Yes, And: Learning to Improvise in Midlife

She thought improv would help her feel more comfortable on camera. Instead, she got more comfortable with who she might be next.

I have developed a strange new midlife habit. I take improv classes.

I realize this sentence may conjure up an image of a very specific kind of person, so I would like to immediately clarify: I am not an improv person. I do not have a headshot in my bag, nor am I waiting to be discovered in a black-box theater. I have no desire to turn every dinner party into a bit. I have reached an age where the sight of a Sharpie, a blank name tag, and 12 chairs arranged in a circle produces the same primitive response in my body as encountering a bear. And in my 40s, if someone in said circle asks me to go around the room and share one fun fact about myself, I will simply leave the building.

And yet.

Once a week, I voluntarily enter a rickety old building in Greenwich Village, climb a staircase that appears to be slanting in a direction stairs are not supposed to slant, and agree to behave like an absolute idiot in front of strangers.

My friend Nick signed me up for this class. We run Craft Night NYC together, where we take the absurd amount of beautiful stuff left over from our day jobs in events and window dressing and use it for crafting workshops. For years, I’ve had this fantasy that Craft Night could become some kind of show. But the second you put us in front of a camera, we become all too aware of it. We needed something to help us get out of our own way; to be less like two people suddenly remembering they have faces.

Nick chose improv.

So here I am. Some women in midlife get really into Pilates. Some go full-blown Liz Gilbert. Some have affairs. I am climbing a structurally suspicious staircase to pretend to be a disgruntled lighthouse keeper with a lanky 26-year-old software engineer from Kansas.

The people in my class are a genuinely bizarre cross section of New York. Different looks, ages, careers, reasons for being there. There are people I could imagine running a hedge fund, people I could imagine making puppets professionally, and people whose occupation I absolutely cannot determine despite having spent several hours pretending to operate an imaginary sandwich shop with them.

No algorithm would have assembled us. And then, for a few hours every week, we have to be together. Really together. I hadn’t expected that part. I thought improv would be about being funny. Instead, it reminds me more of the first time I went to therapy, walking in carrying an imaginary suitcase stuffed with my own bullshit. I genuinely believed I was going to unzip it, dump the whole mess onto the floor, and this trained professional would help me arrange it into neat little stacks. She would make me a to-do list. Maybe identify a few action items. We would put a perfectly coiffed taffeta bow on the whole thing and I would leave emotionally organized.

I had fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.

Because therapy, annoyingly, does not organize your bullshit for you. It asks you to sit there and look at it. And improv, I’m discovering, has a similar bait-and-switch quality. You arrive thinking you’re going to learn how to be funny ha ha, and suddenly you’re standing in a circle examining your relationship to failure. Excuse me? I came here to pretend to be a horse.

Therapy isn’t really about talking. And improv isn’t really about jokes. Both are, in their own peculiar ways, about learning how to be a person while someone else is being a person right in front of you. Which turns out to be incredibly difficult. Especially in midlife. Because by midlife, you have become quite accomplished at being “yourself.”

I have systems. I know which side of the bed I sleep on. I know how I like my coffee. I have a very specific opinion about overhead lighting. I have chargers for things I no longer own. I have at least one drawer that contains 17 batteries of unknown vitality. More importantly, I have spent decades getting good at the things I’m good at. Then I walk into improv class and someone points at me and says, “You’re a blind dentist at a Las Vegas conference whose wife is a ghost.” And suddenly, I know nothing.

The hardest part is remembering the rules while also staying inside the scene. This would be challenging enough if I weren’t attempting it with a perimenopausal brain, which has recently turned the retrieval of extremely basic information into a daily round of charades meets Guess Who? Now, I am expected to simultaneously listen, react, build, not ask questions, not negate my partner, establish a relationship, create a world, and somehow remember the imaginary broom I was holding 30 seconds ago.

One piece of feedback my teacher gives constantly is: “You already know.” Because in improv, asking your scene partner a question is not helpful. At first, this offended me: I am a curious person, I thought questions were good. But in a scene, a question can be an abdication of responsibility.

“Where are we?”

“What are we doing?”

“Why are you holding that?”

You have just handed the entire problem back to the other person. Now they have to invent the answer. Now they have to save you. So instead, you already know.

If your partner says, “I can’t believe you brought the raccoon,” you do not say, “What raccoon?”

Absolutely not. There is a raccoon. You know this raccoon. You have history with this raccoon. Probably a complicated one. Your job is to take whatever has been offered, look at it for approximately one-tenth of a second, and add something to it.

“Yes, and he still owes me 40 dollars.”

Now we have a scene.

“You already know” does not mean you actually know anything. It means: Stop making someone else do all the work. Participate and commit to this new reality.

In my everyday life, I have become an excellent editor. I walk into rooms and immediately start moving things around in my head. I can find the thing that’s not working before I’ve fully taken off my coat. Unfortunately, I do this with more than rooms. I edit ideas. I edit conversations. I edit people. I edit myself. I can spot a bad idea from 20 paces and, even worse, I usually have a fairly strong opinion about how to make it better. Improv does not give a flying fuck about any of this.

Sometimes someone hands me something I desperately want to fix. They introduce a third character nobody needed. They suddenly announce that the scene is taking place underwater despite there having been absolutely no previous indication of water. Every cell in my body wants to say: No. Hang on. We’ve lost the plot. Let’s go back.

But you cannot stop the scene and explain that this would have been stronger conceptually had everyone stayed on land. We are underwater now. My job is not to make it the scene I would have chosen. My job is to swim.

Lately, my life feels like one enormous improv scene where someone handed me a new script halfway through and forgot to give me any of the pages. You spend the first half of your life believing there is some kind of plot. School. Career. Love. Marriage maybe. Children maybe. Home maybe. Achievement. Forward. There are milestones. There are nouns. And then, somewhere around the middle, the nouns become verbs. Things change. People change. Parents gets sick. Children grow. Marriages devolve. Careers mutate. Bodies begin filing formal complaints. The things you thought were permanent reveal themselves to have been temporary all along.

Maybe that’s why “you already know” keeps landing with me. Not because I know. But maybe because I don’t have to? I can take what’s been handed to me even when it is absolutely not the scene I would have chosen and add something. Stay loose. Listen. Respond to what is actually happening, not what I thought was supposed to.

The thing that moves me most isn’t even the improvising. It’s watching. There is something almost unbearably tender about watching another grown adult try something they’re not good at yet. In our 40s, most of us have arranged our lives so other people primarily encounter us doing things we already know how to do. We present the finished version. At work. At dinner. Online. Even among friends. Competence is one of adulthood’s favorite costumes. In improv, it gets ripped off almost immediately.

You see someone searching for an idea, panic flickering across their face. You watch a joke leave someone’s body with tremendous confidence and then shrivel up and die. You see the exact millisecond they realize it has died. It is excruciating. Then something remarkable happens. Nobody dies. No trapdoor opens. The room stays with them, someone picks up the thread. We continue.

Sometimes someone absolutely nails it and the whole room explodes. And there is another lesson there as well. You let them have it. You don’t jump in to prove you’re funny too. You support the scene.

This also turns out to be a skill. Especially in midlife, when everyone seems to be living on radically different timelines. One friend is having a baby. One is sending a child to college. One is getting divorced. One is getting married. One just got the biggest job of their life. One quit theirs, bought a kiln, and keeps asking to do ThetaHealing on me. There is no longer one shared definition of forward. Maybe there never was.

This mixed bag of people who keep showing up to improv class every week has very little to do with comedy. We’re all practicing something we’re hungry for without quite knowing how to name it. And maybe, after spending the first half of our lives learning how to become somebody, there is an enormous relief in occasionally getting to be nobody in particular. Not the boss. Not the parent. Not the expert. Not the person who knows what we’re doing next. Just another weirdo climbing a dimly lit Greenwich Village staircase that sounds like my knees when I bend down to help my kids tie their shoes; another perimenopausal woman with a cunty mom bob heading to class to pretend a folding chair is a jet ski.

At this age, I find that incredibly comforting. I used to think becoming a better person meant eventually arriving at some improved, finished version of myself. More certain. More competent. Less messy. Now I’m beginning to suspect the opposite. Maybe this part of my life isn’t about finally knowing who I am. Maybe it’s about becoming less terrified of who I might be next. The goal isn’t to become someone who always knows what to do. Maybe it’s to become someone who can remain open when they don’t. Someone nimble enough to notice when the scene has changed. And instead of standing there clutching the old script, insisting this isn’t how it was supposed to go, look at the other imperfect person without a script either, and say:

Yes.

OK.

We’re underwater now.

Let’s swim.

---

Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness. And if you’ve liked what you’ve read and want to help us keep bringing stories your way, please consider a small donation.