First Nursing Home show

AUGUST 18th 1pm was our first Improv show for a nursing home. It was at a place called the "Mosaic of Beacon". I walked into the "performance room" with my team to a microphone on a table next to a popcorn machine. We started out by playing the Improv game 'freeze tag' to silence, odd looks and frequent wheelchairs rolling past us.

Luckily this only lasted ten minutes, after that they started to warm up, laugh, and understand what exactly it was that we were doing. Once we started asking them to participate it was a blast. The residents began giving suggestions, and elaborating on them in their own comical ways. Telling us stories of taking jello shots and going to the "Boom boom room." Which I believe is a sex room.

So our show got more and more raunchy when they began opening up to us. We did scenes with booze, Vicodin, Viagra, jello shots, and flasks in the "Boom boom room". It was great to get them laughing, and interacting with them made them more engaged with the show. We also had the employees laughing which helped too. We finished after 70 minutes or so and the activities director I'd set up the show with invited us back to perform again soon.

After the show I interviewed one of the residents on camera. I asked her how she liked the show. She said she loved the interaction and got more in depth... "The boom boom room is real, I'll show you guys sometimes. And we do jello shots all the time..." This was a great interview, but a woman in charge saw this and made us delete this golden interview. So that was disappointing, but it was still really fun, and a good place to get our first show out of the way.

If anyone is interested in assisting in some way below is a link to a website that lists all the nursing homes in the Chicago land area.

http://www.caregiverlist.com/NursingHomeRatingsAndCosts.aspx

I've been calling these places, and asking for the "activities director" and offering my service of having a comedy team. Most will ignore but many will be very grateful and excited!