🔖📺 Alex Brannan’s article, “It Could Be About Anything”: Middleditch & Schwartz and the Viability of Televised Improv Comedy is an interesting read. Longform improv is definitely hard to explain to non-improv normies but also, in my experience, it’s um, not great fun for most people who aren’t “yes…and” nerds, as Thomas Middleditch calls them, to watch. Like… Does anybody NOT initiated into longform WANT to watch a Harold? Maybe they do, but I’m not sure. By the time I was about to stop performing improv, I was over the Harold as an audience member. And I got to see some really amazing teams. Still not a format I would recommend to just anybody. It’s a performance art piece as much as a comedy piece. I don’t know. Anyway, I’d been thinking about watching the show and now I definitely will.

It’s worth noting that I myself never was on a team that did longform without a gimmick. I think our gimmicks were a huge part of the fun for me. We may never know if I would be able to sustain interest in performing the Harold for longer than a six-week class.

🔖 Adrienne So’s Wired piece, ”‘Crisis Schooling’ and the New Rhythms of Pandemic Parenting," makes me feel okay about how extremely unstructured and screen-heavy my kid’s last 120+ days have been.

🔖 📚 I found myself wanting to read so many of the books on Book Riot’s Best Books of 2020 So Far list that I decided it makes more sense to bookmark the whole list than to add each title individually.

🔖 Where do I donate? Why is the uprising violent? Should I go protest? And other commonly asked questions by white and/or privileged people, answered by other white and/or privileged people*

🔖 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice is immensely valuable, because it gives you concrete actions to take in the face of our overwhelming and appalling reality.

🔖 Read recently:

• The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic
• Cosplay Is a Business and It Is Suffering
• Why it’s so hard to read a book right now, explained by a neuroscientist
• Bookstagram: The Antidote to Social Media Grift
• The End of Meat Is Here
• If The End of Meat is Here, What’s Next?

🔖 Read ‘A joyful thing’: the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years. I have a bad habit of idealizing other people’s marriages. This article isn’t helping.

🔖 Stuff I read yesterday:

• One of Oscar Wilde’s last stops in England before exile was a bookstore.
• Growing Without Schooling
• Science confirms it: Websites really do all look the same

🔖 Read today:

• 6 Ways to Maximize Your Reading Time During the Pandemic - I can’t tell whether some of these suggestions are jokes, but they all make sense to me.
• time for new rules. A lot of these rules work for me.

🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.

I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.

I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.