What's in a name?

Welcome to my improv blog!

I suppose you’re wondering about the title “Something Like a Chicken Sandwich”. You may recognize it as a reference to the book “Something Like a Drug: An Unauthorized Oral History of Theatresports”, but why am I referencing that book and why a “chicken sandwich”?

While I first did improv in college with a group called Recess, I really cut my teeth as an improviser at Bay Area Theatresports, now BATS Improv. I owe the roots of my improv knowledge to Theatresports and Johnstonian theory. I’ve even had the pleasure of meeting the crazy cat, Keith Johnstone himself a few times.

So even though I’ve never actually read that book, I enjoy the reference to a chronicle of the origins of the improv theory that shaped me so.

As for “chicken sandwich”, when those of us that founded Un-Scripted first started meeting to form the organization, we didn’t have a name. We didn’t want to choose a name until we had a better sense of who were as an organization, so in the meantime we used the working title of “Chicken Sandwich”.

Why?

My sister and I have long used the term “Chicken Sandwich” to refer to anything we don’t want to name directly for fear of jinxing it. Sort of a superstitious place holder of sorts. For instance: when watching a baseball game, if the pitcher is throwing a no-hitter, you would say “the pitcher is throwing a chicken sandwich”, because as soon as you say the words “no-hitter” aloud, the pitcher will invariably give up a hit. Baseball is a superstitious sport, almost as superstitious as the world of theatre.

So we called ourselves Chicken Sandwich with the understanding that the name could not, under any circumstance, become the name of the company. Where did the name Un-Scripted eventually come from?

Well that’s a story for another posting.

But if we ever write a book about the origins of Un-Scripted and “Un-Scriptonian Improv Theory”, I’d like to call it “Something Like a Chicken Sandwich.”