By Marie-Anne Hogarth
Within a month, Callier was spending every night at Second City, hanging out and watching the sets on the company’s main stage. The manager finally put her to work selling T-shirts and washing glasses. “I could lip-synch the whole show,” she says. “I would go to school, come home and do my homework, and go to Second City.”
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After Callier graduated from high school her mother wouldn’t let her major in theater, so she enrolled at Rosary College to study business and sociology. While continuing to work at Second City she started taking more classes at the ImprovOlympic. She performed regularly with a team called Gracie, named after Charna Halpern’s dog.
Callier also joined the Second City National Touring Company. “My favorite memories are of turning around in the van on an ass-long ride of 22 hours and finding Kevin Dorff and Matt Dwyer completely naked in the backseat, reading books, and having said nothing for six hours.” They traveled everywhere from ski resorts to New York City to Waco, Texas. “We went to some towns that had no black people. I would turn around to the people in the back and say, ‘I am not getting out.’ But I did….It made me think that there is no place on this earth where I do not have the right to be.
But Pitts and Callier were convinced it could be successful. “We started in my kitchen at my laptop two years ago,” she says. “We came up with three things: to have audience development, industry showcasing, and an educational component with master classes.
