Here are some excerpts of our essays from our 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 seasons. If you like what you're reading, you can become a member and receive our monthly newsletter, which will include our essays in full.

From our "Taking it Personally" show:

Still Taking Criticism Poorly
By Jennie Dorris

Recently a boy and I tried to untangle ourselves from a romantic involvement, and while there are the very obvious individual emotional battles, there is one task in which you have to work together, and that is when you find all their shit around your house and present it to them.

In our situation there wasn't a bad guy and a good guy or an obvious event for us both to hold onto, there were just two people that had fucked up and we presented things -- phone chargers, t-shirts -- with the contriteness of two people that had been found out and are now in time out.

But at the end of the trade, my hands shook as I tried to find his key on my key ring, so he took it, and held my keychain up, looking to find which silver key was his. When it wasn't immediately apparent, he held his own key up, trying to match its teeth to the one on my key chain.

And the way he moved slowly and systematically through my ring of keys, seeing which one matched the profile of his own, I took it personally. Because getting to know someone is just that, giving them one tiny jagged edge at a time, until they've sort of unlocked you and come inside.

There it is, becoming the unwitting recipient of someone else's admiration, the unwilling recipient of someone else's forgiveness, and the reluctant recipient of someone else's rejection, another unlikely equation of personal events that instead of just being in a pile creates a layer between you and the world. But somehow it's these events that cling to me like a funny little filter, everything in me squeezing through them. And somehow I've also found a strange and pungent strength in being myself, but a version of myself, that people see through the layers of all the things that I've taken so personally.

Circle of Trust
By Jeanine Fritz

On my first trip to London ten years ago, a pigeon pooped on my head.

I took it personally.

I understood at the time, on an intellectual level, that the bird couldn't possibly have planned it out. His brain's the size of a chickpea. The likelihood of him waiting for his perfect moment, checking the velocity of the wind, measuring the distance between his perch and my head, calculating the exact second for release, not to mention the staggering bowel control required for that sort of task – the likelihood's pretty damn small. But that didn't matter much as I fished around in my black bag for something to wipe the hot white crap out of my hair.

At that moment I was convinced: he did it on purpose.

To be fair, it didn't help that my mother had been laughing at me right then and that I'd been looking forward to the trip as an escape from the breakup of my big seven-year relationship. I was feeling tender and nervy long before the pigeon and I crossed paths and it was just easier to blame everything on him.

Now that the old passport, as well as the crooked glasses and geeky smile in the photo have all expired, I'd like to think my skin's gotten a little tougher. The new passport photo will show demonstrably older skin, but tougher? I'm not so sure of that.

From our "Guilty Pleasures" show:

Barbie Girl
By Jennie Dorris

Johnny sat with the girls and painted his finger and toe nails magenta. He liked the polish, which somewhat matched his pink baseball cap that he wore every single day.

One afternoon we were supervising some noncompetitive softball, when we saw the ball had dropped with disregard for interest in Johnny, who was wiggling around in the corner of the softball field. There was an arc of campers giggling around him, and someone had produced a small tape recorder.

"Earshot revealed that Johnny was singing Barbie Girl, a hit electro-pop tune by a fast-fading band called Aqua. For those that don't know the lyrics of Barbie Girl, the chorus reads:

"I'm a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world. Life is plastic, it's fantastic. You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere; imagination, life is your creation."

After Johnny finished singing it the first time, he stopped. Then he moved the brim of his cap, which sat a bit to the right side, over to the left side. He proceeded to sing Barbie Girl in Spanish.

From our "So, what do you do?" show:

Shooting the Hostages
By Jeanine Fritz

When you're neurotic, however, making a decision about basically anything is pretty overwhelming. The question, "So, what do you Do?" is especially terrifying, because you're forced to weigh your options and worse, act upon them.

This is easier for some people. Keanu Reeves, for instance, does not tremble at the prospect of choice. In "Speed," the movie where Dennis Hopper runs around LA setting up hostage situations, you watch, waiting for the moment Keanu's LAPD detective character can't make a decision on his feet, can't defuse that bomb, can't jump the overpass in a bus.

But it doesn't happen, because Keanu and his wingman, Jeff Daniels, keep each other sharp.

"Alright, pop quiz. Airport. Gunman with one hostage. He's using her for cover; he's almost to a plane. You're a hundred feet away. So what do you do?"

And Keanu replies, with a shocking lack of hesitation, "Shoot the hostage."

Of course, he means to make the hostage unable to continue to the plane, thus foiling her captor's plan to take her even further from safety.

I could never make a decision like that. I would wish the woman well and head home for a sandwich before attempting to shoot her for her own good. It's a great idea, but the risk is astronomical, particularly if someone's life and future frequent flyer miles depended on my accuracy with a gun.

No, for us average folk, coming down on one side of the fence is scary.

From our "Defining Moments" show:

Born to do what?
By Jennie Dorris

The boring way we musician-types find jobs is by refreshing a few web sites that list the job openings. But most of the times it happens like this – a Denver friend of mine flew to Philadelphia to take a lesson with the nation's best player. As he got off the plane, the freelance players in Philadelphia all started buzzing that he was in town to take a lesson – it must have meant an orchestra job had opened up in Denver.

We, by the way, have no problem taking several trips across the country to prepare for the audition. One guy even traveled to Turkey to learn native tambourine techniques. When we lose, we lose big.

Now, some folks find it adorable when they sit next to a buckled-in cello on an airplane. But the next time, look around the bloated plastic case and you'll see a young musician sweating it. His head is all numbers – how much the plane tickets cost, how many people he's competing against, what the number is that he will draw.

Because when you arrive at an audition, you go to a table in front of various rooms. You sign in, and receive a number, which is the order in which you audition. You will crumple this number casually between your fingers like you've done this all before, but the sweat from your hands will cause it to become paper mache.

There will be practice rooms, and here are all your competitors. They will be doing lots of weird shit. They will jump and windmill their arms, smacking their fingers against the fluorescent lighting. They will be eating lots of bananas, and the floor will look like a slip-and-fall scene from a cartoon. Bananas supposedly have beta blockers to calm down your shaking hands.

You care about these people but you pretend not to. You worry instead about the moderator, who is the only official person who can talk to you. She calls your number and leads you into the audition room. When you have a question, you can't do anything except go over to whisper to the moderator and she will relay your question to the judges.

She has to do this because your judges – usually members of the orchestra that highly resent being there – are behind what we call a "screen," but what is actually the exact materials of a cubicle wall. This is ironic in a way you don't have time to think about.

The judges will yell, muffled through the cube wall, the audition excerpts they want you to play. They will make noises after you play that are not clapping, usually they are snorts or you can openly hear a beer can being cracked. Sometimes, to keep it easy, when they hear one wrong note they will ding a small bell that you would use to get someone's attention at a service counter. When they ding the bell, you pack up your stuff and go home.

"You Can Go Your Own Wei Wu Wei"
By Jeanine Fritz

Take the time I decided to buy a motorcycle from the weird IT guy. This is the guy who wore frighteningly thin red long-johns, a tiny child's cowboy hat and a wee pair of six-shooters scandalously close to the bottom button. To work. On Halloween. Inexplicably, and instantly, when I saw his big blue motorcycle in the parking lot for sale for a mere 500 dollars, I said to myself, "Screw it! I'm buying a MOTORCYCLE!" I looked around the parking lot, hyperventilating manically, crushing the Marlboro Light under my combat boot and defying the world to tell me that blue monster wasn't going to be my first vehicle.

I could see my life laid out before me like some sparkling desert highway…a highway where I would nod knowingly to other bikers in passing, stop for chili that would never give me runs and win the respect of all with my two-wheeled badassedness.

Why, at age 22, a motorcycle seemed like a hot idea, I may never know. But in one afternoon, I grilled Cowboy Tim about his bike, called the bank to confirm my account balance and scheduled a test drive with my brother for after work. Yes, my brother, because I still didn't have any kind of drivers' license, let alone one to ride a bike. Brian, who's two years younger, got his license at 16 but I recall being told that high school boys really "need" to drive.

My plan, "the new hotness" as I was calling it, was Brian would confirm the bike's road worthiness and then, you know, teach me how to ride it.

Brian didn't stick with that plan.