A fun fact about me: My 25-year improv resumé has a five-year gap in the middle. During that period I got into ghost tours, of all things. Jeanine, who founded Austin Ghost Tours, was at the time married to Sean, who founded the Hideout, and so people would check in for both tours and shows at the same ticket booth. Being raised on Unsolved Mysteries¹, it didn’t take long before I was chatting up Jeanine about ghost stories and being recruited as a spooky guide myself. 

I still loved improv too of course, but Austin Ghost Tours had a critical advantage of paying money, and so usually won the heads-up competition for how I spent my weekend nights. Austin Ghost Tours was my primary thing for awhile there, to the point I spent some afternoons at the Austin History Center and even explored the idea of buying into the business. 

Maybe that chapter will get its own blogpost someday. Also overlapping in this five-year gap was my first marriage (to a “muggle,” as we snobbishly called non-improvisers). This naturally drew me away from the stage and toward a suburban life in Leander that I can hardly imagine today. Eventually my ghost-tour involvement declined as well, and so without really intending it, I was hardly visiting 617 Congress at all.

Then in 2009, the Hideout celebrated its tenth anniversary over a weekend and invited old-timers like me to return to the mothership. I arrived at the Hideout for the Saturday-night reunion show, gave and received many hugs with old pals, and had that familiar feeling: “Gosh it’s been a minute.” 

The reunion show was a chaotic mishmash of improv games among different “generations” of Hideout players, starting with Sean Hill’s founding troupe, We Could Be Heroes. I was in the second wave along with folks like Peter Rogers and Andy Crouch, and including others like myself who had seemingly moved on from the hobby.

As is true for so many a show, I can hardly remember an ounce of what happened onstage. What I do remember is having so much fun in my group’s set that I lingered without permission into the next set, and continuing to jump onstage until Andy Crouch lovingly body-checked me out of the theater. 

Not to make light of serious matters, but I can easily compare that night to a recovered addict getting their first taste in a few years and diving face-first back into the stuff. I returned to my suburban life in Leander, but a worrying thought kept bouncing around my head: This is my family.

Within months of that show, I was watching and performing in improv shows again at the Hideout, and also at Salvage Vanguard Theater, where I got involved with Gnap! Theater Projects and Merlin Works. It so happened that my marriage was on the downslope, and there was a distinct correlation (not causation!) between my departure from married life and my return to improv. The rest is history.

I’m lucky enough to have a permanent souvenir of that fateful night in 2009. At some point in my set, during a triumphant musical number, some Hideout photographer grabbed a compelling picture of myself, Shannon McCormick, Audrey Sansom, and Noah Voelker. That image was later used for the physical tickets at the Hideout, and last I saw those tickets were still being used, a Hideout ticket-taker’s hole-punch occasionally getting me right in the face.

As I sit here, a Hideout ticket is serving as a bookmark in my nearest book. It’s a privilege, but the least of the privileges I got from being there that night. Oh, I’m sure if I hadn’t gone to the reunion show, I woulda made my way back to improv eventually anyway. But that night felt like I was being welcomed back to the Hideout with a big bear hug from an entire community at once. (Pun intended.)

1. Inevitably, I developed an “Unsolved Mysteries” improv format with my friends Cara, Chase, and Jess. We rented a smoke machine for every show.