Saturday Night Live‘s Ego Nwodim talks about improv likes it’s her therapy—or maybe even a form of religion. When she was a student at Eastern Tech High School in Essex, she knew she wanted to act, although her Nigerian-American parents wanted her to be pre-med.

She compromised—leaving Baltimore to study biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the center of the entertainment industry. It was in L.A. where she discovered improv.

“I didn’t even know it existed,” she says from her home in New York City. She immediately fell for the art form that famously encourages “yes and”—an openness to possibility, a generosity in the way you interact with other people, a tool for being present and in the moment.

But it wasn’t just the practice of improv that energized her, it was discovering that such an art form even existed.

“I feel like, as a child, I was aware of very few professional paths available to me,” she says. “So to me, improv represents expanding your horizons. The knowledge that there was this art form out there that’s available to anyone was very empowering.”

After college, she took classes at the Los Angeles chapter of the famous improv troupe, the Upright Citizens Brigade, and did a one woman show, Great Black Women…And Then There’s Me.

She was good at it. So good, in fact, that Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live came a-callin’.

With her adorably scratchy voice, big smile, and gleefully silly impressions, Nwodim became an instant fan favorite. She’s been on the show since 2018 and has also appeared in multiple TV shows, films, and commercials. She’s very much a rising star.

As a sketch comedy show, SNL allows Nwodim to flex some of her improv muscles. But it isn’t actual improv, which uses no script. And she misses it.

“I’m not in the practice of doing improv regularly. When I [was doing it,] I think I was a better person, a better version of myself,” she says. (See? Therapy.)

She notes that it has become an even more crucial life skill at a time when we spend so much of our lives with our noses buried in our phones. It helps to foster better communication, better understanding, and, of course, better listening skills.

In fact, Nwodim is such an improv true believer, she recommends it to friends who aren’t even in showbiz. “I have a friend who is an accountant and I encouraged her to take an improv class!” she says with a laugh.

At some point, she realized that she wanted to bring this art form that she loves to kids, not just to share the life skills that come with improv, but to open their minds to life’s possibilities—that idea that if you see it, you can be it.

“I had people I looked up to in the improv space,” she says. “But I didn’t see many people who looked like me. There’s nothing like seeing someone who looks like yourself and seeing what’s possible for you. There’s just no substitute for that.”

Nwodim wanted to be that person for Baltimore kids. And she knew just who to reach out to.

Back in the mid-aughts, Todd Wade taught Spanish at Eastern Tech High. He remembers Nwodim, who was born in Perry Hall and grew up in White Marsh, as a great kid.

“Ego was a rock-star student,” he says. “She was so driven. She got straight A’s; all fives [the highest score] on her AP exams. But she also was this extreme extrovert, just super happy. She wouldn’t ever walk by a teacher without grinning and saying hi.”

He knew she would succeed in any path she chose. He never worried about her. Eventually Nwodim graduated and he left teaching Spanish to become the director of restorative practices and the peer mediation coordinator at City Springs Elementary/Middle School for the Baltimore Curriculum Project (BCP), a nonprofit that operates a series of solutions-based charter schools in Baltimore. Around the time of the George Floyd murder, Wade organized a Black Lives Matter (BLM) rally in Baltimore with his son.

“We thought 12 people would show up. It ended up being 3,000,” he says, still somewhat amazed. A white teacher from Baltimore leading people on a BLM march made the news—and it even reached Nwodim in New York.

She reached out to Wade and invited him to come see the show. His first thought: “What show?” Yes, he had no idea she was on SNL. He laughs with embarrassment at the memory.

“I don’t watch TV!” he protests. “I’m not a big pop culture guy.”

But he did go to New York, impressing his friends and family who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get SNL tickets for years.

Of course, he was blown away by Nwodim’s performance that night.

“She’s really good,” he says.

After that, they stayed in touch a little bit. So when, during the writers strike last year, Nwodim came up with this idea to bring improv to Baltimore City schoolchildren, she immediately thought of Wade.

“I reached out to Mr. Wade—I guess I’m supposed to call him Todd now, because I’m an adult,” Nwodim cracks. And she laid out her idea.

It felt a bit like serendipity. Restorative practices is a mindset for how to handle discipline in school, Wade explains.

“It looks for the root causes of behavior.…And it’s a powerful tool to create a school environment where kids know they’re loved.”

Meanwhile, peer mediation is a practice that has students intervening in conflicts. They sit in a circle, they talk and express their feelings. It’s a bit like therapy. And yes, like improv.

Arrangements were made quickly and, last September, Nwodim came back to Baltimore to teach improv to kids at the City Springs Elementary/Middle School in Southeast Baltimore, one of the charter schools run by the BCP.

The improv session itself would take place at Center Stage in Mount Vernon, but first Nwodim stopped by the school to talk to the peer mediators.

“I see myself in you,” she told the assembled group. “I was sitting in seats just like you are and had dreams of doing bigger things. I believe that each of you has inside you what it takes to make your dreams and visions happen. Despite what anyone might tell you…the sky is the limit.”

This message was particularly important to Nwodim. She wanted to show the kids what was possible. Maybe it would be improv. Maybe it would be something else. The idea was to explore and embrace the possibilities. The “yes and” of life.

Terrence Okoh, Taven Williams, and Kayla Austin are all 12-year-old sixth graders at City Springs Elementary/Middle School. They’re also trained peer mediators. They attended Nwodim’s talk at City Springs and then went to Center Stage for the improv session.

Today, they’re gathered in a City Springs classroom to talk about the experience. They confess they didn’t know who Nwodim was when she visited them, but they thought she was funny and cool.

“I was surprised,” Williams says. “Because there aren’t a lot of celebrities from Baltimore.”

The improv work they did that day isn’t necessarily what you might expect. Not scene work, per se, where two people act out a scenario and try to get laughs. It was mostly exercises that teach you to listen and collaborate, which are soft skills implicit in improv.

“One we did was called, ‘Zip, zap, zop,’” Okoh says. “Say if I ‘zip’ to you, you have to ‘zap’ to someone else and they’ve got to ‘zop’ to someone else.”

Wait, what?

“Do you want us to demonstrate for you?”

Okoh says, in an “adults need so much explained to them” voice. So they do, along with Wade, their chairs loudly scraping against the classroom floor as they arrange themselves

into a circle. “Zip,” Okoh says, pointing to Austin. “Zap,” she replies, pointing to Williams. “Zop,” Williams says, pointing to Wade. And around they go. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

“You can’t mess up,” Williams explains.

“And what if you do?” Wade prompts.

“You start all over.”

“You say, it’s all good,” Wade corrects, emphasizing the positive attitude one should bring to the exercise. “And then you start again.”

At Center Stage, they did another exercise that involved counting to 20 with a group of sixth graders. It nearly resulted in a mutiny. In this exercise, everyone sits in a circle (again). But this time, they lock arms, close their eyes, and count to 10. But here’s the rub: “No one can speak at the same time,”

Nwodim says of the exercise. “If two people say four, you have to start over again. So that was very frustrating because it required a level of quiet that I don’t think is inherent to young people. And you need stillness and trust. And so the frustration was that, oh no, two people have said the same number—we were so close and now we have to start over again.”

Some kids bolted from the circle. Others got into shouting matches. But Nwodim kept the whole thing under control.

“Ego was stunning,” Wade says (photographed below, on far left, with students). “She would have been an amazing teacher. A lot of actual teachers would’ve gotten very nervous in that moment. But she was just so patient and good with them.”

Somehow, she managed to corral the kids back to the circle—okay, maybe there was some bribing with Chick-fil-A involved. And they fulfilled the exercise.

“We were supposed to get to 20, but we did 10,” Austin says. But they still felt like they had really accomplished something. Together.

For her part, Nwodim was very impressed by the students. “They were wide open to participating in the games and putting themselves out there,” she says. “[This kind of exercise] is pretty vulnerable. They demonstrated, I think, a level of focus that I wasn’t sure was possible for a group of kids this age. They exceeded my expectations.”

And the City Springs students say the exercises taught them a lot.

“It teaches you to be an active listener,” Williams says, repeating a phrase that Wade uses often in the peer mediation training.

“It taught me to focus,” Okoh says.

“And to pay attention,” echoes Austin.

After the improv session, the kids did a little internet sleuthing to find out about their new hero.

“She was in Good Burger 2!” Okoh says, in awe.

Austin and Williams perk up. “She was?” Williams says.

“Yeah, she played the wife. And she’s in Pizza Hut commercials!”

“I bet she has, like, 12.3 million dollars,” Williams says.

All three say they were inspired by Nwodim’s visit. “It inspired me to do the right thing and not make the wrong decisions,” Okoh says.

“Some people from Baltimore choose the wrong decisions. But Miss Ego came and she talked to us about how to do the right things in life.”

The improv training went so well, and intersected so neatly with the work of the BCP, Nwodim and Wade knew they wanted to continue it. If Nwodim had her druthers, she’d be teaching every single improv class herself—she loves spreading the gospel of improv that much.

“Selfishly, I want to be at every single workshop,” she says. But she knows that’s not possible. So sometime this year, she’s going to come back and teach a group of teachers how to lead improv sessions. Improv will officially become part of the BCP programming. She also plans to take this training to students in New York City. But it’s especially meaningful for her to do this program here at home.

“I’m so happy I was born and raised in Baltimore,” she says. “I always say that I feel like it’s my brag. That I’m from Baltimore.”

She doesn’t get home as often as she’d like, partly because she’s so busy with SNL and other work and partly because her mother sold her childhood home. (“I was devastated.”) But she feels a real connection to the city.

“I held onto my Maryland license an illegal amount of time, because that was my one piece of home,” she says with a laugh. “And when people say they don’t know I’m from Baltimore, I get kind of offended by that. As a performer, I think [being from Baltimore] has given me a bravery and a confidence and a boldness. I like to think I behave like a Baltimore woman.”

Numbers Game

South Caroline Street
April 20, 2017

In the auditorium of City Springs Elementary/Middle School, four fifth-graders are set to take the stage for a battle of wits against four “celebrity” adults. The annual quiz show knock off—Are You Smarter Than a Baltimore Public Schools Fifth Grader?—serves as both a fundraiser for the Baltimore Curriculum Project, which operates several neighborhood charter schools in the city, and usually, a source of some embarrassment for the adult team.

The format is straightforward: The two teams alternate answering questions in every imaginable academic field, including geometry, ratios, musical composition, the American Revolution, French literature, Greek poetry, and the science of cells. Thus far, the fifth-graders remain undefeated.

This year’s students—Bryan Burroughs, Miyonna Johnson, Soraya Johnson, and Luis Matzul from Govans Elementary, City Springs, Hampstead Hill Academy, and Wolfe Street Academy, respectively—jump out to a 3-0 lead initially, successfully tackling questions about metaphors, photosynthesis, and the formula for measuring the volume of a rectangular prism.

Eventually, Fox 45 meteorologist Vytas Reid, WYPR’s Gil Sandler, CareFirst vice president Maria Tildon, and notably, city schools CEO Sonja Santelises, rally. “I may have to resign if I miss this,” Santelises jokes before nailing a tough astronomy question. Later, the kids drop a geography query, opening the door for an adult-team comeback and some trash-talking by Reid, who cracks that he “needs a moment to massage his medulla oblongata,” which is actually part of the brain stem that deals with automatic functioning such as breathing, not thinking.

After several rounds of back-and-forth volleys, including final correct answers from Luis about a French literary device and one from Reid about the solar system, the score ends in a tie at 9-9 when Santelises misses (or maybe throws) a final question on fractions.

“I’m 90 years old,” Sandler says afterward. “As soon as I saw the math questions coming, I wanted to hide under the table.”

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Almost Famous

Pratt Street
April 11, 2017

On the packed deck outside the Hard Rock Café, the original members of Baltimore’s popular one-hit rockers—The Ravyns—are playing their single, “Raised on the Radio,” which found its way onto the soundtrack of the 1980s teenage classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (The enthusiastic jeans and T-shirt crowd appears just old enough to recall all of the above.)

“Everybody remembers that movie and that song,” says Tim Tilghman, 54, host of Radio RockonTour on WLOY, with a smile. “And everybody remembers Phoebe Cates”—the young actress who had a memorable bathing suit scene in the film.

The Ravyns’ six-song set is meant as a kickoff for a bigger reunion show in 12 days in Annapolis. But the band is clearly happy to be together again this evening. Guitarist and singer Rob Fahey, who wrote their signature song, explains he was simply transcribing his own teenage years when he discovered rock ’n’ roll, which became his lifelong obsession—lasting stardom or not.

Raised on the radio
Just an all-American boy
I found my favorite toy

“Being a musician, I’m just still trying to get better,” says Fahey.

In their heyday, the band opened for Billy Idol, the B-52s, and on their biggest night, Styx at the Baltimore Civic Center.

“The phone rang at 10:30 in the morning and I was the one who woke up and answered it,” recalls keyboardist Kyf Brewer. “It’s Styx’s promoter and he says their opening act can’t make it, is there a chance that we can play? I tell him we’re booked for a late gig at the Dulaney Inn, which was true.

“Anyhow, we open and we’ve never been on a stage anywhere near that size. After we finish playing, the event staff tells us to throw some guitar picks and drumsticks into the front row—which we can’t even see because it’s so dark and the stage is so big. Long story short, the picks and drumsticks barely roll off the end of the stage and end up landing on the security team.

“Then we went and played the Dulaney Inn.”

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Grape Friends

Claremont Street
April 30, 2017

On a warm Sunday, in the street alongside Our Lady of Pompei, the 14th Annual Highlandtown Wine Festival is well underway when someone refers to the neighborhood here as “little, Little Italy.” Joe DiPasquale, whose grandfather opened the original DiPasquale’s Marketplace on this block more than a century ago, gently corrects the visitor. “Oh no, this is big Little Italy. Not the other one,” DiPasquale says, referring to the popular Italian restaurant destination near the Inner Harbor. “Always was.”

For decades, the Rev. Robert Petti of Our Lady of Pompei organized a local wine and food get-together, which the festival has supplanted as a community fundraiser. Petti used to collect grape orders—trucking them in from California—for those in his congregation who toiled as basement winegrowers, similar to those in the festival’s competition this afternoon. DiPasquale assumed that task after the beloved priest passed away in 1984. 

“We get a tractor-trailer delivery every October,” DiPasquale explains. “There’s still about three-dozen basement winemakers in this neighborhood.”

For the first time ever this year, the same basement winemaker—Dominic Petrucci—sweeps first-place honors in the red and white categories. Petrucci’s chief competitor, Dominic Parravano, won top honors in the festival’s first year and, ever since, the two men—both stonemasons by trade, both immigrants from the same small town south of Rome—have become rivals not just in business but in winemaking after arriving separately in Highlandtown in the ’70s.

Parravano, who still lives on this street, dug his basement down an extra 7 feet to make room for larger fermentation tanks years ago. Petrucci eventually moved his operation to a bigger cellar in Cockeysville. Although the guest judges choose Petrucci’s wines in both categories this year, it’s not as if it settles the issue of which stonemason is the better winemaker once and for all.

“We usually have about 30 entries,” says DiPasquale. “But it’s pretty much the battle of the Dominics every year.”