Tweets become comedy (and charity) gold at the Playground

Earlier this month, I was part of my first improv show.

It's important to note that I am not a comedian. By any stretch of the word.
I'm just a Twitter addict who loves to laugh.

When I heard that Mustang Repair, an improv group that performs at Boystown's Playground Theatre, does an occasional show that's structured around one lucky Chicagoan's tweets, I nearly fell over.

This is a narcissist's dream.

When I asked begged them to consider using me as their subject, they got back to me almost immediately to set my date: 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 4. There would be three acts that night, each doing a 30-minute set, with Mustang Repair closing down the show.

Feb. 4 arrived, and after a pre-show drink with Mike Dwyer, one of Mustang Repair's members, we headed to the theatre and settled in.

The Playground is BYOB, but these groups didn't need booze's help getting the audience laughing. I'd never been to an improv show before, but my comedian now-ex assured me that these folks were the real deal.

Here's an example of what they did.

My tweet: "I'd really like a border collie."

Their interpretation: Two gay men looking to score some hot Tijuana…sun? encounter a border guard and have a conversation. Part Monty Python and the Holy Grail, part Girls Gone Wild, part something else.

The highlight for me: I tweet a lot about my cat. No, like a lot. And in the very first scene, one of the group's members created a spot-on cat character that walked to center stage, put on the most petulant pout and said, "Kitty is bored."

She was brilliant, came back throughout the show to bring things full circle.

To sweeten the deal for me further, the Playground Theatre actually offered to donate $3 of every $10 ticket sold to the 200-mile Ride for AIDS I'm doing this summer. (They're a nonprofit theatre, by the way, making their donation even more amazing.)

The show wasn't about me, exactly — my tweets were just the jumping-off point for their madcap brand of improv — but any hilarity they created was 50 times more so to me because of my 140-character relation to it.

Interested in getting in on the potentially mortifying action? All you need is a Twitter account. Send a tweet to @the_playground and let them know, "I wanna be part of #theTweetLife!"

Oh, and if the Playground's generosity has inspired you, maybe you'd like to throw a few dollars my way for the ride? My donation page is right here.