What is Creative Apartment Living?

Creative Apartment Living is all about finding the joy and fun out of the things strewn about your apartment or house. It’s about putting games and adventures together in ways that they can all be done inside on a rainy day. It’s about entertaining yourself in new and different ways without having to spend any money… well… usually. Oh yeah, and most importantly, it requires moving the furniture.

Creative Apartment Living has it’s roots back in 1992, when Jerry and I were living in the same King’s Bridge apartment complex in Roswell, GA. I had a ridiculously large rectangular bedroom, the result of an apartment fire some years before where two bedrooms had been combined into one during the rebuild. With a $2 set of foam Nerf baseballs and bats found at Wal Mart, Nerf Baseball was born. Friends came from everywhere to play. The pitchers mound was the mattress on the floor. The batter’s box was by the closet. And that ball, man you could curve that thing six feet sideways through the air.

Next came the Nerf tennis court set up over in Jerry’s apartment, who instead of the extra large bedroom, had the extra large living room. When we weren’t playing tennis, we were usually playing music, and duct taping all sort of kitchen accessories to Michael Angelo to turn him into the walking set of drums. Eventually we moved to Trowbridge Apartments in Sandy Springs, which didn’t have room for Nerf baseball anymore, so we moved the game over to Mike Vergili’s garage. We had several almost every day players, and we even started keeping pitching and hitting stats in a notebook.

Back at the new apartment, Creative Apartment Living really began to take shape. Jerry and I started writing long, weird, funny, and complex answering machine messages, usually a new one at least every week, and sometimes every few days. The recording process began to get so elaborate that it would often take 30+ takes, with 12 different things used for sound effects and several boom boxes with tapes of music and other noises surrounding the answering machine microphone. This was really during the pre-computer era, at least we didn’t have one, so there was no digital recording and editing. Everything had to be done live to a tape.

New games emerged. The bounce the ball off the kitchen floor and try to get it as close to the ceiling without hitting it game. At one point we had an entire 18 hole putt-putt course mapped out throughout the three bedroom apartment. Bands started rehearsing and playing in the dining room, much to the chagrin of the 70 year old neighbors upstairs.

Then, one day, we had the idea which put us on the path towards doing the two Creative Apartment Living shows. It was coming up on Christmas time, and we were broke, of course, so we decided to write and record a Christmas song for all our friends. So we wrote out a list of friends who frequented the apartment, as well as our girlfriends at the time, and set to writing the Happy Xmas Song, complete with lines about everyone on the list. We gave them out as presents, everyone was pretty happy to have their names said in a song, and it was just simply a whole lot of fun to put together. That would have been the Christmas of 1994, if I’m doing my math right.

So for the next Christmas, 1995, we naturally felt like we needed to one up ourselves. So one day, sitting out on the back screened-in porch, I said that we should write a show together, and put it on inside the apartment as a Christmas present for all our friends. In order to make sure we didn’t get lazy about it, we agreed to stop drinking for the duration of the writing process, hoping this would give us the added push to deliver a script. Well, about two weeks later, we were both drinking again, but the first show, Creative Apartment Living – Tickling Life Upon the Groin was well under way.

We had no idea how much time would be involved with writing, directing, producing, and starring in your own Christmas present. And as it turns out, doing a show over the holidays is not the best idea, because it leaves little time and money for actual Christmas shopping for family members, but somehow or another we got it all pulled together. We even hung lights from the ceiling, and built a light board out of pizza box. (I was really hoping it wouldn’t catch on fire) We recruited many friends to help, and come show day, we had about 30 people packed into the living and dining rooms on every chair and couch we could fit into the space for the “Non-Smoking” show. (Parent’s and older friends) The next day we had standing room only attendance for the “Smoking” show, which also doubled as my going away party, as I was moving to Colorado in a few weeks.

Overall, the first show was a success, but after watching the video tapes, we both knew we could better, and saw many ways to improve upon our first effort. I ended up moving back from Colorado in October of 1996, and Jerry and I almost immediately began working on the next version of the show, Creative Apartment Living – Rent’s Late Again. We decided this time to torture ourselves once more with the holiday theme, and we delved into writing a New Years Eve show, again to be performed for all our friends and family in the apartment.

Having learned from our previous efforts, we worked out an almost two hour sketch show, with 13 total pieces, two songs, one tear jerking piece, one thought provoking monologue, one prop wallet from hell, and of course some good old fashioned mime action. We re-wrote and reprised only one piece from the previous year, the Audition, and broke it into two parts because it had gotten quite long, and the rest of the show was all new material. The first show was performed on 12-30-1996 as our “Non-Smoking” show for parents and family. The second showing was part of our New Years Eve party on 12-31-1996. Both shows played to full houses of 35+ people.

Disk 1 of this DVD set contains the taping from the first night of the show. I remember I had the flu, and was worried I wouldn’t be able to sing or remember any of my lines, but as it turns out, it was actually the better of the two shows. Disk 2 contains after show footage of about 30 minutes of the beginning of the New Years Eve party while we left the camera rolling in the corner of the room. I think it’s fun to see how everyone looked way back then. So young.

So 13 years later, I present to you all the Creative Apartment Living – Rent’s Late Again DVD. A project I started about a year ago when I realized that the video tapes will disintegrate over time, and I could lose the entire thing to one bad VCR tape head. That’s right folks, we’ve gone digital, and are now on YouTube and everything. I hope you enjoy the show again… or if it’s your first time, I hope you can get some sense of what Creative Apartment Living was all about… and maybe even be inspired to do something wacky wherever you’re living right now.

Shawn Millar - 07/22/2009