#luckily my chosen name is close enough to my deadname it could pass as a nickname

[fiishboowl]

Heard my mom use my chosen name before my deadname when talking to my grandma, which means that’s the name she associates with me FIRST, 🏳️‍⚧️WIN for transgender rights🏳️‍⚧️

[twotwinks]

Ok

Y’all? Y ‘ a l l

I know I said I’d update last night after the show but uh

Well

I ended up Slightly Overwhelmed

Because I 100% ended up on stage with Colin and Brad yo!

So basically this is the story of How I Died

They asked for three volunteers who could help them out narratively and I’m like “hey I’m a creative writing major I could maybe do that” and then my mom started whispering “volunteer” and by that point Brad had already picked one guy so I’m like “well now there’s probably an even 50/50 chance that I’ll get picked I’ll take that” so I put up my hand, Brad picked another guy from the right side of the audience, then was like “alright let’s get a young lady up here” (which I technically Am Not but it’s fine!) and started scanning back over to the left side of the audience, and there’s lil ol me, sitting in the very third row (wearing Dramatic Earrings and a stripey sweater that I probably subconsciously picked to draw attention to myself) with my hand half up and he just looks straight into my eyes and goes “you”

So I gotta walk super far to get on stage because I’m sitting in the orchestra pit, but I was wearing my lil boots and I know how to run on my toes so I nyoomed up the stairs and across the stage and Brad’s like “we’ll put you in the middle” and takes me by the shoulders and backs me up to center stage and I’m like OH GREAT THE ATTENTION SPOT because at this point I’m somewhat panicking

Anyway the game is called Pillars, and basically Colin and Brad were telling a story, but using us as “the pillars of the story” because the joke was every once in a while they’d stop in the middle of a sentence and touch one of us and then we had to finish it.

Spoiler alert: I did NOT possess the narrative skill for this and my fiction prof would be Disappointed askhasdk

The story ends up being Brad has assembled a diamond-encrusted bra for the Queen of England (I had nothing to do with that, I promise, the audience suggested “bra” and Colin came up with the rest). I did, however, come up with the murder plot against the queen (which basically went...Brad: “They don’t want her to receive the bra because they’re planning to” Me: “KILL HER”) as well as the bra’s ability to explode (the murder plot made mild sense and drove most of the story but why did I make it blow up? Why did you think that worked brain? Spoiler alert it didn’t really and Brad had to perform modifications on the bra after the guy next to me also made it stab the queen/self destruct askhas).

Also. I find it necessary to say. Colin seemed to be using all the volunteers pretty evenly but I SWEAR BRAD HAD A PERSONAL VENDETTA AGAINST ME HE WAS NOT LEAVING ME ALONE EVERY OTHER SENTENCE WAS ME SIR PLEASE I’M JUST MAKING THIS WORSE

Towards the end, the guys end up killing a man who they think is an assassin waiting for the queen using a cat (my suggestion, which I regretted as it was leaving my mouth, because of course my mind immediately went to “THE CAT!”). The man ends up being a cleaning guy, so then they have to hide the body because oops they murdered an innocent man (again, Colin’s idea, for all this went off the rails 25% of it was also Colin’s doing) and Colin’s listing out what they’re going to do with the body, they’re going to take him down to the catacombs (which is how they snuck in) and then...he cues me, and I’m basically thinking something along the lines of throwing the body in an underground river, but I can’t think of a Concise way to say this when Colin has his hand on my arm (seriously how can you expect anybody to think when some of the greatest improvisers in the world are touching you, let alone when they also happen to be your heroes) so I ended up saying “DROWN HIM!”

Y’know

Drown the dead guy

A slight bit of flawed logic that Colin immediately pointed out asdkjhasd

But! They still ended up doing what I’d wanted them to do so it ended up being fine!

The end of the game was definitely the most terrifying, something I learned is that when these guys get close to the end they start making things Much More Difficult, either on themselves or on their volunteers. So I have Colin on my right, luckily not super close because I would have definitely stopped functioning, but Brad is on my left and he’s LESS THAN TWO INCHES AWAY I SWEAR TO GOD and they start prompting us for really hard suggestions, Colin starts with his father’s last three words and I can’t think of anything, and he’s looking at the guy on the other side of him, but I’m figuring he’s trying to lull me into a false sense of security and at the last minute he’s gonna turn and make me finish it (this is the price I pay for being Hyper Aware of everything huh) but luckily he spared mercy on my Tiny Anxious Soul and actually DID make the other guy come up with everything! Then Brad is like “oh yes, reminds me of my grandfather’s last words, his last four words” and I’m like OH COME ON but luckily he ALSO picked on the guy on his other side! I was spared completely!

I did not fare so well during the finishing limerick, however, (Brad I don’t remember why you decided we should do a limerick but I hope it went about as well as you were expecting)

Brad starts with me, and he’s already established a bit of an Irish theme (carrying over from the first volunteer who said she wanted to visit Ireland) and he starts with what I hear as “there once was a man from” and I love Ireland yo, I miss it, and so I’m thinking about when I went there and marched in the Dublin St Patrick’s Day parade, so I say “Dublin,” but judging by Brad’s reaction to this I now wonder if he actually said “there once was a man named” and I just have really bad hearing

Anyway, he then continues with “whose cauldron was a-” clearly setting up the next guy to say “bubbling” but this guy decides to be cheeky and say “sizzling” or something that definitely doesn’t rhyme and I’m like! What is happening! Brad sets me up to say “mouse” to finish the next rhyme of the limerick, which is what I say, and he brushes over it so fast that then I’m like yeah maybe I should have been a little more creative but it’s FINE because the next guy continues to break the rhyme scheme by saying “spouse” as the last line when he either should have rhymed with “Dublin” or whatever the other guy said. (I can’t remember it was A Lot!) For the record, a limerick’s rhyme scheme is supposed to be aabba but we ended up with abccc and you BET the guys made fun of us not knowing how limericks work for the rest of the show

They let us go after that, thank goodness, because I do NOT think I could have handled much longer of trying to direct this wild nonsense! And so they took the mics from us and shook our hands and I was Bad and fixated on Colin so I Very Distinctly remember his hand being very soft and the exact way he said “thank you so much” like! Tucking THAT one away into the back of my brain so I can pull it out in secret and remember how happy I was then when I’m having a hard time being happy in the present!

So yeah then I ran back to my seat, which was like in the middle of the third row (y’all I was so close! I could see their faces and their expressions perfect) and I had to pass by this middle-aged group of people and one of them has been drinking a little so he just goes “yeah girl great job!” (he was also cheering when I passed him the first time to go up on stage) and high fived me, and got his whole group of people to high five me as I went by askhsd

This guy, I swear, during intermission when I went to run to the bathroom and passed him again he had to cheer me again, and I’m certain I felt Hand somewhere on the tassels/hem of my sweater and I’m like SIR but I’m telling myself he was just aiming for my arm but I nyoomed too fast asjhasdh

One of the ushers also told me “good job up there” when I went by so! I feel like I didn’t really do that great but hey maybe I did!

That’s pretty much the End of my adventure! I did unfortunately have to deadname myself when I went up on stage because my mom brought me to the show, and after her last reaction to my chosen name I wasn’t quite brave enough to have Brad announce it to the world, y’know? But I actually ended up tweeting them both once I got home to say thank you, and I told them about that too, and I woke up to a like on the tweet from Colin so he at least knows my real name! And really that’s all I could ask for, this whole night was all I could ever ask for, I’m just so grateful I got this opportunity and that I’ve been strong enough to live my life long enough for this to happen to me! It was an absolute dream come true, of course I was secretly hoping that maybe I’d end up on stage but I really did think it was nothing but a dream! I never thought it would actually happen! Hundreds of people in that audience, and Brad decided to pick me!

I’m just so happy, really. I’ve been really low the last two weeks, especially this last week, but for now at least everything is good!

(Fingers crossed I can come up with some way to get over to our Rival College in January when Colin does a Hyprov show there!)