” If you create together, it brings you together. The great part about improvisation, is everyone, the performers and the audience, are creating together. 

The Alchemy Comedy Theater performs every Friday night in the theater at Coffee Underground and have another Introduction to Improv Scene Work class starting Tuesday, September 30th. 

Click here to see Alchemy Comedy videos in each issue of Fête Magazine!

Birthday Wishes for a Proper Family Narrative

As is often the case every couple years on my birthday I take a self diagnostic and write a "Birthday Wishes for" post. Whether it was Happy Parenting in 2008, Political Perspective in 2010, or Empathy in 2011, the exercise has become a neat anti-New Year's Resolution (check my post history to see how those have worked out). This year, nothing seems more relevant than a simple wish for a happy family. From the NYT:

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

The uniqueness of the answer is concealed in just how simple "knowing" was measured:

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

Loyal blog readers may be thinking, but what about that whole Life's Not a Story, It's a Mess quarter-life epiphany. I am certainly still weary of creating overarching life patterns where none exist, but that doesn't mean we can't create some general narrative:

Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.

First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. ...” [sound famialiar? -HB]

Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

It's not about creating a false story that leaves out the gritty details. It's about creating an inter-generational understanding of the world. This seems to be the strength of long lasting institutions (think the military or the Catholic Church). In fact, one of the big realities of Biblical wisdom is having a God's eye view of history. This just seems like a healthy step in the right direction.

It also works for institutions like businesses. Which is why at our most recent State of the Theater meeting, in which we added several new members to Alchemy, I took a few minutes to put where we are going in context of where we have been.

This has also given me the idea of creating a new end of the year project for my US History courses. Every year we create a large timeline going around the room labeled by pictures of the presidents a graphic organizers of every topic. After exams this year I plan on assigning students to investigate their own family heritage and narrative and label our giant timeline with the names and stories. I look forward to completing it myself.

Improv Show with 30 Rock's Scott Adsit

The folks at the Charleston Comedy Festival were kind enough to ask me to perform in their All Star shows this year. Here's a clip:

Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Ad Contest

A local video production company and I recently entered the annual Doritos contest and made it to the top 40 videos. Go here to vote for my video entitled "Triple Play".

Top 5 Thoughts on Kids and Money

While going through my email recently I came across some thoughts from my brother-in-law on kids and money. My response was my top 5 thoughts on kids and money (earlier):

1) There are chores you have to do because you are a part of the family. There are extra chores you can do to earn money (I think I might let my kids bid against each other on these).
2) During the summer they can do extra work for you/neighbors/businesses.
3) The older they get the longer their pay periods are.
4) Buy a piggy bank that can only be cracked open. Anything they add to savings we will match dollar for dollar (like my own retirement account). Encourage them to keep a ledger of what has gone in so they can have an estimate of when/if they want to crack it open.
5) I'd like them to tithe, so pay day is church day so they can take their "first fruits" to church that day. I'd also like to encourage them to give money away. I'm not quite sure what the kid equivalent of a tax deduction is.

Economics of the Flu Vaccine

This is the first year I've ever gotten a flu shot. This is the first year I've ever gotten something like the flu (that eventually or was always pneumonia). I have been convinced, perhaps expectantly to get a flu shot every year for now on. How you might ask?

The classic explanation for government subsidy and distribution of vaccines is externalities. We often hear the word associated with negative externalities like pollution, unemployment, or even panhandling. However there can also be things that have positive spillovers, like vaccines. But externalities is only part of the story. There are two other issues two information and temporal. Here's the information needed:

1) Cost: Most people can get it for free
2) Pain: Be a wimp like me and try the new needle so small you can't even see it and it literally cannot hurt you
3) Hassle: Bring your phone and do something useful on it (even if calling your mom is all you can)
4) Likelihood of making a difference: What I take away from this experience is that if I get 50 more flu shots and it only makes a difference for 1 person 1 time it's worth it. I've felt like crap for 7 days, I'll do a lot to keep that from happening again.

And that brings us to the other issue, the temporal. All the "hard" work of getting a flu shot doesn't benefit you immediately if at all. It benefits some future version of you. The key is to get that present you to help the future you. How do you do it? Write a blog post about how much you want a flu shot when your sick, that way when you get better you'll remember this YOU'RE ONLY GETTING OLDER AND SICKER.

I Had Roses and Apologized to No One

my sick station

I've been holed up in my guest bedroom with a "flu-like virus" and a fluctuating fever of over 100 degrees since Sunday afternoon. Most recent record was 103.8 degrees and the scale says I've lost 5% of my body weight. This is the worst I've physically felt in memory. I haven't been able to keep any real food down and haven't gone to work all week. It's been an interesting contrast to the last time I took some time off, right after my baby girl was born in October.

I've been reminded of the phrase at the title of this post, "I had roses and apologized to no one", from everybody's favorite libertarian superhero V for Vendetta. There is a character dying in prison of a deadly disease, but instead of dwelling on her current state, Valerie remembers back to the few good years she had before her world went bad. So I've decided, while I'm in my sweaty, hacky, drug filled state, I'd like to remember those 3 weeks in October:

looks this good overdue

By October 10th my wife Traci was already 3 days overdue, so we decided to get out of house, grab a bite to eat out and buy me some khaki corduroy pants I'd been wanting for so long. When we got home I gave my wife free reign on a movie selection. She choose a classic Traci favorite, The Break-Up. I guess we were prepping for our real tears with some celluloid ones.

taking a stroll,
pausing for contractions

Traci starting feeling labor pains in the middle of the night Thursday morning. For the next 20 hours or so, we labored in the house with our doula and walked around the neighborhood. The actual process of contractions, although very intense, were, in my wife's own words, "not as bad as expected". And I really enjoyed the bonding of going through it together.

not all newborns are that cute 

The last hour or so of the birth was a different story. This is the only part they show in movies because it is super intense. My wife did amazing job and at 3:32 am Friday, October 12th Traci gave birth naturally to Mae Harper Brookie. 20.5 inches and 6 pounds 4 ounces, long and thin just like her parents.

about to leave

Our plan was to spend as little time at the hospital and get to the comfort of our new home quickly. However, I was blown away at the quality of the midwives, nurses, lactation consultants, etc (though the rumors of bad food were true). I've concluded that the last big innovation in medicine is great customer service.

resting on the porch

We got home with Mae on Sunday and thus began a wonderful 2 weeks at home together (in fact I'd been so busy leading up to the birth I hadn't really spent a full day in our new house yet). The 3 of us trying to figure out eating, sleeping, and soothing together. Cuddle naps with Mae while my wife lifeguarded to ensure everyone's safety. Friends and family brought us delicious meal after delicious meal and they were all so sweet to Mae.

family of Kiko the new baby giraffe

We mostly kept ourselves during this time, with a few trips to the outside world. Some strolls around neighborhood, church, a meal out with my family, and even got a chance to walk downtown, baby strapped to me, to say goodbye to a friend moving away. And Halloween is always more fun with a baby. I ended up only missing one Alchemy show, but the theater ran just fine without me.

Like the bad times, the good times are mostly out of our control. A year ago I came to Greenville saddened by my work load, the impossibility of finding a house we could agree on, difficulty getting pregnant, and the improv community I left behind in NC. And here I am a year later with all of those desires fulfilled. I embraced the reality of suffering then, and I embrace the reality of joy now. We shouldn't brag on the upswing or be ashamed on the down. Stop and enjoy the roses you've been given and hold on to them for the future. Apparently my baby has been smiling up a storm the last few days. I look forward to seeing it in person myself. Here's a teaser for us: