I'd like to thank the academy ...

Even though I once worked at an improv theater and was in a show pretty regularly, I'm fairly inexperienced at performance. I haven't done any other kind of theater. I've never sung professionally. I always get stage right and stage left mixed up. But I've had moments that make me see why people do it, what makes it so addicting, and why they'd give such long Oscar speeches.

When I worked at the museum, I was giving a tour of the historic house once. It was a large group of retirees, about 15-20 people. They took these kinds of trips all the time. They had booked the tour well in advance. Because it wasn't one of our regularly scheduled tours, the assistant director of education (me) gave it. I was used to giving tours of the house and enjoyed it immensely. I always tried to bring the place to life and place the visitors in the time and place for which the house was meant. Halfway through the tour, my boss quietly joined and listened in on the tour, hanging onto the end of the group. When it was finished, the group applauded me. That was the only time that I'd gotten applause for that tour. As we left the house, they each one shook my hand and told me how much they enjoyed it, which meant a lot because they'd visited a lot of places. Later, my supervisor mentioned that she'd never gotten applause on a tour. I felt proud.

When I was in grad school, I was a TA for a semester and one of my professors (my favorite professor) let me lead a lecture for her art history class. I did the research and pulled the slides. My lecture was on modern art. I'll be honest, art history classes can be snooze fests. Imagine that you're sitting in the dark in an overly warm auditorium listening to someone talk about stuff that's at least 100 years old, and rather esoteric stuff at that. I gave a great lecture. And the class applauded. My professor listened to the whole thing in the back. Afterwards, when I was getting my slides, she mentioned that she'd never gotten applause for any of her lectures. Well, you can imagine how that made me feel.

I remember one particular show when I was performing improv regularly. I was doing my favorite character, Tikka Masala, in Good Bad Worst Advice. I was bad advice. On the final question, I made one of the other performers laugh so hard that he had to turn away. The audience was with me, laughing so hard. We had yet to give the worst advice. And when he did, he set me up for the perfect call back to an earlier joke. It was the high laugh and the perfect way to end the game. I'll never forget how great that felt.

Today at work, I performed in our pep rally this morning. Another manager and I put together a Broadway song with revised words. We had a little choreography. We had a pretty good harmony. When we rehearsed, we didn't sound bad. The performance went great. When we got to that final note and held it, they gave us a standing ovation. They cheered and hollered for us. It felt every bit as great as all those other moments. We alone of all the managers got a standing ovation.

In every unforgettable instance, I earned the applause of my audience and the envy of my peers. One without the other would not have been nearly so sweet or memorable.

You wish you were me.