A Quote by Demetrius Shipp, Jr.
In high school, we would do improv. Me and my boy were, like, the stars of the class.
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Grade school, middle school and high school were relatively easy for me, and with little studying, I was an honor student every semester, graduating 5th in my high school class.
I was on the improv team in high school, and after I graduated, I joined an improv company that had been established 10 years prior to me getting there. They did longform improv, and I fell in love with it. It's acting, character creation, collaborative, artistic expression and comedy - and it's scary. It was a big rush.
I remember when the O.J. verdict was read; at my high school, all of the teachers were like, "We are stopping class right now," and turned it on and we watched it. There were people coming out of their classrooms, like, "Yeah!" Some people were like, "Nooo." I was in Spanish class.
I didn't like school. I was pretty much daydreaming all the time. I would be in the back of the class writing down random stories and stuff that would have nothing to do with school. I only lasted two years in high school before I moved out to L.A.
There was an improv class in our high school, and we all ended up taking it and loving it. Then we just started our own thing.
I actually live right near a high school and I always walk by...I live in a high school. I actually live in the boiler room of a high school at night. When I see high school guys now I'm actually like, 'Thank f - king God I'm not in high school anymore because they look like they could kick the living s - t out of me.'
My life has been a kind of mystery to me. By all my logical, linear thinking I started out in school as a little boy, I didn't have a clue about anything. What they were talking about in school, couldn't play sports, couldn't learn, and I was bottom of the class.
In history class, I wrote a poem, 'The Royalists and the Roundheads.' I would write poems about driftwood in art class and little stories about the sun, moon, and stars in science class. Since not many kids were writing in class, I got away with it.
In 2002, I was taking an improv class because, as a white male with glasses who was born between 1978 and 1994, it's legally required that I take at least one improv class in my life.
I did improv for about 10 years professionally, and before that, I had done it in high school as part of an improv team. It was definitely a big part of my upbringing.
In high school, I got picked on. It's funny that I got tormented for what I'm doing now - the acting thing. People would see me in a Nickelodeon commercial, and I would hear about it the next day at school. Kids would say, 'Hi, TV Boy.' They heckled. I never got beat up.
But at the same time, my parents always encouraged my brother and me to be happy with what we were doing. My parents were athletes in high school; my mom and my dad were the stars of the basketball team, but they never pushed my brother and me to be anything we didn't want to be.
Being a teenager, I would think they were real strict, and I would get upset, but I'm glad they were like that. They didn't let us do whatever we wanted. We weren't allowed to date until we were, like, juniors in high school.
I did improv in junior high school. Figuring out my comedic timing helped my confidence in talking to the bullies and talking to people in class. If I could make them laugh, then I was in; I was OK.
I was a very earnest, hard working boy at school, but my parents were distressed because I was always bottom of the class. But I wasn't dilatory, I worked like crazy.
Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.
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