This Week in Geek Supplemental

Because I was refereeing an improv tournament this weekend, I wasn't actually able to complete Sunday's "This Week in Geek". But there really was a lot of geekery involved in the weekend...

For example, I primed the participating kids and my team of officials with Whiplash jokes the week before. Well, it happened for real (and by real, I mean I was playing the part). See, I decided to be cheeky and finish each match with a "Buzz Bannen, Agent of SNIF" adventure, especially considering I was going to ref one team at least twice (they went to the final, so three times in the end). But the second time I reffed that team, their assistant coach, a waif of a girl sitting in the front row, blurted out they'd already gotten that suggestion before I could finish the ultimately different title. WHIPLASH MOMENT! I screamed and ranted, kicked at chairs, busted out of the room through a wall (well, curtain), the whole deal. There was laughter, even from said assistant coach... everyone knows me too well. Minor injuries resulted: Broke my voice a little, and slammed my hand into a stray bolt and burst some blood vessels. Well you wanna do something stupid, you gotta pay for it.

Saturday night, the adults (coaches and refs) usually offer the kids a show so they can let their hair down, see the people who teach them improv show them why they deserve to, and ideally, see how far the art can be taken. I normally organize these, and play a minimal part in them (artistic direction and bit parts mostly). My 6 chosen improvisers played through various unusual/maverick challenges, but we kept the best and most difficult - the one that really could make us crap our pants, which is where the best improv is created - for last: an improvised musical with two characteristics - it had to be GOOD, and it had to be at least 30 minutes long. The suggestion for a title came from the kids: "Personne sait" (Nobody Knows). It was a rather tragic story about a character (the one with the wig) who loved a stranger, but was ostracized by society (the picture shows everyone but the Stranger as, essentially, "social forces" about to smother the lead for daring to love. Justin Guitard was the lead as he had a facility with singing and rhyming, but the secret MVP of the play was Ludger Beaulieu (on the right), the real architect of the conflict, the staging and the wonderful ambiguity of the play. Why did we hate Justin? Nobody knows. And that title became a recurring bilingual refrain ("Personne sait, Nobody knows") that is still stuck in our heads. I stage these shows exactly for this kind of thing, to see the best improv players in the province create complex, memorable, surprising stories out of whole cloth. My thanks to Justin, Ludger, Eric "Tornado" Lavoie, Renée LeBlanc, Amélie Montour, Marty Léger and everyone present for a great experience.

So by this point, I'm pretty tired, right? Too bad, because I'd also challenged Tornado to a public Doctor Who Trivia Face Off! I'd obtained the participation of other Whovians at the tourney to stage it as an impromptu game show - so thanks to host Scott Cowan (kind of dressed as Matt Smith), quizmaster Miguel Roy (who cosplays a mean David Tennant), and scorekeeper/DJ Andréanne Basque (who recently started watching Classic Who from 1963 on) - using 50th Anniversary Trivial Pursuit cards. Needless to say, I crushed Tornado, and even forced the judges to accept that a card had a mistake on it (the Ice Warriors are most definitely NOT in The Seeds of Doom, but in The Seeds of DEATH!). 16 to 1, though I think he might've done better if I hadn't intimidated him with my geekly arrogance. Of course, this was all just a set up for him to challenge me to a Star Trek Trivia Challenge in the next tournament one month from now. Oh honey...

But wait, more geekly stuff awaited me at the final. First, I had to tell the audience which team corresponded to which colored voting card. One team (coached by Tornado, who keeps appearing in these stories) had red highlights on their uniforms so were represented by the red card. Duh. The other card was green, which had nothing to do with the other team, but the coach, Marty (another usual suspect) was wearing a Green Lantern shirt, so I alluded to that... Only for Tornado to take his jersey off and show he TOO had a Green Lantern shirt on. WHAT THE HELL GUYS. Later in the game, I used soundtrack on an improv I'd edited together from Big Finish's Doctor Who: Protect and Survive's bonus tracks. And then I somehow won the Best Referee prize (for getting angry, I guess), which looked like this:

Robocop? I was probably born to win that.