High Five Escalator
Katie Sokoler
Natural-born prankster Charlie Todd has become an expert at creating surprising, magical moments in New York and across the globe with his group of undercover agents known as Improv Everywhere.
“Welcome to the MP3 Experiment Eight: First Contact. My name is Mark, and I’ll be your omnipotent voice today. Follow my instructions, and we’ll all have a pleasant time together.”
It’s a warm summer night and my husband, Luke, and I are sitting on a bench in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan listening to this otherworldly voice coming through our headphones. It’s exactly 8:30 p.m., and we — along with about 3,500 other participants — have just pressed play and are listening to an MP3 we downloaded earlier that day. Surreptitiously, we look around at the other people nearby who are also wearing headphones and who are dressed in black T-shirts. We smile at one another, giddy with the knowledge that we are about to make utter fools of ourselves in public, and we listen closely in anticipation of what this disembodied voice will tell us to do next.
Andrew Brusso
“Tonight is the annual Celebration of Lights Festival, and our counsels have arranged for a meeting of the tribes in the neutral zone. But first we must do some activities on our own to prepare for this very important diplomatic ceremony. … In the northern tribe, a slow dance is done in a very unique way. … When the music plays, you are to slow-dance with each other. You can dance in any style you like, so long as it’s slow and your arms remain locked, touching each other’s elbows.”
My husband’s and my years of theater training finally come in handy. When the music begins flooding our earphones, without hesitation, Luke grabs a young man clad in a black T-shirt and pulls him toward us. Along with hundreds of other participants around us, I lock arms with this person I have never seen before in my life, and we begin an impromptu waltz.
This organized chaos — or “mission,” as Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd calls it — has drawn close to 3,000-plus New Yorkers out of air-conditioned movie theaters and restaurants and into the streets on a Saturday night to join in a collective experience with no particular meaning or purpose behind it other than to have a good time and make jaded passers-by do double takes.
The group has come a long way since Todd moved to the city 10 years ago. Bitten by the acting bug, he quickly realized he was just another temp with a dream until one night, he and a few college friends convinced everyone in a bar that he was the musician Ben Folds. The next day Todd posted the prank on the Web and the idea for Improv Everywhere (
www.improveverywhere.com) was born. Since then, he and a team of undercover agents — many of them veterans of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre
(www.ucbtheatre.com), where Todd honed his craft and later taught — have staged a fake U2 concert on a New York rooftop, infiltrated a
Best Buy dressed in blue polos and khaki pants (the employee uniform) and, more recently, conducted a horse race on the carousel in Bryant Park, complete with announcers, bettors and a lone jockey who competed against the 4- and 5-year-olds trying to ride their way to victory.