Create a skit. Ready, begin.
In the sixth grade, I signed up to join a creative problem-solving team at my school through the organization Destination Imagination (try saying that five times fast), and looking back, I don’t even know what led me to do it. The cliché would be to say it was fate that led me to that audition, but honestly, I think it was mostly because my friends were doing it. (It was middle school, after all.) However, I don’t think I’d say I joined out of an attempt to keep up with the popular crowd or to gain a certain social status. I mean, the name alone ought to tell you that people weren’t exactly giving up their pom-poms or cleats to be a part of something with the word “imagination” in the title, let alone in a rhyming format. For whatever reason, though, that didn’t bother me.
I say “for whatever reason,” but, in truth, I didn’t have a lot to lose. I mean, I wasn’t necessarily unpopular, but I wasn't exactly turning heads as I shuffled down the hallway either. I was just a really shy and quiet kid, struggling through the years where your worth seemed to be determined by how many boys asked you out (zero) and whether or not your pair of Birkenstocks was real (nope). Becoming a part of something that could potentially (and did) lead me to dress up as a turban-wearing, Russian accent-speaking fortune teller was definitely not a move that was going to help me socially...
In Destination Imagination, students are divided into teams with five to seven members, and then each team creates a skit to function as their solution to one of five challenges in different categories ranging from technical design to improvisation. That year, my team’s challenge was entitled “Instant Pudding Improv,” and it was our job to stir up a six-minute skit whose ingredients included an historical figure, a famous place or event, and an eccentric character. The catch to this recipe (or best ingredient) was that the entire skit had to be cooked up on the day of competition, thirty minutes before we served it out, hot and fresh. No time to let anything thaw, no waiting for it to set in the refrigerator. Prior to competition, we could prepare and research various historical figures and famous events from a list, but all our efforts were only allowed to pre-heat until that moment at t minus thirty minutes before performance. Then, once we knew which ingredients we’d be using in our theatrical dish, we could set to work whipping up props, costumes, and set pieces out of ten pre-determined items like a shoebox and mailing labels. Sound appetizing? To indulge myself in the extended metaphor a bit longer, I ate it up.
Very quickly, I no longer saw all these “rules” as obstacles, but instead as key tools that actually gave me more freedom in creating a story. What if the person with asthma were the Big Bad Wolf? Should he be attempting to huff and puff and blow the Great Wall down? Could we make the wall out of cardboard? What if the Wolf ended up being self-conscious about needing an inhaler? Could we make a Chinese New Year Dragon out of paper and an umbrella? Should an Asian Humpty Dumpty sit on the wall? Once the gears started turning, the story could end up in Istanbul or Neverland, it could involve pirates and lobsters, or a man who loved to do the twist for kings and queens. A leprechaun could get lost and go in search of his rainbow home or oversized pieces of fruit constructed out of trash bags and newspaper could form a conga line across the stage, exuberantly led by the Chiquita Banana Lady.
The cyclone of creative energy consumed everything in me, so much so that even my self-consciousness was blown off its hinges entirely. In the excitement of a good idea, no one could hold me back in trying to express and share it, even if that meant dancing across the stage in a skirt made of broom bristles or coloring my face green with a marker to become a troll. (Luckily, I recruited someone else to do this, and I was able to remain a non-alien skin tone. It was washable…) I would’ve never sung in front of anyone as myself, but in order to communicate the great wit of Grecian gods and goddesses singing songs about Greece to the tune of songs from Grease, you bet I did it. It was embarrassingly off-key and cheesy, but I sure did it.
With imagination and lots of duct tape, anything was possible. Anything, that is, provided it could be accomplished before the judge given privy to this magical creative whirlwind uttered the words your adrenaline and brainwaves had been whirling toward ever since the countdown of preparation began-- “Time’s Up!”
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