A good-looking young man strolls down a city street. He spots a sporty red hat in a shop window, buys it and puts it on. He walks jauntily home, only to find, when he looks in the mirror, that the hat is cursed and has turned him into a PIG. Distraught, he calls on the angels to help him. A faraway singsong voice replies, "The angels are busy! Please try again later!"

That’s the opening scene of one of the skits from my week at the improv. I gave small groups of students plastic grocery bags filled with ill-assorted junk and challenged them to create and perform their own short plays, all in the space of one class period. The students’ response belies their whole educational experience, which has largely been focused on memorization and preparation for standardized tests. They responded with creativity, humor and depth of feeling.

Prevalent themes: romance (of course!), family-based situation comedy, petty fraud (especially overcharging foreigners!) and incompetence in the workplace. Restaurant waiters took an especially bad beating all week.

My favorite skits:

The high-maintenance girlfriend spurns all the gifts from the boyfriend until, at last, he is inspired to give her a pet bunny – which the skit team has crafted from a potato and a rubber glove.

The patient complains of trouble with her right eye. The bumbling doctor uses a wooden cooking spoon to mask each eye in turn, giving a vision test, and concurs that the right eye is injured. "Don’t worry. Your left eye is fine. Just let the left eye tell the right eye what it sees."

A true-to-life tourist site souvenir seller hawks his wares loudly, and sells a worthless handkerchief to unsuspecting tourists at a high price, all the while making sly asides to a Chinese pal.

On a serious note: a soft-spoken narrator talks about the three stages of her life, acted by her classmates: student, successful businesswoman, and, finally, grandmother. The grandmother’s prop is a computer diskette, on which she pledges to record her good memories for her grandchildren.