Improv and Whispers

I felt so much better about our improv show this week than I did about last week's. We'll see what our coach has to say about it on Saturday. It's interesting that being a good improviser means being comfortable as yourself. Lots of my current pursuits require that I be comfortable with who I am, and real about it with other people. Easier said than done, obviously, but at least it's all heading in the same direction. I'm slowly, slowly finding my voice -- literally, even, in the case of the singing lessons.

Part of this discovery process involves learning to be offensive -- whether it's playing a controversial character in an improv scene, or learning to express my opinions or have a stronger personality around people who might not like it. I don't like being offensive, and I ceratinly don't intend to be offensive merely for its own sake, but the self-censorship has taken its toll. I feel a bit like my heart has been in a pressure cooker. The world has seen bits of steam escaping, but no one has seen how much is really compressed in there. I'm not looking for a big explosion (God help us all if that happens), but -- to extend a rather gross cooking metaphor -- I wonder if my heart is close to being, uh, done, and the lid can come off soon.

Is anyone else picturing a cooked heart now? I am. Not sure that's the most helpful image, really. Lord, I'm open to a better one if You've got it.

Interestingly, while I'm slowly finding my voice in my creative pursuits, this week I've managed to physically lose it to a sore throat/cough kind of thing. It went raspy, then it just went. Is it weird that I've always enjoyed this sort of thing? I've always found hiccups fun, too. Not sure if it's the novelty of it, or if I like having a little quirk for a while, or if the actress in me likes having a comedic role to play. Whatever it is, these little ailments never last long enough for me. I'm a little bummed that I don't have more opporunities to talk to people while my voice is gone. A person's voice makes such a difference in whether they're perceived as cute, masculine/feminine, sexy, smart, confident, or annoying, and I'm so curious to know how differently I'd be perceived by someone who had never heard my voice and could now only hear me whisper, and whether hearing my voice later would change that perception. Dang, so curious and no one to experiment on!

I think that pressure cooker/cooked heart image is odd no matter what voice speaks it, though.