People Floating Near You

Misha Glouberman is my very good friend. Years ago, we started a lecture series together called Trampoline Hall. He was the host, and I picked the lecturers and helped them choose their topics. After several years of working on the show, I quit, but Misha kept it running.

A few years later, I really missed working with Misha, so I decided I would write a book about him. It was to be called The Moral Development of Misha. I got about sixty pages into my story of a man who wandered the city, who was nervous about his career and life, yet was a force of reason in every situation. Work on it stalled, however, when I couldn’t figure out how to develop him morally.

Worse than that, I never found the project as interesting as I found my friend. I have always enjoyed the way Misha speaks and thinks, but writing down the sorts of things he might say and think turned out not to be as pleasurable as encountering the things he actually did say and think. If I wanted to capture Misha, in all his specificity, why was I creating a fictional Misha? If I wanted to work with Misha, why not leave my room and walk down the street?

One day, I told him I thought the world should have a book of everything he knows. He agreed to ­collaborate on this project with me, but only if I promised not to quit in the middle as I always do with everything.

Here are four chapters from what ended up being a book—I didn’t quit!—called The Chairs Are Where the People Go. The book has seventy-two chapters in all, pretty much encompassing everything Misha knows and thinks about and does. The chapters that follow are about the classes he teaches in sound improv games. Other chapters are about things like monogamy, quitting smoking, and going to the gym.

We spent a spring and summer meeting at my apartment every morning, drinking coffee, working our way down through a list of topics. Misha sat across from me at my desk. As he talked, I typed.

I. The Conducting Game

Here is a music improv game that can be played by a group of ten to one hundred people.

You walk around the room and make sounds, whatever sounds you want. If and when you decide you want to be conducted, you stand still and put your hand up and point at your head.

If you see someone who wants to...