Fourteen years ago, Charlie Todd started a prank with a handful of his college friends where they rode the New York Subway with no pants on. As his project, Improv Everywhere, and vision expanded, the event became more popular and this has become an annual tradition. It had spread to dozens of cities all around the world! Last year, I participated in the DC version for the first time, and had a total blast.
This year I was very excited to do it again, especially because I had a few of my friends come with me! Unfortunately, because it was so cold, not many people came out to the DC event. The same can hardly be said for the New York sector, which with thousands of participators is hardly covert anymore!
For me, having less people doing it made it more exciting because less bystanders knew what was going on. I felt bad for my friends, though, who were experiencing it for the first time and were promised hoards of people! It actually took us a long time to even cross paths with fellow pantsless friends because we were ten minutes late and missed the rally at the park.
That didn’t stop us from having fun, though! There is something super liberating about walking around in public in your underwear. My friends were joking that I was cheating because I never wear pants anyway, so the “No Pants” ride is me every day. Touché, boys– but that’s just semantics. We all know you loved my rainbow ruffly underwear.
As I mentioned, since there were fewer people participating, the public was more confused than usual. This year I had way less people asking me what was going on and way more people stare at me, either reacting with laughter, horror, or that sense of urgency you get when you can’t get to the camera application on your phone quick enough.
We kept joking that we wanted to find more pantsless people so we could touch our kneecaps to theirs, which reminded me of Tina Belcher (from Bob’s Burgers) and how she always wants to touch butts. We ended up just touching each others’ kneecaps. (And yes, Brad’s boxers are calculators and when the lights go out the screen of each one reads “Boobs”.)
This is one of the fellow participators we ran into. As we saw each other he said “Oh my god! I’m so glad we weren’t the only ones who woke up in a strange place this morning without pants!”
Thanks to Daniel, Brad, and Ashley for coming out with me, even though Brad was running on barely any sleep!
I’ve mentioned Improv Everywhere several times before, and if you haven’t seen their documentary I recommend it with my whole heart. It’s streaming on Netflix, and it’s called “We Cause Scenes”.
If you want to read about the history of the No Pants Subway Ride you can do that here, and you can also check out the video footage they put together from the New York event this year.
You can see a little footage I took here.
The hashtags to check out on social media are #NPSR and #NoPantsSubwayRide. You can also see the DC event’s Flickr group and my post from last year.
