"Yes, And...": The Show Must Go On

This is the fourth and last part of my continuing story. If you would like to read the first three parts, you can do so here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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It seemed that I had finally found my niche. That strange combination of nerds, drama queens, geeks, and people who believe that the best way to tell jokes is to tell all the jokes you can think of combined into one amazing group of people. I would go to workshops every week, and those Tuesdays would be one of the biggest highlights of my week.

Fall semester continued, and I started making more and more friends in the group, and we became very close. It was a lot of fun. We had shows, usually twice a month, and slowly, ever so slowly, people were debuted and we got new performers every once in a while. Finally, finals week rolled around, and we had our final workshop. Christmas break was here, and we were all looking forward to not having school, and excited for the new things we would be doing once we got back for winter semester.

The month rolled by, and winter semester came. It turned out to have a surprise in store for me, as the club presidency was very suddenly lacking in a secretary and they very urgently needed someone to take that spot. As I had expressed interest in helping out however I could before, I was sought out and asked to take that spot. I accepted.

I was now the secretary, one of five people that were constantly struggling to keep the club going and authorized with the school administration. It was hard, with struggles that ranged from seemingly arbitrary school rules that made it hard to get authorization to do what we wanted, finding performance-ready actors for the dates the shows were to go, not having any access to our accounts and thereby no idea whether or how much money we had, and constant schedule and communication conflicts.

Eventually, somehow, we got through winter semester. Summer semester came, and I got to debut, in a show coincidentally placed on my birthday. Our presidency changed, and we started to build upon this foundation that had been created the past two semesters.

Now, it's fall semester. I'm a veteran performer and still an integral part of the presidency, albeit now in the treasurer position instead of the secretary. We still have a lot of struggles in running the club, from still not having access to our account, and therefore not knowing what money we have. We have a lot of great ideas we'd like to show, but we still need to focus on maintaining our improv foundation and keep building the club so that it can continue after we are gone. We're bigger and better and far more grown up than we were when we started. I've got waaayyyyy more friends than I would have imagined otherwise, and it's amazing.

This journey has been long and hard and difficult, but also great and incredibly rewarding in the long run. I can't wait to keep going.