Spontaneous Broadway is an hour and a half long  musical show broken into two 45-minute sections. In the first half, the audience members are asked to write down made-up song titles and put them a basket. Each actor in the cast will draw one from the basket and, based only on the title, make up a song right on the spot. Afterward, the audience will vote for the song they like the best.

In the second half of the show, the cast will create a Broadway musical that contains the song the audience picked along with many other songs, characters and a story. This, again, is done entirely by improvisation.

Just the thought of this terrifies me. That’s why I flew to San Francisco last week to participate in a workshop put on by Bats Improv Theater. The conclusion of the workshop was a public performance this past Sunday.

Oh boy! Did we (the student cast) did an awesome show?

We did. Not only were the songs we created on the spot awesome, but the story we

created collaboratively was incredible as well. It was a story of a nun falling in love with a blind priest. I played the nun’s father. I made up a solo number, titled, “Above all else is chastity.”

It’s enough to say that we’ve blown away the audience with our performance. In fact, we blew ourselves away, too, since there were times we crashed and burned during practices and we never thought we could have done this so marvelously.

If you think about if, the most precious resource in our lives is not money, it’s our time and mental energy. Choose wisely where you invest your time and energy. Other than my family, which is  most important to me, I choose to invest in activities that are outside of my comfort zone.
I truly believe life begins at the end of one’s comfort zone. I might even say personal growth begins there as well .

What have you done lately that is terrifying?