An Open Letter to Impulse Re: Larry Pinder
Dear Neil, Mark, Phil, Wes, Ben, Dave, Aaron, Brian, Dave, Eric, Scott, Paul, Sarah, Matt, and anyone else who had the rare pleasure of attending Grinnell High School in the early 1990s and being involved with the theatre program there and participating in the improv troupe Impulse, where Larry Pinder bestowed with great force and cheer the gift of good improvisational acting on our impressionable young addled minds:
Doing this in a blog entry might be horribly gauche, I realize, but I am lacking most of your email addresses and I haven’t even seen many of you in nearly a decade and brazenly frank blog entries rife with oversharing are apparently my thing now more than ever. But I wanted to fill you all in on what happened in Grinnell the other night.
My brother and I both made it back to Grinnell for Larry’s service on Wednesday, and we were among the few representatives of GHS’ theatre alumni. I guess this is one of the dubious advantages of remaining in the Midwest: it’s slightly easier to make it back to Grinnell for things like funerals and Thanksgiving.
The service was held in the high school’s new auditorium (which I regarded throughout the proceedings with good-natured envy, recalling the days when we did improv in church basements and stuffy classrooms and people’s attics because the school didn’t have a proper theatre of its own) and was eminently tasteful and well-organized and pervasively joyous rather than sad. It was an open-mic sort of affair where people were invited to share their memories of Larry. I was overwhelmingly pleased to see a couple rows of seats occupied by various Grinnell College alums from 1992-1994—Brian, Brandon, Phil, Jim, Craig, and others—who along with Larry intimidated the hell out of us while at the same time teaching us how to do good improv sixteen years ago and whose word we regarded as gospel and very presence we felt made us smarter, cooler, better people, whether we were playing improv games with them in the black box theater in the Fine Arts building or watching a Stumbleweed show with them in Gardner.
These are people I wasn’t sure I’d ever see again, people who had informed my creative universe for a good two or three years in high school and then graduated and went on to bigger things in other cities, and we acknowledged at the reception afterward how it would have been nice if the circumstances reuniting us didn’t have to be so shitty.
Several people’s comments at the service, including my own and my brother’s, were about how Larry taught them to be funny, to have a good sense of humor, to laugh. To integrate the rules of improv into daily life like zen tenets. To elevate one’s taste in art while appreciating the lowbrow and the absurd. But also—considering my brother and I both secured our first post-collegiate jobs at the newspaper, under Larry—he helped teach me and many others how to be grown-up. How to do the smart, responsible thing. This is charmingly ironic since, to hear his friends and family tell it the other night, he never stopped being a very big kid, in the best possible way.
Liz spoke and recalled how Larry brought the Harold to the State Thespian Festival in 1993. It was the first and last time a Harold’s ever been performed at such a festival, and Liz confirmed for me afterward that I was a member of that cast, but I have no recollection of the performance. Maybe you can help me with that.
Tom, Larry’s longtime comedy partner and fellow elder statesman of Grinnell College improv, remarked that Larry always had a gift for spontaneity, which he perhaps took a bit too far the previous Wednesday, which dark joke was met with tentative, scattered laughter.
Another former college classmate read a letter from Neal Stephenson, who had lived with Larry many years ago and memorialized him in absentia. Larry’s whole family was there, of course: that big, smart, eccentric clan, the kind of people about whom the usually trite phrase “pillars of the community” is for once uttered unironically.
During his remarks Craig said he had been dreading this—meaning the service—but was now glad he came. I felt the same way. I reflected, not for the first time, on how Grinnell might be at its best when it loses one of its own; how funerals, perversely, are when I’m happiest to be a Grinnellian, that rare opportunity to appreciate my close-knit small-town pedigree.
Several invocations of “yes-and” were uttered, and I sat there rededicating myself to the principle of yes-and in all things: how much happier it will make me as a person if I take what someone else has given me rather than ignore it, and build on it rather than knocking it down. So thanks, Larry, for fifty years of relentless yes-anding, and to that brief but massively influential segment to which I bore witness.
Posted: September 12th, 2008 under Grinnell.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from mrp
Time: 13 September 2008, 21:25
I would have done anything to be there. Firstly so I could have put into words, to a room full of people who would have known exactly what I was talking about, the extent to which he had an impact on my life. Secondly so I could be once again in the presence of that group of improv paragons who I will very likely never see together again. RV, to my young impressionable mind, was sheer unadulterated brilliance, made only more intense by its ephemerality. It’s almost comic the place those people hold in my memory, especially considering how little of them I knew, as we never really interacted as peers (my head would have exploded).
I keep re-writing this paragraph over and over to try to get it right, and it’s not really working, so I’ll just say this. Larry taught me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned, and I am forever indebted to him that I was able to learn it at such a young impressionable age. He taught me that any pursuit is made more valuable, more personal, and more rewarding when approached with seriousness. That improv, and all creative endeavors, should be work in the best and truest sense of the word, and that it is worthy of all the scrutiny and attention we can give it—that it will always give back.
He took me and my creativity seriously, and by example demanded that I do the same—something that no adult, let alone one whom I admired, had done up to that point in my life.
Comment from bpk
Time: 13 September 2008, 22:39
I can only make a short post and comment now, but it was great to see you JP (someday I’ll start calling you Jake!). The turnout was impressive. We had almost the entire final lineup of RV there.
I think any of us that spent any kind of time with Larry knew what kind of person he was, and we all have a shared joy for his passion, and for his effect on our lives. I know how he affected all of us in RV, and I had a good guess that he had that impact on you guys.
What was stunning to me, was to realize that he coached at GHS year in and year out, so there have been 13 more years of kids coming through there that have been impacted like we had. It gave me a great smile to hear one of the first guys who spoke, a kid still in HS (or maybe just graduated?) describe the same Larry that I know. Even giving a spot-on rendition of how he laughed (two versions).
Nice to reconnect with you guys…more from me later.
-Brian
Comment from Libby
Time: 15 September 2008, 11:59
I am saddened to find this out now. I too would have liked to attend. Even if I wasn’t a member of Impulse, many of my friends were and I have very fond memories of Larry at the improv workshop we attended at Grinnell my senior year. Specifically he pairing Peter and I up to do the mirror exercise and slowly backing us away from each other until we were on opposite sides of the library. Finally he declared, “Wow, you two seem to be very connected.” That’s when we told him we were siblings. I am very sorry to hear he isn’t with us any longer.
Comment from Neil
Time: 15 September 2008, 19:42
I just found out about this 20 minutes ago while cleaning out my neglected gmail. When I talked to Larry last Christmas, we joked about how many people, including ourselves, systematically ignore cell phones (In fact I think Larry said that he didn’t own one), email, chats, blogs, and the other various forms of social networking. That being said, had I known about Larry’s death I would have maxed out a credit card to get back for the service. I feel like I’ve been punched in the throat.
I remember the Wednesday nights at the UCC where Larry coached us to act from our intelligence.
You all have to remember the speech contests where we would walk around with inflated egos talking about how the improv coming out of other schools sucked so bad. It wasn’t their fault. They just didn’t have Larry.
Comment from Tom Johnson
Time: 16 September 2008, 12:43
I hope this gets where it needs to get so you all can read it. I’m one of those people mentioned above who isn’t blog-smart. (And Larry did have a cell phone–he just didn’t know where it was, which is even better)
J.P. , and all other Impulse members:
First of all, J.P., I’m really sorry I didn’t get a chance to say hi face to face last week after the service. I got cornered in the gym after and before I could do any mingling the place was starting to clear out. Anyway, thanks for sharing your great comments and memories. It was amazing to me to see you representing the first group of GHS improvisers I knew, along with the kids who had been working with Larry this year.
I had the opportunity to work alongside Larry a with most of you way back when, and let me say it was a pleasure and an honor to be involved the small amount I was with your work. I have vivid memories of first watching you do long form work, first in a rehearsal and later at one of the contests. “These guys get it,” was my reaction. (I also have vivid memories of seeing Vivid for the first time, and saying, these guys are annoyingly talented) I was particularly proud of you the time you got yourselves disqualified for doing what you knew was right by the work instead of following some dumbass rule in the contest. Kevin Dorff was in town working with us that week after leaving Second City, and I have a great memory of him spouting obscenities (directed at those judges) outside of Roberts theater after meeting Wes and Mark and hearing about that. One of your mothers was there to witness the remarks of this mentor to your mentor.
Larry’s death has left a void in my life that can’t be filled, but it is very inspiring to be reminded so eloquently of the influence he had on you all, and the immense value of the work in which he so fervently believed. I’ve been in the improv racket for a lot of years now, and as I get ready to open a new theater in Portland, I will try to keep living up to the memory of a man who had it in his soul.
-Tom Johnson
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