After reading the Best Buy prank I wrote about a couple of days ago, I checked out the rest of the Improv Everywhere site. It made me wish I lived near NYC, so I could participate in things like that.

Among my favorite "missions":

• The Moebius, in which seven people at a Starbucks repeated a five-minute time loop for an hour
• Frozen Grand Central, when over 200 people simultaneously froze in place for five minutes in Grand Central Station
• Suicide Jumper, where a distraught man was talked down from the ledge of a building by a cop, a fireman, his wife and one of his co-workers (who bravely went out on the same four-foot-high ledge to plead with him).
• Food Court Musical, in which "employees" and "patrons" in a mall food court broke out into a Broadway-style song, complete with orchestral backing playing through the PA system
• Anton Chekov, where they staged a "Meet the Author" session with the famous Russian playwright at a Barnes and Noble - without the management's knowledge
• Look Up More, a performance art piece taking place in nearly every window of a department store building - again, without the knowledge of anyone working in the building
• Best Game Ever, in which they provided a major-league experience for a randomly selected Little League game, complete with enthusiastic fanbase, NBC sportscaster Jim Gray calling the game on a Jumbotron, and the Goodyear Blimp

...and so many more. I'll admit, "Look Up More" has significantly improved my opinion of performance art. The video of it was actually very cool.

(Kudos to Karen for the title of this post.)