Professor Les Golden of Oak Park, Illinois, has received a contract for the improvisation book that results from his study with his mentor, Del Close of The Second City improv nightclub in Chicago. McFarland & Co., the distinguished scholarly publishing house in Jefferson, North Carolina, executed the contract on January 16, 2022, and Golden inked it on January 17.  Expected publication is in 2022.

The Book

The Scientific Approach to Creativity:  The Techniques of the Chicago School of Improvisational Theatre results from verbatim, copious notes taken by Dr. Golden in Close’s workshops.  It presents the most comprehensive discussion of the techniques that Close developed.  In keeping with Golden’s scientific background, holding the Ph.D in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, the book is arranged rationally.

It has three parts.  The first discussed Golden’s theory of creativity and the split brain.  Part 2 presents Close’s theories and techniques.  Part 3 presents an in-depth analysis of interpersonal status, what Golden considers to be the most important element of interpersonal relationships.  It contains numerous original comedy dialogues as exercises and illustration.

The organization of Part 2 displays Golden’s rational approach.  The six lengthy chapters present the elements of a scene, the physical structure of a scene, the literary structure of a scene, choices, interactions, and characterization.  A complete index and bibliography are also included as well as Close’s autobiography as presented to Golden and an appendix on “how to be funny.”

Polymath

Leslie M. Golden is a polymath, with careers as a professional astronomer and retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, having obtained the Ph.D in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, and bachelors and masters degrees in Engineering Physics with Distinction from Cornell University.  There he was the multiple award-winning editor-in-chief of the Cornell Engineer magazine.  He is a professional actor with over 100 credits, and is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.  His agents are the Shirley Hamilton Agency in Chicago and Sonjia Warren Brandon in Los Angeles.

His editorial cartoons have been published, and he has a listing in comiclopedia, the international cartoonist database.  He is a multiply award-winning writer in fiction and non-fiction, including a winner of the prestigious Lili Fabilli-Eric Hoffer Laconic Essay Prize.  He was one of the founders of the prestigious University of California Jazz Ensembles, and is a professional trumpet player, jazz vocalist, jazz festival emcee, and band leader.  As Flash Golden, he was the play-by-play voice of the California Golden Bears basketball team, and was a jazz disk jockey at KALX-FM.  As a stand-up comic, he has performed on the college circuit, at Playboy Clubs, and in comedy clubs from Los Angeles to Boston and Chicago to Puerta Vallarta.  He was a featured regular on the Eddie Hubbard Radio Show broadcast live from Arnie’s Restaurant in Chicago as one of his comic characters, Jeffrey Clayton Maxwell, from Bhutan.  He performs as himself and as Subrahmanyan Berkowitz (“What! Another comedian from Bangladesh!”)

 He was a letterman at Oak Park and RiverForestHigh School and has managed and played third base for league-winning fast pitch baseball teams in and since college, including the Golden Rods (Cornell) and the Foul Balls (Berkeley).

He is an internationally known environmental activist and animal welfare advocate, being the leader of the eventually successful effort to save Onion the dog, leading to revision of animal control laws in western states.  He is a knowledgeable and blistering critic of zoos, singling out the notorious Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and the Calgary Zoo (“Auschwitz for Animals”) as examples of concentration camps for imprisoned wild animals.  The literally hundreds upon hundreds of animals murdered at the hands of political-patronage zookeepers at the city-run Calgary Zoo is the subject of Golden’s dedication to the book.  He details dozens of cases by name and specie in a documentary-worthy fashion of historical value for animal rights activists.

Recent Work

In 2021 Golden had two scholarly scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals.  “A Joint Mind Consideration of the Drake Equation in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” was published in Acta Astronautica in March and “The Contribution of Artificial Turf to Global Warming” was published in December in Sustainability and Climate Change.

Acknowledgements and Scholarly Work

Golden acknowledges numerous individuals as contributing to the acting book.  These include the late Emeritus Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature James McConkey (Court of Memory etc.), Golden’s former professor at Cornell University, actress, professor, director Joyce K. Porter, Cheryl Balaban, actress and member of the improv group Let’s Have Lunch, actor and writer Rick Plastina (Killing Poe), actress Lana Wood, and those who participated in the workshops under Close at Second City.  Jonathan Pitts, the founder and long-time director of the Chicago Improv Festival will write the foreword to the book.

In 2016, Golden had two papers at the 16th triennial Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking in June at the Mirage Casino/Hotel, “An Analysis of the Disadvantage to Players of Multiple Decks in the Game of Twenty-one” and “A New System for Roulette Based on the Physics of the Roulette Wheel.”  He also had two applied mathematics articles published in a peer-reviewed journal.

 Other Resources

Details about Les Golden’s Renaissance Man activities can be found at:

encyc.org/wiki/Les_Golden and en.wikisage.org/wiki/Les­_Golden

Les Golden’s activities as a gambling writer are profiled on his alma mater website:  http://www.cornell65.com/interest/golden.html

His papers on the Golden Diagram (blackjack) and Magic  Circle strategy (roulette) presented at the 16th triennial International Conference  on  Gambling  and  Risk  Taking  in  June,  2016,  in Las Vegas are at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_institute/2016/June9/

 Les’ listing on the Comiclopedia International Database appears at:

http://www.lambiek.com/artists/g/golden_les.htm

The Chicago Tribune presented a political profile of Les Golden at: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-10-03/    
/news/9510030038_1_wallace-gator-bradley-candidates-taxes

 Some of Les Golden’s animal welfare and environmental activism activities are described at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/les-golden-oak-park-dog-a_n_1497423.html en.wikisage.org/wiki/The_Horrors_of_Zoos_and_Horse_Racing.

 en.wikisage.org/wiki/CARE_Party_of_Oak_Park