John “Dr. Wimpy” Ward, was a very dedicated and passionate member of the New York improv scene over the last eight years. He took classes, performed and was a huge supporter of others. He often appeared as an agent with Improv Everywhere. He was a funny man and by all accounts a joy to play with. He started doing improv in his mid 50s. This last Sunday he passed away very unexpectedly.

Auditions for improv teams were held the weekend before he died at the UCB Theatre. It’s a collective freakout the community goes through every year as hundreds of UCB students compete for a handful of coveted spots on Harold teams. And among the hundreds of hopeful 20 something kids, desperately wanting to be on a team, was John Ward, a man in his 60s who looked remarkably like my childhood vision of Santa Claus. He was one of the few that got a call back, and I bet he was as thrilled as anyone to be seriously considered for a team.

It’s hard to resist the urge to reduce a man’s life down to a simple life lesson. I’m sure there was much more to John than his improv career, judging from the stories trickling in about his life before improv. But his example is an obvious slap in the face to anyone who thinks that it’s too late for them to be an actor, a musician, a writer or a comic.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about John, I’ve included some links:

• A tribute on the Improv Everywhere site
• A thread on the Improv Resource Center following the news of his passing
• John’s page in the IRC wiki

If you knew John and have things you’d like to share about him, please feel free to add them to his wiki page.

Some improv groups were added to the wiki this week, Great Heights and Twenty Seven and some updates to Whisker Bliss, UCBW and Un-scripted Theater. We also had some updates to some performer pages including Shannon O’Neil, Julie Klausner, Jodi Skeris, and Rachael Mason.

This week I started pages for the New York groups Centralia and Burn Manhattan. I also started a page for Inside Vladimir, a long running Chicago team that featured Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (I added some info to both of their pages also, but they are still a bit sparse). I also added a little information on a team I was on and coached in NYC called Ice-Nine. There is also a fairly new page for the team Leo Callahan and updates on the pages for the Magnet Theater and New York performer Micheal Short.

There are lots of pages that could use some love. I’m trying to get the guys from Vladimir to add more information about the group to their page. I was a bit surprised that there was not a page for The Real Real World, given it’s long run in New York and the many early UCBT improvisors who were a part of that show. There was also a Chicago version that included many performers from Vladimir. I’d also like to get something up for the Living Room. This was a show created by The Family in the 90s at ImprovOlympic (now iO) and also featured Fey and Poehler. It had a very simple format of creating a fake living room on stage where the performers could discuss issues and tell stories and then jump up and do scenework whenever an idea came to mind. The goal of the original run was to make a TV pilot, which did get shot, but wasn’t sold to my knowledge.

If you have information about any of these items that you would like to add, please start an account there and add it.

In the mean time, I’ve been working on the IRC Improv Wiki. I wanted to get a few more pages going. I realized last week that there were no articles on Tina Fey, Jack McBrayer and Inside Vladimir. I have written a cursory entry for each and hope I can get some other people to chip in and expand them.

There is also a lot of stuff going on which is taking a higher priority right now. In the last couple of weeks, we have lost some of our staff that helps us take care of my mom, so we have been busy finding and training new people. That is somewhat stressful. Our longest standing worker gave notice two weeks ago. Today was her last day. She worked first shift with me and did a terrific job with my mom. It made things much easier for me to have her working first shift. We have found a good replacement, but it will take time getting her up to speed. I will be spending more time here at my mom’s in the interim, and that may translate into some more posts since I do most of my writing here.

I have been running again for the last couple of months, and I’m ready for some 5K races. As soon as the weather warms up a little bit, I’ll be out running different events on the weekend. I hope to run a dozen or more races this summer including some 10Ks and perhaps even a half marathon. Also, I picked up guitar last fall and I’ve been practicing a few times a week. I started a group class with the park district in Peoria. My goals with guitar are simply to keep it up, learn as many useful chords as I can so I can play a few songs. Both of these things are competing with my desire to write more. However, next week I will likely be able to complete a few of the posts I’ve been working on.

I thought it might make a good journal entry to write down a lot of the things that we went over in the conversation. But before I got too far into the entry, I decided to look it up on the IRC Improv Wiki to see if anyone had written anything about it. It turns out I had already written a pretty comprehensive explanation of the exercise there.

So instead of rewriting that, I’ll first show you this video I found on youtube. It’s an animation by Shaun Clayton of a song writtend and performed by Michelle Edwards. I think they did a great job of capturing the spirit of what Del what was after. If you want to learn more about them after you watch the video, go over to the IRC Improv Wiki and read about the Invocation there.