I’ve been wondering why BOTOC* is so important to me (while being so loathsome – initially – to you). Maybe it shouldn’t be so important to me. Maybe I should heed your not-so-passive lack of interest in it and give up on it already.

But I can’t. Because I have finally realized why it is so important.

I teach and coach y’all about 350 days per year. Day in day out, seven days a week. Mornings, afternoons and well into the early hours of the next morning. And EVERY time I see you guys, and I think your acting could be improved upon, or I see a gap between where you ARE and where I think you need to BE in order to get a JOB, or you’re missing stuff on the page, or your acting is pushed, or your text analysis is off, or your hair is weird, or your voice is too high, or you’re moving like a kangaroo, or I am worried about some choice you’ve made, I have to bitch at you.

I have to come up with the fix, the answer, the suggestion that will work. And that’s hard. ‘Cuz it’s not so fun between us when I have to do that. You’re upset with me that I’m coming down on you. I’m upset with you ‘cuz I feel like you’re not listening to me. We’re alllll upset. 350 or so days a year, folks.

But lo and behold, after watching the BOTOC 2016: Science Fiction and/or Fantasy shows I was NOT upset! Nope. I was actually deeeeeeply filled with joy! It was the best!

But why was I was so happy?

I finally realized that I was happy because it was so freakin’ wonderful to get to just watch you act and not have to yell at you about anything. It was sooooooo blissful to just get to see you make something and have a great time and be great at it, and to just get to love the fuck out of you and watch you perfooooooooooooooorm. Unfettered. Free.

Most of the time, no matter how much I love you, I suspect you don’t feeeeeeeel loved. Most of the time I think you feel a lot of pressure to improve. (Don’t worry. I feel pressure too. To make you better.) But during BOTOC, during that one week at the end of the year, that pressure is gone. For all of us.

I need nights like that. If we’re going to spend all year together, if we’re going to torture each other day in day out all year, I need one night when I don’t have to yell at you; when you just get to put on a show, and I just get to fucking love and enjoy and revel in you and it. It’s so cool to get to see all of you do your thing for no reason at all except for our enjoyment. It’s so great for there to be no audition, or director, or agent, or manager, or casting director attached to the end of it. Most of the time, what we do here feels like it is attached to some hugely important outcome. It’s so nice to just do it for us. For fun. For the love of it all.

Shouldn’t we all get one night out of the year to just have a great time doing what we love to do?

Yup.

As my beloved, brilliant and adored acting teacher Barbara June Greener Patterson always said, shouldn’t acting simply be “a gift of love?”

Yup. It should.

Kahngratulations to everyone who participated in 2016 BOTOC: Science Fiction/Fantasy!

If you would like to see the complete listing of the awards general comments, click here.

For the No Kahntest awards, click here.

For the complete listing of award nominations, click here.

For the final award announcements, click here.

*For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, a BOTOC is a Battle Of The Ongoing Classes. Get it? BOTOC. It has nothing to do with that Botox crap you shoot into your forehead. A BOTOC is a Kahntest — or dare I say Kahnpetition – between the Ongoing Classes. The theme for BOTOC 2016 was Science Fiction or Fantasy, so everyone got to create, write, produce, and perform a show in one of these two genres. We do this every year – at my insistence.

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