Still Smiling

When I joined the Rodents in March of 2007, Jeff (who took these photos) asked me just two questions:

Do you have cute underwear?
How high is your pain tolerance?

I quickly discovered why these elements are crucial. The underwear issue comes from the game, "Pants, No Pants", where the players do a scene and when someone offstage dings a bell, your pants go down and you continue the scene. If they are already down, they come up. And so on.

With a number of players onstage in various stages of undress, the scene takes on certain slapstick vaudevillian qualities, which (hopefully) the audience finds amusing. Christa was always kind enough to let me borrow her Star Wars boxers - with the words: "The Dark Side" printed on the butt - for the occasion.


The pain question is a real one and it pertains to the game, Mousetraps. The stage is covered in live mousetraps and two players are blindfolded, removed of their shoes, and forced to conduct a scene while walking blind over these snappy little contraptions. We've all had various body parts snapped and snipped during this game and yes, it hurts, but 'tis a small sacrifice in the name of comedy.

I have successfully avoided playing the game again for a while now but it finally caught up to me last night. To raise more funds for Smile Train, we've got mason jars with a photo of each player on the front. At the beginning of the show, we encourage the audience to put money in the jar of the player they most want to see in pain. Last night, I suspect that comedian-favorite Emily's Mom put enough cold hard cash in my jar that I found myself barefoot and blindfolded and playing with ex-ROUS, Emily.

Emily hates the game and I'm no big fan either but that is where the hilarity lies. We were a mother and daughter in Italy, trying to get some food - each trying to get the other one to walk towards them. At some point, we were in a bank and there was a hold-up: "Everybody on the floor!" Down we went and I heard a snap with Emily screaming, "My butt!"

Why do we do this to ourselves? Dunno, but people laugh and that's really the point. I still have a tiny purple bruise on one of my toes this morning and looking at it made me giggle. I mean, really, if that's how I get hurt these days, I'm doing alright.