I took a jet-lagged nap the first day I got back home from my trip to Europe, and I dreamed about being a magic dragon in a car outside the school for bears.

A two-person scene is hard enough in improvisation.

Add more people to the equation, and it gets more difficult to manage. When the lights come up on four or more people, I remember the advice that Mick Napier taught me back training at The Annoyance: think more of the same. Rather than finding points of differentiation, aim to bring your disparate characters in alignment over the context of the situation and how you all feel about it. While an eight-person monoscene with eight disparate points of view can be done, it isn’t easy to improvise!

However, I want to take a closer look at and unpack the dynamics and methods for three people improvising together in a scene. In general, three bodies in play tend to align in common relationships, and there are both pitfalls and strategies we can employ to heighten each dynamic.

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Unless I am trapped in some god forsaken town without a gay bar, I’m done with online dating/hook-up apps. I hereby swear them off for good.

I’m done with Grindr and Okcupid and Squirt and Scruff and Tinder and Thrinder and JDate and Feeld and Bro and Match.com, and I would be done with eHarmony too if they didn’t think my sexual orientation was a choice.

I am done with profiles designed to show curated trappings of us at our self-selected best. People are messy, and I’m more attracted to the bumps on the seismographic of someone’s personality than the smooth first impressions they try to make.

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There is a person I may be in love with. I met him a month ago, and we’re as close to a real-life version of fairytale soul mates as I’ve experienced. I knew it from the first time we hung out and got into a long discussion about Jodorowsky’s Dune. Now we’re friends for life, after just a couple months of knowing each other.

When you meet a new person and invest yourself in him or her this much, you create a mirror. You can see yourself anew through this person’s eyes — from the first impression you make to the soul you bare as you let down your guard. You reveal the dirtier parts of yourself in the reflection— the cold sores, the longstanding fears, the hangups, the hopes you’re afraid to admit, and specifically for me: the bitterness I carry.

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My name is Philip.

I believe in the maxim: never date someone with your same name. It must be cursed from the outset. I’m not referring to cursed as in your future family-in-law confusing who’s who when asking for “Philip” to pass the green beans at Thanksgiving. No, it must be a law of nature that two humans of the same name shall never intertwine, lest catastrophe befall both.

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What makes people laugh? I believe it can be boiled down to an equation:

Surprise + Believability = Laughter.

The most obvious answer is Surprise. “I didn’t see that coming! Who ever thought he’d do that? Woah! Can you believe that’s how it went down?!” We laugh when we are caught off-guard, our anticipations subverted or paid off in an unexpected way.

I flew to Tel Aviv and Berlin last month. I taught improv in these cites to pay for the trip, but the experience was all about dancing. I danced harder than ever in my life in these magical cities. And I had great sex with the most beautiful people.

Sex and dancing is what this story is about.

Oh, do not worry!” Sofia, the owner of the hotel said, as my friend Aaron and I stepped into her elevator without a door. I reached out and skimmed the interior facade of the building with my hands as we rode upwards. Aaron joked out loud that this elevator would never fly for American hotel safety standards. “Never!” Sofia agreed, throwing us a devilish smile.

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It was the morning of an improv gig I had booked in Oberlin, Ohio with my show Happy Karaoke Fun Time. I did what I do when I’m traveling, which is to log into Grindr as soon as we arrived. A man named Ben messaged me. Ben was a stocky, muscular guy whose photo looked the part of a corn-fed farmer bro from the great Midwest (I found out later he was a graphic designer living with his mom). We started chatting, and he was interested in meeting up for a hook-up on my one night in town. We traded pics; I liked what I saw, though he only sent one out-of-focus face pic of himself in a foggy bathroom mirror. I could have pressed for more photos, but I wasn’t being too picky. I was on the road, and I was horny.

He asked why I was in town. I mentioned my improv gig, to which he responded, “Oh, well, I’m hilarious in my downtime.” This seemed a very unfunny statement to me, but I wrote back, “Nice.”

He replied, “Ha yep. We will jive pretty good then.”

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It was a bright, cold morning in March, 2011 in Chicago. I had just had the best improv audition of my life at The Second City. I skipped, high on life, back to my 1992 BMW 525i car in the perfect parking spot I’d found right outside the theater. I started the engine, and the radiator exploded in a cloud of fumes and acrid smoke. It ballooned outward from the front of the car. A jogger ran right into the cloud. She coughed and stumbled to the driver side window. She started screaming at me for poisoning her lungs. She threatened to sue me. I shouted back, “It’s my car, not me!” She flipped me the middle finger and jogged away.

The car was totally dead. And, as it seems to happen in my life, I’d gone from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows in a split second.