ON STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES

I've been thinking a lot about group formation lately. Two aspects of my life come to mind - work and improv.

In both situations, I am blessed to be working with people who have strengths different from my own. At work, there are people who are strong in terms of programming, or developing relationships with their RA's. In improv, perhaps people are better singers (there are no worse singers in our group than me) or people can be counted on to be more "out there" in terms of developing characters, always making unconventional choices.

At work, the leadership is obviously directed for us. We know who reports to whom. In some situations, however, someone has to step up and run the show, so to speak. We just had an interview with a candidate in which only the RD's participated. I happened to be sitting nearest the candidate and so started things off. As the candidate delivered one of his answers, I found myself wondering if the rest of the room resented me for running the interview. It's not an intentional thing on my part - I just wanted it to get done. No one said anything to me, but maybe I'll wait to see how tomorrow's interview goes before asking everyone how they feel. It's just that I've been here the second-longest (tenured on Friday) and think that with great seniority comes great responsibility...just like Spider-Man Senior said.

Improv is different. While our rehearsals are run by our director, everyone else kind of chips in for the rest of what we need to do. We all try to book shows, we all work on publicity, we all try to support the group. The only problem is that when something falls through the cracks, no one notices. It's a frustrating thing, and certainly one we all have to work on, but it's the nature of a communal approach. And certainly from the business side (as opposed to the creative side) of the group, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. I created most of the press kit for the group, as well as a program that we have apparently not given out in a while. Hmmm.

I don't know that I have any huge, glaring weaknesses in either aspect of my life. Lest you think me vain, I don't have any huge glaring strengths either. Let me put it another way: in the game "Mario Kart" for the Super Nintendo, different drivers were good at certain things and less good at other things (for example, Donkey Kong had a high top speed but low acceleration). The Mario character was balanced - not exceptional, but also not deficient in anything. If life is the SNES Mario Kart, I'm Mario.