Making your own fun . . .

I've spent a lot of time on the road over the last five years cramped up with a lot of other people. Besides just speaking, and stand-up, I performed on the Northwestern College summer drama ministry team for two summers, driving around the country in a 15 passenger van for up to 8 or 10 hours a day. I've driven hours upon hours with the Sioux Falls crew, and spent many a night on an air mattress-crowded floor with seven or eight other people. After a while, monotony of travel, lack of sleep, and close quarters on bad beds can make you go a little nutty and get a little tense. I've always taken it upon myself on trips to loosen things up a bit. My main choice of action is the practical joke or dare. So I figured I'd take a moment or two and share some of my favorites from over the last several years - at least the ones that are fit to print.

The Dare / Exploding Cigarette
On one of the drama ministry tours, right in the middle of an extremely long van ride, our group stopped to eat at a McDonald's in the middle of Podunk, Nowhere. I was eating at a table with my wife Andrea, and a good friend Tonya (now Tonya Folkerts).

Dares are always really big with me on gruelling trips. I like to challenge people to crazy things for either small amounts of money, or I'll guarantee them I'll do something even crazier than the challenge I pose. I never plan on winning the bets. Part of the fun is finding a challenge that's crazy, but just easy enough for the participant to accept. Then, not only do they do something crazy, but they get to watch me do something a little nutty too. It can liven the whole group up.

So we're sitting there, and we look out the window, and there are these two teenage girls who can't be more than 14 apiece, sitting outside at a table, smoking cigarettes. After a lengthy conversation over hamburgers about how unappealing these two girls are, I dare Tonya to go outside and bum a cigarette from them. I tell her I'll give her two bucks.

Tonya quickly agrees, but I tell her that's not all. There's a large, round (about a foot in diameter) rubber adverstisment on our table (sticky on one side, with a picture on the other) advertising the new McDonald's milkshake. I tell Tonya she has to peel the ad off the table and wear it on her stomach. She does. We watch. The girls give her a wide-eyed surprised look. And Tonya gets a cigarette.

So now we're in the van, I give Tonya her two bucks, and she says, "Well, I guess I'll throw it away, I don't smoke." That's when the great idea hits. Someone has brought along on the trip these things called "Cigarette Loads". They're basically these little white firecrackers you can hide in the end of cigarettes to make them explode after the person's lit them and puffed. We have several smokers on the trip, and we've been waiting for an opportunity to slip them one, but we can never get our hands on their cigarettes.

So Tonya loads it up, walks over to a smoker on our team named Solomon, explains the teenage girl dare, tells him it was funny but she doesn't smoke, and offers him the cigarette. He kindly accepts and we watch as he walks off a bit from the van and lights up.

Now, these loads are pretty small, so we're not expecting much - maybe a small *pop*. Well, about five seconds into the smoke - BANG - like a black cat going off. Sol drops the cigarette and just backs up like he's been shot. We were laughing so hard from the van and feeling so content at such a string of great jokes.

Frozen Toilet
Another drama ministry trip - we're in Traverse City Michigan over a spring break. The drama team is rehearsing a play on the main stage, and I'm sitting in the empty auditorium watching because I'm not on the trip for drama, just stand-up. So I'm sitting there, bored out of my mind, and sitting next to me is the theater director's son, Joseph.

I lean over to Joseph and ask him if he wants in on something good. He does. I lead him back to our two suites that we're staying in (the guys in one, the girls in the other) and we walk out to the patios. Luckily, we find the girls' patio door open, so we let ourselves in. I tell Joseph to find a bucket of some kind, and he comes back from the kitchen with a big plastic bowl. Michigan is in the middle of this huge snow storm, so we make trips back and forth outside collecting snow - which we then kindly deposit in the girls' toilet until it finally tops off. We pack it down hard, put the bowl back, let ourselves back out the patio door, and head back to the auditorium.

Later in the afternoon when we're all back in our rooms watching TV, we hear a scream from the girls' side. We all rush over and find one of the girls, Crystal, standing in the kitchen in a very panicked state. "What's wrong?" everyone asks. Crystal tells us that when she sat down on the toilet a second ago, something "bit me!"

Well, it was just the snow (now ice) giving her a little frost nip, and the greatest part was, that even though Joseph and I were the only two people on the tour who could have slipped away from the rest of the group, the girls are blaming the other guys in the group. Perfect.

Underwear Ninjas
I ran out of underwear during the middle of the week three years ago at the SERVE project in Sioux Falls, SD. I had come to SERVE in the middle of a summer drama tour, and hadn't had time to do laundry. It was Thursday, we were all tired as all get out, and I decided that instead of tracking down a laundry machine, I'd just buy more underwear.

We head to Walmart, and I grab a pack of boxer briefs. (Which was pretty fun in itself because I'd forgotten what my size is, so Mark Elgersma actually checked the pair I was wearing, while I was wearing it, in the middle of Walmart.)

We get back to the van, me and Mark in the back seat, and Troy Kooima and Dawn Ryswyk in the front seats. Now, I've figured out this little trick that only works with boxer briefs. If you put your head through the waist and one leg so that you're wearing it like a turtle neck with the leg pulled up over your nose, and then take the other leg and bring it down over the top of your head leaving only your eyes open - you look like a ninja.

We (Mark and I) decide we all need to be underwear ninjas, so we hand a pair around to everyone. Dawn quickly removes hers though after Mark and I ponder about whether or not it was the pair I tried on in the store.

Now we're all driving along on our merry way, making up great underwear ninja names for ourselves (Skid-Mark, Blue Flame) when we pull up to a stop light and Dawn points out to Troy (who's driving) that there's a cop on our left.

Troy freaks, because he's a guy who never wears a seatbelt, so he goes, "Oh, crap!" and starts struggling to get his belt on before the cop looks over. Right when Troy snaps it into place, the cop looks, the light turns green, and we take off. Troy lets out a big "Whew!" And Dawn says, "Yeah, I'm really sure he was noticing your seatbelt when you and two other guys in the car ARE WEARING UNDERWEAR ON YOUR HEAD!"

He didn't pull us over, so it must not have been the wierdest thing he'd ever seen.

Till next time,

Jason