Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode.

Begin the song exactly where you are.

A small piece of personal trivia, which will come as perhaps no surprise to my more regular listeners, is that I did a lot of theater in high school.

I loved the community it provided, the rush of creating something

that made people laugh and cry and be entertained for hours on end, and the pure pleasure

of inhabiting stories that captured my own imagination and the imagination of an audience,

and bringing those to life. But one of the things I loved most about theater

were the fun games we would play to get into the habit of acting with and against each other.

And one of those games was something called Freeze.

Now, Freeze is what you call an improv game, the premise was fairly simple you would begin two

actors would begin a scene they would improv the scene together it was unfolding what happened and then at

some point during the other times somebody else in the audience would yell freeze and both the

actors have to freeze in position the person who yelled freeze would go and tap one of the actors on stage's position, and they'd

adopt it, and they'd begin a brand new scene in which the other partner had to go with

whatever story they told, whatever character they were given.

And I loved this, first of all, because it often ended in laughter and usually had a

comedic bent, which is why games like this are often used in improv comedy. But also there's this

thrill of making a story up with someone in live time, on stage, and seeing other people react to it.

But in improv and in this particular game, there is a fundamental rule that everyone has to follow

if it's going to work. And this is commonly known as the yes and principle, which is that

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