Month: June 2022

That’s right. It’s June, and that means I’m once again heading up to Gay, Michigan, to chill for a week of isolation with my friends. You know what you can do while I’m gone? You can read my Radish serial, Taken By The Alpha King, which has hit 2.5 MILLION views!

I will return rested, with more freckles than I had when I left, and ready to rock, in a week.

Have you seen the absolutely bonkers show I Was Prey? I started watching it on Discovery+ and I became hooked. The marketing explains that the show “recounts the hauntingly true stories of people who found themselves in a life or death situation, face-to-face with a dangerous animal.”

What they should have said was, “recounts the hauntingly true stories of people who made fucking terrible choices and ended up getting mauled by something. Come look at this guy’s stump.”

The formula of the show is pretty simple to understand. An episode tells two stories, cutting back and forth between them to keep viewers on the edges of their proverbial seats. Most episodes are what Mr. Jen calls “surf n’ turf,” because one tale will take place on land (a bear, for example) and the other in the water (almost certainly a shark), and they’re told in first person by the, well, prey. While bears, sharks, and gators lead the pack, you also get the occasional moose or hippo. Frequently, the stories are pretty hilarious. One time, a raccoon pulled a lady’s pants down. Another time, a man was shot twice by his son-in-law while being actively mauled by a grizzly (“Skeet saved my life,” the man tearfully recounts about the man who, I cannot possibly stress this enough, shot a person being attacked by a grizzly bear. Twice). A scientist with knowledge of animal anatomy shared the stunningly bad-ass realization he had while a shark ate his legs: “I know how to get that eye out.”

The gentleman did, indeed, go on to rip a shark’s eye out.

While the individual circumstances of the stories are what really make them pop (a man bitten by a rattlesnake realizes he left his cellphone in his locked truck; a ranger decides that today is a good day to leave the bear spray at the office), there are a lot of common themes and events that occur in each episode and that’s part of what makes it fun to watch. It’s one thing to laugh at the misfortunes of another (in my defense, these people survived), it’s another to be able to indulge in running jokes with the people who watch the show with you. It gives it that extra bit of oomph to place hypothetical bets on whether or not this shark attack segment will result in a dramatic stump revelation, or if the mountain lion’s breath will be described as smelling like death.

These hallmarks of the show give Mr. Jen and I so much joy, we decided to make I Was Prey into a drinking game. Lately I just haven’t enjoyed drinking alcohol. I do, however, enjoy watching I Was Prey while apocalyptically high, so I’m turning this into an edibles game. If you live in a place where you have legal access to marijuana-infused edible treats, consider the following recommended “doses” of treats for each event.

Unofficial and Unaffiliated I Was Prey Edibles Game
Every time one of these events occurs, take the suggested dose of THC. You will get fucked up.

• “It seemed like a lifetime.” Any time the survivor describes time as slowing/freezing/standing still, says it felt like a lifetime (“I was only under the water for probably thirty seconds… but it felt like a lifetime.”) or an eternity, take 5mg.
  
• When the survivor mentions how bad an animal’s mouth stinks, take 5mg. If they specifically mention that it smells like “rotten meat” or “death,” take 10mg.
  
• When an episode isn’t a surf n’ turf, i.e., if there are two attacks on land and none involving water or vice versa, take 20mg.
  
• When the animal returns after the initial attack to strike again, take 10mg for the second attack, 5mg for each subsequent attack.
  
• “Suddenly, I’m on the ground.” When the survivor describes being knocked down by the land predator, take 5mg.
  
• “I felt something bump me.” When the survivor describes the first hit from a water-based predator, take 5mg
  
• If the episode is bearless, take 20mg
  
• If the episode is sharkless, take 20 mg
  
• If the episode has neither bears nor sharks, take 50mg
  
• “I knew I was going to die.” Take 5mg at the moment in the story that the survivor realized they were in mortal peril.
  
• Anytime the title cards are in passive voice, i.e., “Sally is being attacked by a mountain lion” instead of “A mountain lion is attacking Sally,” take 5mg.
  
• If the survivor dramatically reveals their horrible scar, take 5mg.
  
• If the survivor dramatically reveals their missing limb, take 20mg.
  
• “I could feel his teeth in the back of my skull.” Whenever the survivor describes teeth in their skull, take 5mg.
  
• When the survivor punches the animal, take 5mg.
  
• When the punches are underwater, take 10mg.
  
• When the punches do nothing, take 5mg.
  
• When the survivor is wounded by something other than the animal during the attack. For example, Skeet, who shot his father-in-law twice while the poor guy wrestled with a grizzly, or the guy who stabbed himself with his pocket knife while a mountain lion attacked him. Take 20mg.
  
• “I had to survive for my kids.” Everyone on this show has to survive for something. When they state what that thing is, take 5mg, unless…
  
• The survivor’s motivation to survive the attack is their dog. If that’s the case, take 10mg.
  
• The survivor accidentally left behind life-saving equipment. If, for example, the ranger forgot his bear spray that day, take 5mg.
  
• The survivor intentionally left behind life-saving equipment. If, for example, the ranger intentionally left his bear spray in his vehicle because he’d never needed it before, despite being deep in bear country, take 10mg

You will likely ingest between 100mg and 200mg if you find the right episode. I recommend closing your eyes, scrolling, and surprising yourself. And if you’re not into substances, making it a hydration game and take a drink of water instead of edibles. Just be careful not to get water-drunk.

Does anybody in Trout Nation watch I Was Prey? Let me know if you check out the show or try the game.

I may have picked the absolute worst show to keep a show diary for, to be perfectly honest, becasue at this early stage in rehearsals, there’s not a lot to report. Much of that is due to the fact that I’m a villager. There are only three villager scenes, so I’m not called so often. Especially since we’ve absolutely crushed our blocking in record time. Which is good, because…

Covid shut-down: Mid-week three, we shut down due to a high number of covid exposures in the cast. Not everyone turned up positive, but we took no chances. All rehearsals were shut down at the end of last week, through the Memorial Day holiday. We still have some cast members out, but a five-day quarantine hopefully mitigated transmission. I’ll be masked up until tech week because I’m not taking chances.

No one throws it back like Gaston: Dance rehearsal for “Mob Song” got me and my friend Kaleigh in a goofy mood. Maybe it was the heat of the rehearsal space? Maybe it was hearing that song over and over and over again? During the number, the female-coded villagers leave the stage while the male-coded mob goes to the Beast’s castle. With nothing to do on the sidelines, Kayleigh and I amused ourselves by twerking to the song (which we weren’t singing that night; when we’re learning a dance, we do it to a recording). The thing is, I didn’t remember that there’s a line where Gaston yells something about “grab all the booty you can find.” When that line hit, the laugh that exploded out of me was like a foghorn and an airhorn having a loud three way with a megaphone. It was completely unprofessional, immature, and so hilarious that I don’t regret a moment of it.

Our rehearsal space is so hot. Just oppressively hot. Anyone who has done theater knows that your rehearsal space is always going to be either way too hot or way too cold. There is no perfect temperature in any rehearsal venue anywhere. Yesterday, I spent our ten out in my car, blasting my pits with the a/c.

“Our ten” means our ten-minute break. Here’s some backstage lingo for yous: during rehearsals, you actually do hear “take five” or “take ten.” And when it’s over, they’re like, “that’s five,” or “that’s ten.” It’s not a cliche, it’s actually how the stage manager talks. And it can be very confusing, because you have conversations like:

Me: Hey, are we still on our ten?

Someone: Yes.

This might lead you to believe you’ve got ten minutes. But you’ve actually only got three minutes left to play Candy Crush on your phone, so the ten is meaningless. It just refers to how much time you were given.

It still doesn’t feel like this show is actually happening. Obviously, it is happening, and things are going super well. But since this was our summer 2020 show and it’s been canceled twice, I’m having a hard time believing we’re really doing it. It just became this mythical, far-off dream or something. After Sister Act: The Musical, where I was called practically every night from the first rehearsal on, it’s surreal to only have to show up twice a week. I’m looking forward to the entire cast coming together for full run-throughs, which starts during week seven. It’ll feel a little bit more like I’m actually in a show then. But honestly, having waited two years for this? I’m pretty sure I won’t believe we actually, finally got to do it until we’re tearing down the set.