Damn the Torpedoes! -- Guest Blog Post by Mike Trupiano
I'm an experienced performer.
I've been a comedic improviser in Chicago, a standup comedian in New York City and now a storyteller in Berlin.
So, being in front of an audience does not really scare me. I've dealt with good audiences - polite, middle class, well behaved, attentive and I've encountered raging drunks in Brooklyn bars that you had to beat down like a lion tamer.
In standup clubs and bars, I learned to do what you have to do in this situation - have a punchline within the first fifteen seconds and keep the punchlines coming. Otherwise, everyone’s minds start to wander. They start talking to each other. The volume builds and, once you've lost them, it's almost impossible to get them back.
And with my dry style, I'm not going to yell a crowd into submission. So, you keep the punchlines coming and, maybe later, if you sense it's safe, you can slow the pace a little and try to get a little deeper with the material.
A thirty-ish comedian I knew, who I saw around at various venues, had been talking about being adopted. When I heard it, I cringed. It just seemed too personal to me. Maybe it was because he wasn't making it particularly funny.
I did think, however - huh, talking on stage about being adopted? Interesting.
Standup comedy, however, is such a specific paradigm and to hammer one's adoption story into something palatable for a standup audience - to make it funny and interesting and in short enough bursts and, God forbid, possibly poignant - boy, oh boy. That seemed like a very tall order. Besides, there was so much other stuff to talk about. Why even go there?
I was thinking this at the same time as I constantly struggled to come up with material, having no idea that my unconscious prohibition about talking about "this stuff" was hindering my self-expression across the board and possibly in “real life” – you know, that time when not on stage.
Time passed. I moved to Berlin. Craving a creative outlet, one night I went to a storytelling show, the Bear. I'd been to the Moth Story Slam a few times in NYC but I'd never been on stage there. In Berlin, I thought - I don't want to do this but I'm going to tell a story about being adopted. I don't know how. I don't know what I'm going to say. But there's something about this topic that I feel compelled to talk about.
But they’ll all hate me.
Damn the torpedoes!
Spring of 2016, I get on stage at the Bear and I start telling an eight-minute story about searching for and finding my birth mother. If I'd learned anything at all in standup, it was the importance of grabbing an audience right away. So, I start with, "I was an adopted kid and if there was one word that would define my life growing up, it would be 'wonder'". Every day I woke up and wondered about the parents I had somewhere out there."
The audience perked up.
Nonetheless, I anticipated reprobation for that opening salvo. What is this guy doing talking about adoption on stage? WTF?
It was a very similar feeling to the first time I went into a twelve-step room when I shared and I expected, as it was in the chaotic home life I grew up in, to be shouted down - how can you have that opinion? You can't talk about that! What will people think?
I expected the audience to say - why is this so important to talk about? You have a family. Why do you need to go searching? etc etc etc.
Even though the story got laughs and there was applause at the end, I still had extreme trepidation afterward.
I had talked about searching for my mother; what it's like to not know who she is - the before, the life changing event, the aftereffect - my female gun toting, chain smoking detective, showing up on my mother's doorstep, acting like a delivery man, finally seeing “her”.
This piece got the biggest response of anything I'd ever to that point done on stage. Why? Maybe because it was personal. It was honest. Most of all, I think, was that it was very urgent that I tell that tale.
Long story short, that opened the floodgates. Since then, I have plumbed the depths of my searching and adoption story from many angles on stage - from finding my father's side of the family on a DNA website and meeting my half-sister in front of the Vatican in Rome to going to my father's hometown in Sicily and wandering the streets there and going to all the addresses he lived at, half expecting and half wanting people to come out of their houses and, because I looked so much like him - a twin, I'm told - my deceased father - the neighbors to look at me like a ghost and say - oh my god you're back! And then crossing themselves and kneeling down like a Pasolini film.
Something shifted after that first tale and even further with subsequent ones.
Telling my story is no longer taboo.
I no longer have to obey that prohibition.
Beyond anything I'd ever done, I think that by telling my adoption story before an audience, I had gotten down to the elephant in the room that had created so much difficulty and drama and lack in my life. This enormous unspeakable sucking the air of everything. Could it possibly be safe to talk about these things?
After one of these stories, while still on stage and the applause was dying down, someone yelled up, "you should teach!"
Friends encouraged me.
I gave it a try.
If you can believe the testimonials of past workshop participants, they got a lot of out it and I know what I’m doing.
l help you take your mishmash of memories and desires and sense of self and weave a coherent narrative out of all of it.
Workshop participants learn how to structure stories, how to see their own histories in a new light, how to weave humor into a dark situation.
In my small size (6 person) workshops, everyone gives feedback, not just me. You'll learn how to listen more adeptly to a tale and how to discern its strengths and weaknesses.
It's serious work, telling stories. My workshops are a lot of work but also a lot of fun. We are a community where you can experiment and grow.
And you don't even have to be adopted to participate.
Come! It’s fun!
You have nothing to lose except your silence.
You can contact me at:
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