American Idiot

I am a lover of all things pranktastic. I just am. I think pranks are hilarious when done right. I've been gotten by pranks a lot, and though most of the time they either scare the ever loving life out of me or make me look like the biggest fool ever, I appreciate that they tend to shift my perspective and lighten the mood.

On Saturday, I got to hang out with some wonderful women and talk about pranks that we had pulled and what some of the best ones were. As it happens, most of my really good ones, tend to backfire the most because either my timing is off or because the person doesn't think it's funny. But hindsight is 20/20 right?

One of my favorites is from this haunted house outreach that my church did. I worked at a church in Austin with the Master's Commission program as the Media Director. So not only did I do all of the media for the program, I also taught other students how to do it as well. Well, one year, we decided to do a haunted house at an old abandoned grocery store. The staff and students pulled excruciatingly long hours to put it all together. We had a section where people would chase you with chainsaws and we had an Exorcist station where they would show a clip from the movie and then someone would jump out and scare you, we had crazy insane clowns, and all sorts of other haunted house things. Well, at the end of it we had a coffee shop set up where you could talk to people (including our students) about what you thought of it all and we left out comment cards for people to give us feedback on what they liked and what they didn't like.

So, one day, just to be funny, I filled out one of the comment cards beforehand and I told the person in charge of choosing the cards that our director would read each night aloud to the cast to be SURE he read that one. So on the comment card, I said something like:

Wow! You guys did amazing! I'm a theater student at UT and I work a lot with painting sets and some of the more technical aspects. Man, whoever ran tech for your car crash scene was AMAZING!! [side note: for the record, it was me ;)] They must have put in a lot of time and effort to get the cues right. I'm impressed! And the painting in the clown section was phenomenal! [side note: the person who painted it was sitting next to me when I was filling the card out.] Your team deserves a big fat raise!

He read it out loud to us at the end of the night and even though most people in the room knew I had written it, and were giggling (as was I), our director TOTALLY thought it was real and was feeling pretty awesome about the magnitude of the compliments . . . until he found out it was me. ;) He then proceeded to fire me, then rehire me. This firing and rehiring would be a recurring issue between us for the next 4 years . . . in fact, I think that since I've left, he's fired me 3x as well.

(For the record, he doesn't REALLY fire me,
he just says it and we laugh)

So basically what I'm saying is I love pranks.

Also, I need some people to help me recreate this awesomeness! ;)