The Ultimate Travel Rewards

Early morning in Denver:
Cranky. Only three hours of sleep, not in a row. After passing through the metal detector at the airport I redress, reshoe, repack, regroup so I can take the train to the terminal. And then, after stepping off the fifth escalator of the morning I see standing before me a young girl in a white floor-length dress, wearing a silver tiara with a big blue jewel in the center, silver glitter shoes and purple mardi gras beads. It never even occurred to me to travel as a princess or a fairy, yet here is this lovely creature, at dawn, waiting for the train, holding her father's hand. I soften, immediately.

On the plane:
I’m seated next to a young man who is movie star good looking, with eyes that the camera would love in repeated close-ups. He’s wearing a tan turtleneck sweater with socks and loafers that match. I decide he is a secret agent. When the flight attendant comes over and informs us that we’re in the exit row and asks if we’d be willing to save every single person on the entire plane if there’s a problem, I’m a bit slow to respond. The secret agent says, “Yes,” very casually and I eventually grunt something along those lines. As the flight attendant walks away, I turn and ask, “What exactly did we just commit to?” The secret agent says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got your back,” and even though I’m buckled in and tired and bleary and older, I’m pretty sure I swoon.

We take turns napping. (Do I snore and drool? Probably.) The secret agent and I start a typical airplane conversation: I was in Denver teaching at the improv festival, he joined friends to run a marathon. One thing leads to another and my seat partner of the dark curly hair and big dark eyes is sharing where he is in the age line-up of five siblings. He tells me this story: how his parents jumped through all of the complicated hoops to adopt a daughter. For an entire year—paperwork, home visits, etc… Then, the day they went to pick up their new daughter, while at the foster parents’ home, they find out about, and meet, their new daughter's younger sister. And as he gets to this part of the story, my seat mate gets teary and starts crying as he tells me that his parents refused to leave without taking both girls, that a judge had to be called off a golf course somewhere to approve the decision, and how his parents came to get one daughter and left with two. He is a little embarrassed that he still cries as he tells the story, that it still moves him, that he is amazed by his parents’ compassion. It’s such an intimate moment between us, this revelation. I touch the back of my hand against the back of his hand and look away. When I look back he is trying to regain his composure. I lean over and say, softly, “It’s a big deal, what they did. It’s a sign of life that you are still touched so deeply all these years later by what happened. Good for you.”

If you pull on the right thread in a conversation, sometimes you get lucky.

The airlines will not grant me any extra literal miles for these two specific moments, yet the internal mileage provided for my heart are infinite.

It's a 'Woof' Thang

In the restaurant lobby waiting for my pals to arrive, I heard a woman at the bar exclaim in a loud voice, “Woof!!” I heard her say this a couple more times and thought, “Well, someone’s had a bit much to drink.” Sure enough, the Woof woman stumbled from her barstool into the lobby to greet a friend and while hugging him said, “It’s so great to see you—Woof!”

Soon Molly, Rebecca and I were seated at a table near the bar, near the Woof woman, who continued punctuating her conversation with repeated Woofs. When she finally wobbled out of the restaurant, everyone started imitating her. Woofs were bursting from all corners of the room. (Here a woof, there a woof, everywhere a woof woof.)

The three of us wondered: is the Woof woman using Woof as punctuation, or as a way to emphasize good sentiments or bad? We weren’t sure, we couldn’t tell. But we were curious.

We decided to try out a bunch of Woof variations ourselves. But then we’d forget about our experiment until one of us would respond to something with an excited ‘Woof!’ or a somber ‘Woof.’

‘Woof’ became a shorthand for us, a way to respond without having to use many other words, as ‘Woof’ pretty much summed it up most of the time and became the go-to phrase of the night.

We kept finding ways to insert a ‘Woof’ every now and then, no matter what we were discussing. Together—with our group mind, our creative collective—we invented so many more ‘Woof’ variations than I ever would have on my own.

That’s the gift of working as an ensemble.

People say to me all the time, “I could never do what you do—that improv stuff, where you make things up on the spot.” Ah, but we all do it all the time. Case in point: Woof!!

All improv scenes involve a who/what/where. So if you're with friends, having dinner in a restaurant, the scene is set.

All you'd need then is a suggestion from the audience.

We got ours without having to ask and it was "Woof!"