Rome and his radio production team recently played a 20-show game they dubbed “The Rex Game.’ One of his producers noticed one day that they’d had someone named Rex on three consecutive shows. An improviser, seeing such a pattern, has one response: Do more! That’s what Rome and Team did, they kept interviewing Rex’s.

For 20 consecutive shows, they interviewed someone named Rex. Imagine how much bullshit a game like this cuts through in production meetings. How it swept subjectivity, judging, opinionating, credit-claiming and ego out of the room like the Red Sox do the Yankees at Fenway. “We have a guest.” “Who?” “Rex.” “Book it.”

How easy is that? compared to, let’s say…

“We have a guest.” “Who.” “A soccer player. She’s interesting.” “How interesting?” “Real interesting.” “To you she’s interesting because she’s hot. But this is radio. Does she have a take?.”  “She has a take.” “What kind of a take?” “A good take.” “How good?” Etc. etc. etc.

Rome summed up the benefits of the Rex Game like this: “You don’t get to 20 Rexes without stretching a little bit.”

Exactly. Extension is what you want out of a game. Doing something you’ve never done before in order to get where you’ve never gone before. That’s what improvisation is all about.

Interestingly, when Rome got requests from callers and his producers for him to play another similar game, say a Derek Game, Rome riffed on it for a bit, “Derek Jeter, Derek Harper, Derek Coleman, Derek and the Dominoes…” and then quickly decided against it. This is an excellent example of a clean edit, something else Rome does exceptionally well. His transitions are clear. He never meanders.

UPDATE: Though Rome decided against the Derek Game, he and his team are playing a Kyle Game, interviewing someone named Kyle for as many days in a row as they can. Just more proof of how much game the Rome team has. As the great improviser, Craig Cackowski, says, “Don’t look for the game. Look for a game.”

The Jungle is full of game  You can always let go of one vine and grab another. Just make sure you have a take when you do, because the Jungle can be a cruel place when you don’t.

We have been analyzing the scene here since shortly after the miners were discovered alive.  One of the most instructive aspects of the ‘Los Mineros’ scene is that it has very little spin.  The cave where they were trapped was truly a no-spin zone.  Events were not manipulated or interpreted to someone’s economic or political advantage.   There were no conspiracy theories.  No, this was as unadulterated as a media narrative can be.

During their 68 days in the darkness, the miners had time to ponder their lives in ‘the normal world,’ as Joseph Campbell would call it.  Many, if not all, seem to have been enlightened by the experience, emerging with a newfound clarity about themselves and the world they are re-entering.  “I have been with God and I have been with the devil.  I seized the hand of God,” said one, Mario Sepulveda.

“I have changed.  I am a different man,” said another, Mario Gomez.

Here is a post-by-post summary of the GameChangers series about  the ‘Los Mineros’ scene:

PART ONE:  THE TRAPPED CHILEAN MINER GAME (August 26)

Lesson: Don’t be defined by your circumstances.  Be defined by how you behave in those circumstances.

PART TWO:  LEVELS OF MEANING (August 31)

Lesson: Narratives communicate on three levels of meaning:  Cosmetic, Emotional and Meta.

PART THREE:  YONNI’S WAITING PARTY (September 2)

Lesson: Rules of the game must be known to all players.

PART FOUR:  ESPERANZA! (September 17)

Lesson: Additions can heighten a scene emotionally.

PART FIVE:  SUPPORT FROM THE WINGS (September 28)

Lesson: Additions are generative.

PART SIX:  ACT THREE BEGINS (October 10)

Lesson: End energetically.

When Bird was 12 years old, she and her older brother, Cam, were playing with a group of children in a park at the foot of the remote mountain in Colorado where they lived.  A gang of men appeared out of nowhere and abducted Bird at gunpoint.  Cam escaped and made it back up the mountain.  Bird’s abduction was all over the news, but she could not be found, and after awhile, everyone assumed she never would be.

For three years, the gang held her hostage.  She was made to do menial labor and was raped repeatedly by men twice and three times her age.  The gang eventually sold her to a Canadian man who was in the fur business, and wanted her for his mistress while he was on business trips.  At the age of 16, she was pregnant with the Canadian’s child.

She named the baby Jay-Bee.

When Jay-Bee was six months old, Bird accompanied the Canadian to a business conference in Iowa, where he crossed paths with Bill and Lewis, managers of a real estate syndicate acquiring and developing raw land west of the Mississippi.  The Canadian could sense that Bill and Lewis were major players, connected at the highest levels of government and the intelligence community.  He also sensed that they were enamored of Bird, who it turns out had a gift for languages and knew a surprising lot about raw land west of the Rockies.  The more Bird contributed to the conversation, the better Bill and Lewis liked the Canadian.  So he let her talk.  And sure enough, they invited the Canadian to join their company.

The Canadian turned out to be a miserable employee, capricious, and ill-suited to the relentless pace of the real estate business.  On top of it, he was a raging alcoholic.  Worst of all, he abused Bird and the baby.  When Bill caught a glimpse of this behavior one day in the company parking lot,  he fired the Canadian on the spot.  Lewis, a lawyer, arranged for Bird to get a divorce.  After the divorce, she got her real estate license, whereupon, to her surprise, Bill and Lewis invited her to join the company.

She brought Jay-Bee to work with her every day, and he soon became the company pet.  Bill, who at that time had no children of his own, took a particular shine to the boy, and nicknamed him ‘Pompous.”  She never told anyone about her life before the Canadian.  She couldn’t.  She had no memory of it.  Somewhere, during the time she’d been held hostage by her abductors, she had perfected her ability to forget.

A number of years later, Bill and Lewis asked Bird to join them on a business trip.  They didn’t tell her where they were going.  They took the Gulfstream, landed on a private field at night, got into a waiting limo and checked into their hotel.  In the morning, when Bird looked out the window of her hotel, her heart fluttered like it had wings.  There, in front of her, like a childhood dream remembered, was the mountain where she had grown up.

Still numb, Bird went with Bill and Lewis to a meeting of local officials, and at the meeting, representing his town council, was her brother, Cam.

It took them a second to recognize each other, but the instant they did, she flew across the room to him and they  hugged and cried.  The meeting wasn’t much of a meeting after that.  It was, instead, a celebration that didn’t end for two days, a big dance around a brother and sister and members of their clan who couldn’t stop crying and smiling at the same time.  Bird’s memories of her happy childhood came back to her during those two days.  She remembered that when she was a child, her very favorite thing was to look at a flower, a bird, anything beautiful, and ask of it, “Who made you?”, and that this is what she had been doing when she wandered off from the other children on the day she got abducted from the park.

Bill and Lewis made a killing on their real estate deals, of course, and Bird played an important role in their success.  Lewis went on to become governor of Louisiana and Bill and his wife, Julia, moved to Washington, where he held a number of high-ranking positions in government.  My suspicion is that Bird and Bill were in love.  We will never know for sure.  What we know is this:

We know that Bird gave away whatever money she’d made to charities that supported the poor rural community on the mountain where she had grown up.

We know that on the ten-year anniversary of its founding, Bill invited everyone who’d ever worked for their real estate company  to join him in Washington, D.C. for a big party.

We know that Lewis, driving alone from Louisiana to D.C. for the anniversary party, stopped at a motel in Tennessee, put a gun to his head and killed himself.

We know that Bird, who was living in Iowa at the time, brought Jay-Bee, who was twelve years old, with her to D.C. for the anniversary party.

We know that during this bittersweet trip, Bird visited Bill and Julia at their large home on the Potomac and ask them to let Jay-Bee live with them and their son, Lewis (named after Bill’s partner) and take care of his education.  We know that Bill and his wife raised Jay-Bee as their own son, and that Jay-Bee himself became a prominent player in Washington, advocating for his mother’s causes.

We do not know for sure what happened to Bird.  Some stories say she died of a broken heart soon after returning from D.C..  Some say she died an old alcoholic, alone, broke, and on the streets.  Some say she lived to an old age, doing social work for her community until the end of her days.

We know that today she is commemorated on a gold American one-dollar coin and that her given name was Sacagawea.

And we know that whoever made the flowers and the birds and anything in beautiful in nature, made her, too.

This morning, my friend David LaPlante (if you want to read something beautiful, see his most recent blog entry) sent me a link to a CNN story and headline:

Here’s my response:

Candidates and media use the word erroneously, as CNN does in this story, when they refer to an EVENT as a gamechanger. A gamechanger is PERSON with the ability to change the game. Like you : ) A gamechanger can also be a brand, as in the focused, networked behaviors of a group of people who share business objectives.

The media have the luxury of predicting the future, reporting after the fact, and pontificating about the meaning of it all. Most of us have to face facts in the present. We don’t deal with things as they were, or as predicted, but as they are, as events unfold and new information comes our way. This is why gamechangers are good improvisers. They make every moment count for something. They don’t focus on outcomes but on process and trust that the outcomes, whatever they are, will be positive, and that their group’s agreed-to objectives will be achieved.

GameChangers change events. If a person does not have the improvisational skill to change an event, the event is sure to change them, and they will have no say in the matter. GameChangers play the game, and don’t let the game play them.

In terms of improvisation, Obama kicked ass last night. He was in tune with the scene and the audience. He listened. Agreed with his scene partner. Matched energy. Heightened. Called back lines. He moved more confidently than McCain. His timing and editing were far superior to McCain’s, who not once but twice walked in front of a live camera like a rookie P.A. on the Amarillo local news. McCain went for jokes, which is a big no-no in improvisation

If CNN had been looking through the lens of improvisation, they would’ve seen their gamechanger in last night’s debate. It was Obama.