Improv Everywhere - MP3 Experiment

If you haven't been involved with Improv Everywhere, you're missing out.

Earlier today, at 6:00pm SHARP, was their annual MP3 Experiment. Put simply, each participant downloads an hour-long audio file of a mysterious voice giving instructions to do quirky things. These are the guys behind the famous Frozen Grand Central and the No Pants Subway Ride.

So today started off with instructions to bring a bag with a roll of toilet paper, two sheets of paper each with a letter (one vowel and one consonant) written on it, a marker, and a wrapped gift of something in the house you don't want. Their website told people to position themselves in any retail establishment on 41st-43rd streets between 8th and Park avenues.

I met up with a friend at the very last minute and ducked into the Times Square Sephora (yeah, whatever). After some individual ice breakers - like "scratch your head so you can see who else in the store is participating - we were eventually told to, among other things, take an item from the shelf and start slow-dancing with it as if it were a ballroom partner. There must have been 40 people in the store doing this.

We got kicked out. Most people did, from their respective stores.

Then, on the sidewalk outside, a group of about 100 people gathered on the corner of 42nd and 7th. We were told to walk as if we were in a marching band, do a crazy dance, follow a random stranger in a conga line and imitate their every move, freeze position for 2 minutes, and high-five complete strangers.

Then, we all walked to Bryant Park where we were met with the hundreds (ultimately thousands) of other participants from the area. We were told that "Steve" was celebrating his birthday today and we needed to sneak up on the park to surprise him. So, as you would expect, thousands of people descended on Bryant Park crouched down and covertly hiding behind people, trees and garbage cans.

Then we all jumped up on cue to shout, "SURPRISE!" and rush "Steve", alone in the middle of the field. I later learned that the field had been reserved and the whole event was coordinated with the park.

After some other activities we broke out the paper-wither-letters and spent some time finding people with whom to make words, sentences, phrases. Then we took the markers out, found a partner, sketched the partner. After that, we tested our geography skills and drew one continent on our paper, then passed it to six other people to complete a drawing of the world. Then we did a simple gift exchange with what we brought from home.

The piece-de-resistance, by far, was the stint that brought out the toilet paper, which was nothing more than a great, huge, flash-mob mummy-wrap. See below for a great image of the scene (click on it for a link to the website).

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-..._7365980_n.jpg

Some other great pictures of the event, as of now, are available here and here.

I'm definitely in for their next activity. Consider it! It was a BLAST.

Brian