Foolish thoughts...

While driving around town over the weekend doing errands I heard a great story on NPR. (Yes, I listen to NPR now. I’m too cheap for satellite radio and all other radio sucks.) (Oh, and what errands did I run? Well, those of you who have seen my apartment and wondered just why my dining room table only has three chairs will be happy to know that I have finally gotten an office chair for my home office. Which means I no longer have to use one of my dining room chairs. It only took me a year and a half to accomplish this.)

Anyway, the NPR story. I’m not sure if this is inspired genius or the meanest pranks ever but it is something that needs to be shared. There are a group of people in New York who do what can only be described as live action improvisation. It’s kind of like a flash mob but flash mobs are pretty random occurrences, just organize a bunch of people to meet in one spot and do something silly for a minute and then take off. This is much more in depth and inspired.

Here’s the first bit they talked about. If you’ve ever gone through your local paper you’ll always see some no name band playing a small bar on a weeknight. Just a couple of guys playing for beer money. Well, what they did was organize thirty or forty people to go to a random show, learn the lyrics to the band’s songs, and just go nuts while watching them play. Just act in the crowd like this is the greatest, most amazing set you’ve ever seen. And then, once the band leaves the stage, everyone takes off and goes home so the band packs up their gear to an empty bar. There’s something incredible about hearing from the band as they talked about how incredible it felt to be in front of a screaming audience and then wondering where did everybody go. But once they found out it was a prank it seemed a bit cruel.

The second one seemed even more inspired. Again, they organized thirty people with the idea that on a Friday night they were going to choose a random guy and act like he was an old friend and they were celebrating his birthday. They came up with a full backstory: guy’s name was Ted, worked for Oppenheimer, favorite band was Dave Matthews, and everyone was to come up with their past history with Ted. So, they go to a bar and just pick a guy at random who is drinking with a buddy and one by one they start going up to him and saying “Hey Ted, happy birthday man.” Start buying him drinks, giving him gift cards, they bring out a cake at one point. It sounds like the most amazing thing imaginable.

Except from the guy’s perspective. He recounted how here he was just relaxing at a bar and everyone started calling him by a different name and it really started to weird him out. Because no matter what he tried he couldn’t convince these people that he was not Ted. He started worrying that some guy was going to come through the door and be pissed that here he was with his birthday presents. At some point he just starts going along with it and saying that he is Ted, just because it is the only way that he could handle the situation. In the days that followed he would look at the gift cards and wonder just what happened. And then every once in a while someone would come up to him and go, “Hey Ted, how’s it going?” Which has to be the most disconcerting thing in the world.

Like I said, I don’t know if this is inspired humor or cruel mind games. There is something cool about throwing a birthday party for some random person and giving them gifts. I mean, it does sound like it would be cool to be on the receiving end. But then again, to have everyone say that you are someone else and talking to you about experiences that you have never had must make you question your sanity. Still not sure what the end answer is but I have to say at least the people who put these things together try to make life interesting.