A note before you start. This one comes with a song called None of It Was Mine. If you’d rather listen first, the link is at the end. Two hours into the lesson, I’m standing next to my wife in a room that used to be a dry cleaner’s, except none of it is real. There’s no dry cleaner. There are no photographs on the wall behind us, no five generations of somebody else’s family, no great-great-great-grandfather who started the business. Phyllis Katz put us there with eleven words. A married couple. He’s getting the business in the divorce. Go. The Family That Never Existed Kymberlee started naming them. Her mother. An aunt who sewed buttons. A great-great-great-grandfather who was, she decided on the spot, the queen’s tailor. Each name landed as it had always been there. I stood in the middle of a family that had existed for maybe four seconds, feeling something I did not expect to feel at seventy-three, in a room I’d paid to be humbled in on my birthday. I felt small, and not because Kymberlee was funnier than me in that moment, though she was. The more names she gave to that lineage, the more real it got, and the more real it got, the more I understood that my character had married into something enormous and had brought nothing to it. No trade, no history, just a man who’d noticed she was staying in a business she didn’t want, staying because leaving felt like disappointing relatives who were already gone. I told her that in the scene. I told her the thing she actually wanted was the music, the guitar she wouldn’t put down, and that I’d left, eventually, because she never did. The Actual Assignment Is Silence The gift itself was simple. My birthday landed this week, and Kymberlee arranged two hours alone with Phyllis Katz, a founding member and former director of the Groundlings, one of the people who helped build the school itself, decades in television, film, and stage, still teaching, still sharp enough to stop you mid-sentence. Two of the six people in our improv group were there too, Harnoor Lai and Louis John. Our regular coach is Navaris Dawson, Thursday nights over Zoom, here in Santa Barbara. Phyllis subs when he can’t make it, which means a founding member of the Groundlings is our backup, a fact that’s been ironic on a dozen different levels since the first night we found out. Mostly, what Phyllis gave us that day was silence. Not the kind that happens because nobody has anything to say. The kind you build on purpose and then refuse to fill. Two people up at a time, a relationship, a moment that matters, and one instruction underneath everything else. Find the awkward silences. Do not talk your way past them. I am not good at that. I’ve spent a career, four decades of it, making rooms comfortable, filling the gap before anyone else has to feel it. Phyllis was asking me to do the opposite on purpose, in front of people, for no reason except that the silence was where the scene actually lived. Every instinct I have said, keep talking. She kept saying Stay. Productive Struggle, Mid-Scene So there I was, an invented husband standing in an invented business that belonged to an invented family that was not mine. The actual struggle of the whole two hours had nothing to do with remembering a game or hitting a mark. It was standing still. Letting the moment sit there, ugly and unresolved, instead of rescuing it with a joke or a line or anything at all. I have a word for what that felt like now, one I picked up a few weeks back from a teacher talking about how children learn: productive struggle. I was in it, mid-scene, wanting badly to fill a hole Phyllis needed me to leave open, not knowing yet whether I could. I pushed forward instead of talking. I let the pause sit past the point where every part of me wanted to say something, anything, to make the discomfort stop. Kymberlee let it sit too. And in that stretch of nothing, standing surrounded by five generations of people who had never existed until she named them, something actually happened between us that no line of dialogue would have gotten to faster. None of what happened in that room was real. The two of us, standing in it, were completely real. That’s the difference between listening and waiting for your turn to talk. Later, working with Harnoor, Phyllis said something I wrote down without meaning to. His character already had the answer, she told him. He just had to stop getting in its way. Once you actually know who you’re playing, the character thinks of it. You don’t have to. It gets fast enough that it starts moving on its own, and that speed isn’t a trick. It’s just enough time inside the thing that your own thinking finally gets out of the way and lets the truth through. I recognized what she was describing. It’s the same reason I could stay inside a silence by the fourth scene without bailing the way I’d wanted to on the first. Fluid and authentic turned out to be the same word, arriving late, after enough of it that I stopped deciding what to say and started actually being there. None of It Was Real, All of It Was Real Here’s the part I keep turning over since. None of what happened in that room was real. The photographs weren’t real. The dry cleaning business wasn’t real. The great-great-great-grandfather was invented on the spot by a woman who had never met him, because he doesn’t exist. We built the whole thing out of nothing but the words we chose to say to each other. But the two of us, standing in it, were completely real. What passed between us in that silence, the discomfort, the decision not to fill it, the actual attention we were paying each other instead of waiting for our turn to talk, that part wasn’t pretend. That part is the same skill whether the room is invented or not. It’s the difference between listening to someone and waiting for the gap where you get to speak next. Most conversations I’ve had in my life, the good ones and the forgettable ones both, come down to which one of those two things I was actually doing. I’ve run companies. I’ve produced over a hundred TEDx talks from the wings of a stage in Santa Barbara. I’ve built systems meant to help other people say what they mean. None of that taught me to sit in a silence I’d built with someone else and let it stay uncomfortable until it turned into something true. Phyllis Katz taught me that, at seventy-three, standing in a fake dry cleaner’s, surrounded by a family that was never mine, on the one night of the year built entirely around the fact that I was born. The Pause I’m Supposed to Keep Kymberlee teaches her speaking clients something she calls the Power of the Pause, a breath, a beat, room enough for what was just said to land. What Phyllis had us do was the same thing stretched longer and left raw, uncomfortable on purpose, never rescued. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with it away from the stage. I know the silence is still there, the next time someone I love is talking and I’m already deciding what I’ll say back. Listen to None of It Was Mine on Suno: https://suno.com/s/seXowXziIKjJryR2 Get full access to Through Another Lens at marksylvester.substack.com/subscribe
