The morning of September 11th, 2001, I trudged into work at my uninteresting office job, tired, and only half sensing that things had seemed eerily quiet during my commute. I plopped down in front of my computer and started my day as I usually did then, checking in with an improv internet message board. I had few friends at the time, a job I hated, and a relationship, an engagement in fact, that was starting to fall apart (and would, in fact, continue to fall apart in slow motion for a couple more years). I had just started performing, and it was, if not my entire life, then a very big chunk of it.

Anyway, I logged onto the message board that morning and all the thread headlines were things like, "Plane Flies Into World Trade Center" and "Plane Crashes Into Pentagon" and I remember thinking, "Well, that doesn't seem funny at all."

And that's how I found out. I think of that as a strange, modern sort of story.

Improv takes up a much smaller chunk of my life these days, nearly ten years later, but last night I was sitting in a small black box theater, getting ready to do a late night Sunday show for... not many people at all, when Alex leaned over and handed his phone to me. I read a text from his brother that read, "Osama Bin Laden dead. Twitter going crazy. Announcement from president in 45 minutes."

And then we had to run onstage to start our set, the middle group in a three group show. No time to even tell the rest of our cast. Or to confer about whether we should announce it. "Hello! We're the Welcome to Your Thirties Boys! Osama Bin Laden is dead. To start our show we need a suggestion of anything at all!"