Talk to Wooster
Summer 2004
But Seriously, Folks
All those hours doing Don’t Throw Shoes improv prepared us for something in the real world – not cubicle comedy, though.
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I don’t get college students today. The way they’re all into "internships" and "networking" and "jobs."
When I was in college, I was a founding member of the comedy/improv troupe Don’t Throw Shoes. Resumes? Who was thinking about resumes? We had sketches to develop, improvs to practice, time to waste. Before we got to Wooster, there wasn’t even a thing called Don’t Throw Shoes, and then we gave it that goofy name, so how much credibility could it carry in a job interview? "I wasn’t president of SGA or a member of the German language house, but I helped write the ‘Scooby Monkey Trial’ sketch, I appeared in the video ‘COPS: Campus Security,’ and I’m really good at the Emotions Improv. When can I start, sir?"
What has become of the founding members of Shoes? Have they all, as justice and logic would dictate, become profoundly troubled drains on society? Like me? (Playwright, same difference.)
"My Shoes experience has been useless professionally," says Justin Boyd ’93. "I learned not one single resume-ready skill from Shoes." Justin went from Wooster to be, among other things, a journalist, a playwright, and staff writer at – I just like to say this title – Rubber and Plastics News. So it’s entirely possible he could sue Don’t Throw Shoes.
Apparently I’m the only person who actually used Shoes to land a real job. When I got hired by Indiana University in their financial aid office, I’d assumed it was on the strength of my well-rounded liberal arts education. Turns out it was because this office did skits at a luncheon every Thanksgiving, and the financial aid director noticed Shoes on my resume and thought I’d be a ringer. (She was wrong. So wrong. Cubicle comedy is murder.)
So I expected everyone to be snarky and irreverent, pathologically afraid of sentimentality, spewing obscenities, and hanging up on me. We are talking about comedy people, after all, who don’t take anything seriously. Writing this thing would be a snap, and I could get back to surfing the Web.
But Shoes was apparently so valuable an experience that even these guys are loath to joke about it too much.
I expected optimism among more recent Shoes graduates, since life hasn’t had time to crush them yet. Shoes seems to operate pretty much the way it always did, the main difference being that Shoes folks now have names like Cory and Merritt and Daren. They sound like the cast of a Fox nighttime soap while we (Eric, Gabe, Clarke) might have been someone’s IT department.
