Listen to Black American Actor, Comedian, Impersonator, and Improv Specialist Dion Flynn, Master of Arts in Acting from NYU — who lived in Michigan until he was 2-years-old, then lived in Maryland until 17-years-old, and enlisted in the U.S. Army, then lived in Albany, New York, then New York City, and now currently lives in Brooklyn — share about his ancestry that he learned through 23 and Me, which is British, Irish, and Sub-Saharan African. He shares about founding “The Improviser’s Mindset” during the Covid-19 pandemic where Dion helps people connect with themselves and others using the powerful skills of improv.
“So, to bring the metaphor back to what is 24 hours like in our home during the pandemic, I just saw that I never had the option to just sit down in the snow and die. I had two entities upstairs who were depending on me and to find new ways to use the technology and become more savvy with online forms of collecting payments for whatever the things I'm doing. All these things. All these adaptations came from the offers of the pandemic. You know, Sonja, in improv we talk about offers: anything that someone does on onstage, like my scene partner, they do something, we call it an offer rather than a thing or you did something. We call it an offer, because it already has the energy of it being a positive thing. Oh, I can see what you're doing. I can see this. So, the pandemic arrives and my brain had been trained to look at everything that life brought as an offer. And some people, through religious terminology, will call it God's will. Everybody's got a way of shaping the reality with language that helps them navigate it. So, for me, this improv stuff really helped, because I saw the arrival of the pandemic in all of its component parts, both the external offers... you know, sickness, quarantine, you can't go anywhere, you can't travel, you can't travel work abroad the way you used to. The internal offers like our own fear coming up, us having to get closer as a family and really learn how to navigate a small NYC apartment, when we really can't go out even freely like we used to do..."
Dion memorializes losing his mentor, Jerold Mundis, to Covid-19 in 2020. Mundis was an author who reached many people through his books, especially “How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously.”
