I'm in L.A. this week (at least so far) which means I don't have any work to do so I'm kinda bored. I had a pretty awesome weekend. I went to the Foundry retreat with Grace Community Church. It was my last hurrah with them. At first, I wasn't sure if I really wanted to go or not. I felt pretty good about going to the new church and I felt like doing something with the old church would just keep me in church limbo or something. Anyways, there was no backing out since I signed up for the "drama" competition. I'll talk some more about the retreat later, but now I just want to talk about skits...

Why not talk about skits. That's the name on this site of course. I don't know if I've ever posted about the name, Skitguru, but if I have it was long enough for me to forget, so you probably did too. Skitguru is somewhat of a name and somewhat of a title. It's a really cool name because it doesn't really sound like some other nickname for one. The other reason is I didn't come up with it myself, but it was given to me by my skit team at UCLA. No fancy ceremony or anything like that, just one day they started calling me Skitguru and it stuck. Skit team was one of the greatest things I ever had the honor of being a part of. I never laughed so hard in my life and so I will carry it with me in some form or another. Currently, it will reside here and on my IM and on the Yahoo account I never use except for photos, ha ha.

Anyways, this retreat was the 4th Foundry retreat. The last three retreats had prop skit competitions where it would be 4 teams vs. the champions, who were me and my roommate, Chris. This time, Chris was in Guatemala for a missions trip so I had to replace him. Luckily, Russ had joined the Foundry so my protege from UCLA skit team will be my partner to battle the contenders in the "drama" competition. So I put drama in quotes because it seems the three teams had a different interpretation of what that meant and so as a result you got three very different performances. The first was more of a Stomp style performance where three angst driven guys drummed on ironing boards. It was pretty cool. The second was a very serious drama and pretty much was a small Bible study lesson in skit form. The third was us. Now when I see the word "drama", I just think skit, so I did what I know and that's comedy. So our skit actually had two parts, a prologue and then the story. The prologue was me and a video of Chris in Guatemala. I was talking to him "via satellite". It didn't work out so then Russ comes on stage to bail me out. That ends the prologue and then we do an entirely different skit which was called "Time Travel Through Foundry History...And Beyond!". First we traveled to the ever popular 70s and then we wound it too far back and ended up in a time before creation and just floated in the void for a bit. Then we went back to the present where I took a rest cuz I swallowed too much void and Russ proceded onward into the future and talked to the old version of myself. It was a fun skit. It was kind of a rewrite of a skit we did at UCLA. Neither of us really had time to come up with a decent idea, but that one did get the laughs, and we won that round.

The finals were a props skit against our pastor, Kurt, and daytime Emmy award winner, Chad Brannon. It was actually pretty intimidating. Kurt is a really funny guy and Chad's got the star power. So I'm against pastor power and star power for a props skit. Here was the list of props:

2 little plungers
4 long foam cylinders
2 visors
2 thingies you put on the handles of tricycles that kind of look like pom poms
1 Monster Disc, kinda like a huge frisbee but it's basically cloth covering a ring
2 Nerf looking bombs
1 deflated handball that looked like a baseball

So how do you make a funny skit out of that stuff? It's not easy. Especially since many of the items were in the 3 previous props skits I've done. I have to top myself and win which is the dilemma of every retreat it seems. At first we were going to do a James Bond type skit, but then Russ had the golden idea of the Olympics. So each of us played off being an announcer and displaying the events. Because it seems like so many silly events get added to the Olympics as time goes on, our Olympics took place in the year 2050, and we showed coverage of 9 events starting at somewhat silly to completely ridiculous. Here are the events:

1. Weightlifting
2. Human Rowing
3. Walrus Wrestling
4. 400m Plutonium Relay
5. Men's Pom Pom
6. Helicopter Hurdles
7. Blind Pole Vault Relay
8. Javelin Fencing
9. Over Age 80 Men's Marathon

It was quite a silly skit and proved to be much better than the other skit we did the day before. In fact, it was probably one of the best skits I've ever done. There were tears in the audience. It was a great abs workout for some. Ha ha! I love skits. It was recorded, so I hopefully will be able to get it and put it on the Skit DVD (coming soon). We won by the way.

Funny thing about skits is I love them and I hate them. I always get major nerves right before I have to go in front of all those people. Then once it's started I feel alot better. I'm not really nervous about whether people will like it or not or whether I will be funny. I'm more worried that I will forget a line or totally freeze up there. The first skit I had alot more nerves than the second skit. Maybe cuz I was already used to it by that time or maybe cuz I just thought the second one was so funny. I never really think about how I'm doing this silly men's pom pom routine in front of 180 people. I just think that this is the part I'm playing at this part in the skit. Kinda weird, I can't explain it. Such is the mystery of Skitguru.