The rats went to Iowa!
A road trip to the land of corn.
A few months ago the Ghost Rats Instagram account got a DM from someone who was allegedly an events director at the University of Iowa asking if we vermin were interested in a paid gig doing improv for three hours in front of incoming freshmen during welcome week. Of course the answer was yes, and after a zoom call with said events director proved that he was real and worked at U of I, the answer was double yes.
The deal was that we would do three shows consisting of 45 minutes of improv, and in exchange for our performances we would get some money and hotel rooms for the night. The trade-off was that we had to transport ourselves 200-some miles from Chicago to Iowa City, but who doesn’t love a good road trip?
So after a month of talking and preparing, August 19th arrived and we hit the road. I love road trips because I don’t have a car and basically don’t have a license either so I’m always a passenger—and I love being a passenger. As a passenger in a car on a long drive (if you don’t want people to hate you for being a mooch) you should take the responsibility of being a navigator and doing that job well. For this trip specifically, this was also very easy for me because I spent four years of my life going from the Chicago suburbs to Augustana College and back every few months, and the Quad Cities are basically just like Iowa City.
It would be nice to say that the drive from Chicago out west is interesting and/or beautiful, but it is just corn and soy. The moment you leave the suburbs, there’s nothing but farmland and the occasional little house down the way. If your car breaks down or you need to pee after the Dixon exit, you’re basically fucked for a hundred miles. We don’t even get any fun religious billboards telling us that we’re all doomed to go to hell like Indiana gets. It’s just farm.
To pass the time, the people in my car started playing mad libs and they were pretty bad. Doing a mad lib for the first time in probably twenty years I think that the type of humor of a mad lib is not designed to be funny past the age of eight. It is not good that even though I have grown so much I am still laughing at peepee, poopoo, and penis. I am not aging well. In one of our mad libs, we discovered that Thomas Jefferson actually said, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of sunglasses.” It’s great to learn the truth about history. The other car was doing that New York Times “questions to fall in love with someone” or whatever. Learning deep, intimate facts about your improv teammates? Sounds boring to me, bring on more poop jokes!
Once we did hit the Quad Cities, we stopped in East Moline at a taco place to meet up with Car #2 and get lunch. The Quad Cities, you would think by its name, is an area of four cities. This is incorrect. The Quad Cities is an area comprised of five cities: Davenport and Bettendorf on the Iowa side and Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline on the Illinois side. I have never been to East Moline until this day, and I can say that the QC can do without it. I am forever an East Moline hater.
There are a lot of restaurants I love in the Quad Cities, and this taco place was not one of those. To be fair, this place probably did not exist eight years ago when I lived there (that’s so long ago, ugh), but we were limited to places that had vegan options and unfortunately La Ranch (the blessed restaurant of better years) does not fit that criteria. The thing about QC food is that it is unhealthy, delicious, and very cheap. This is the one payoff of living in a dying town where the college kids don’t even go to the college kid bars anymore—you can get a very good meal for less than $10 and a Long Island iced tea is $5. I am saying this as someone who has not been in the area since 2018. The establishment that we were at was serving three tacos for $13 a plate with no rice and beans on the side and we had to order chips and salsa separately. This does not feel like a Quad Cities establishment, but it did feel like home (I live in Wrigleyville and all the dive bars keep going out of business and being replaced with restaurants like this, but worse). This is my boomer moment.
I would have loved to give my friends a tour of this shitty town that means so much to me, but there was no time to visit the Augustana campus, or go to Rozz-Tox, or walk by the riverfront and point out that Centennial Bridge, while beautiful, is one of the structurally worst bridges in all of America. But that would be for another time. Today we had one job and one job only: get to Iowa City before 3:00.
The second leg of the drive was fairly uneventful. My controversial take is that Iowa is actually a lot more beautiful than most of Illinois and that is actually just objectively true. Iowa is a lot less flat and there’s trees and hills among all the farms. Tom tried playing 20 questions with Car #2 via text and it went about as good as you can expect. Turns out the three of us in Car #1 are very bad at answering questions. Turns out corn is not a vegetable and is instead a “fruit” and it turns out that Rihanna, who has not put out an album in like seven years, should be classified as someone who is “currently making popular music.”
We arrive in Iowa City and before we check into our hotel there is one more thing on the agenda: posing for a picture at a Kum & Go. This was just for me, nobody else was excited about it. We kame and went and everyone asked why we took the time to do this.
The hotel we were booked to stay at is the Graduate Iowa City. I know nothing about Graduate hotels but they are apparently very nice. The lobby had so many bookshelves, which made me think like I was a smart academic and not about to do three hours of comedy where teenagers gave suggestions like “airport bathroom” and “gynecologist.” The wallpaper on our floor had a corn/barn/pig/cow motif. The walls said, “You think Iowa is just farm and corn? Well you’re fucking right! Here’s a lamp that’s shaped like a barn, you ignorant sack of shit.” Some other decor of all the hotel rooms included a wall hanging of different wrestling positions two friendly men can engage each other in, a painting of the Field of Dreams White Sox players emerging out of corn, and a portrait of a blonde woman who apparently worked for Oprah and is the most famous person to come out of Iowa. Tom and Troy’s room also had a CORN TROPHY and I am so upset that my room did not include a gold plastic corn. God, I know what you’ve done for others.
We were settled in for like twenty minutes until we had to book it to Hancher Auditorium for the job that we were getting paid to do. Dressed in our finest business casual in the 85 degree, 85 percent humidity air (we had decided to be goddamn professionals and dress better than these college freshmen), we entered the building and got a tour of where we were about to perform.
Hancher Auditorium is gigantic and also quite beautiful. Centennial Hall at Augustana could never. (The acoustics in that auditorium are so bad but we learn how to play around it so then the administration would be like, “We don’t think you need a new auditorium,” but we’ve always needed a new auditorium. Anyways, I am not a student anymore and also am not in band so why am I getting so heated?) We were not expected to play out to the whole auditorium of hundreds of people, it was more like the stage was also the audience and they had a little stage for us on the stage, making it more of a black box situation, and also a relief. My voice just does not get that loud, which is horrible being a stage performer. During the show they dimmed the house lights to give us a little twinkly background. This was the nicest venue we’ve performed in (so far).
The first show started at 6:15pm and there were maybe four or five people in the audience, which was fine. We are professionals and we were going to do a great show for nobody if we had to. It was like that one time we went to a BYOT and were the only team there besides the hosts. Sometimes, the best performances are the ones that very few people see—and tonight was one of those nights. Since the show is structured for students to walk in and out from the silent disco next door, we decided against doing our typical long form and opted for short-form games instead. When the 7:15 show rolled around, the audience was pretty big. Some stragglers from the last show stayed to see what we were about and some people wanted a part two. The games were the same but that’s the beauty of improv: it’s never the same thing twice. As the 8:15 show started, the audience was once again fairly small. Students of that age are either tired of meeting new people and want to go to bed, or are trying to get a head start on some underage binge drinking and I respect that.
Overall, the audience was great. Some of the incoming freshmen knew what improv was and those people are nerds who are most likely going to do improv themselves later on. I never did improv because I was scared and did not believe in myself, but I did sketch which is a gateway drug into improv. Other students had their minds blown. Our one job (besides being funny) from the guy who hired us was to try to minimize being sexual on stage. Between the students giving us extremely horny suggestions and the Ghost Rats’ natural disposition towards scenes about incest and polyamory, this was harder than we thought it would be.When I was an incoming college freshman I doubt I would have given the suggestion of “grandma’s vibrator” to a group of millennials in business casual, but one girl did just that! But once again, we are professionals.
Then it was time to wrap up and go back to the hotel, and then go out for a few drinks before hitting the hay at midnight so we don’t all turn into pumpkins. I remember when I was in college the bars were empty until midnight and then all of us hopped on a bus and went to dance for three hours until we had to head home. What happened to me? I am aging horribly. Downtown Iowa City was conveniently right next to our hotel and was also a lot crazier than Rock Island’s District could ever hope to be. We tried to find a bar that did not have a lot of 21 year-olds packed in like sardines dancing on each other because we are aged goblins. So we found an Irish pub, where a round of six double shots of whiskey cost less than $30. Maybe city life is overrated and living in the middle of the Midwest is the smart thing to do. A house out here costs $10 probably.
As someone who graduated college, I am jealous of the standard “going out” uniform of today’s young people. All the guys look like European soccer players and some of them have mustaches, which I will not comment on but maybe some 28 year olds should take a look and get inspired. All the girls are wearing high-waisted light-wash jeans and a cute satiny tank top that maybe Hilary Duff once wore fifteen years ago. That’s a cute outfit! Back in my day everyone was cosplaying Han Solo with those puffy vests and Katniss with those green jackets everyone had. Because I’m built different (annoying), I didn’t really participate in the uniform and just kind of look the way I still do: not wearing pants and wearing a large flannel (or Hawaiian shirt if it’s hot out) over my non-pants. I think this looked fine but I remember so clearly I had a friend who threatened to un-invite me from her birthday party if I “didn’t have a cute outfit” (translation: didn’t have a form-fitting leather jacket like the rest of the crew did). I also remember that night I was delegated to Mom Duty and had to take said friend home almost immediately and nobody asked ME if I got home okay. I’m not bitter! College was very fun and the best time of my life I swear!
After a few drinks and spending $5 to play out Fall Out Boy songs on the TouchTunes, we went home, played some Smash Bros, and went to bed to prepare for an 8:00am departure. Too early for me, but some people had jobs to do in the Big City and we are a team and a family and nobody gets left behind. The drive back to Chicago was fairly uneventful, as the weekend adventure was coming to a close, but we still had a good time chatting away. We saw more corn. I took a nap as soon as I got home.
Sometimes, it’s a good idea to check those hidden Instagram message requests.