Congratulations, Gavin/Pally! You guys deserve it.
As for Mother:
No improv group, past or present, has more sentimental meaning to me than Mother. I took my first improv class before I'd ever seen improv, and it was on Tuesday nights so I couldn't see Harold Night, but I used to go to Cagematch for free, and Mother was on a long run. They weren't the first improv show I saw, but they were probably about half of the first dozen.
To this day, I think of those Mother Cagematches as my favorite improv shows ever. I felt like I was watching the ultimate in controlled chaos-- people who clearly knew their way around improv and got how it worked and knew what to do, but also had fun and did crazy shit that didn't fit into any mold. When learning the "rules" of improv sometimes felt constraining, Mother always seemed like the shining example of how to master improv so that it felt liberating and insane instead of constricted and formulaic.
Mother's the only improv group left from when I first started seeing UCB shows, and their shows always make me remember when improv seemed like magic. I will miss Mother a lot. Thanks.
