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BEST OF JACKSON HOLE 2020
Why I Don’t Ski By Andrew Munz
Photo: Jacob Lewis Ferguson
I DON’T SKI. I JUST DON’T. Normally, people don’t go around announcing what they don’t do. What a pointless, interminable endeavor. I literally don’t do so many things every single day. As humans, it’s challenging enough to tell our friends how we actually spend our days. Narrowing our hobbies down by a process of elimination, in turn, seems maddening. Near psychotic, even. Yet, having grown up in Jackson Hole, a town of self-proclaimed ski gods living atop their Mount Olympus, I find myself in an infinite wormhole of interactions that force me to sheepishly admit that I don’t do the thing that everyone is doing. For many folks, skiing is the very reason they live in Jackson Hole. It’s what brought them here and it’s what keeps them here. Therefore, once I confess that I both live in Jackson Hole and am completely uninterested in the practice of going up and down hills from Christmas to Easter, well, it tends to rile up the base. It’s not that I’ve never skied. My parents put me on skis early, and I got pretty good at it. When I was six, I was the top NASTAR racer in America in my age group and have the medals to show for it. Somewhere, anyway. But for some reason, the passion never stuck. No ski posters ever graced my bedroom walls. I couldn’t name more than a handful of professional skiers if you paid me. After high school, I even switched over to snowboarding for a couple of winters before losing interest altogether. In 2014, I sold my snowboard and never looked back. So the question arises: If I’m not taking advantage of Jackson Hole’s world-famous skiing culture, why am I here? The answer is complicated — a tangled bramble of reasons rooted in family, comfort, simplicity, beauty, pride, etc. As an actor and comedian, I’ve managed to carve out a bit of relevance in the community through my satirical play series, “I Can Ski Forever.” Over the course of four full-length
productions, complete with musical numbers, slapstick humor, and biting satire, I skewered Jackson Hole culture under the guise of comedy. I allowed locals to poke fun at themselves, while also commenting on things like alcoholism, income inequality, dog ownership responsibilities, etc. Studying improv at the iO Theatre and The Second City in Chicago, I learned the crucial lesson that good comedy is rooted in truth. The audience is an organism, an everevolving collective seeking a reason to connect, to laugh, to belong. The “Ski Forever” shows are full of characters unaware they are in a satire. Every decision they make, every word out of their mouth, is earnest. They are (or were) convinced their lives are genuinely better by simply existing in Jackson Hole, and are constantly searching for validation. As the production begins, the audience laughs at these strange caricatures of Jackson folk, but as these characters unapologetically maneuver through their individual motions, the audience begins to sympathize, and then (“hey, wait a second …”) relate to them. A man singing about having too much plaid in his closet rips open his plaid shirt to reveal yet another plaid shirt. A wealthy divorcee and her hench-cougars, all of whom live in log mansions, get roped into solving Jackson’s housing crisis for its poorest citizens. A dog-owning barista, who, in a previous scene, was tossing drinks back with a GoPro bro, is now lamenting about her endless
