following up on the "what am I doing today?" thread...
So a few weeks ago I get a casting notice from one of the local theaters I've worked at before looking for improvisers to take part in a police training scenario. I checked the calendar and it was on a lull in the production schedule, sounded interesting and I figured worst case I'd get lunch out of the deal, so I responded.
Cut to a couple weeks later and we meet Officer Carmen from the Daytona Beach PD who, in addition to having a real familiar energy i can;t quite put my finger on, is a former jock turned theater kid turned cop who has found a way to make his theater background work for his new job.
So we do some auditions for him and he casts five terrorists and five hostages who will be taking over this theater and making demands of the hostage negotiation team. I get the role of the main terrorist's brother, who starts our all gung-ho but eventually gets cold feet and decides it got too real and tries to cut a deal without my brother knowing (spoiler alert, we all got shot before any deal could be cut. apparently the only deal on the table was DIE).
Two of our actors were also former Army, so they were busily constructing barricades at various points of entry and creating booby traps, which officer Carmen generous brought along and helped us wire up and funnels to control their movement should they enter.
So today we go through the exercise, and the responding cops were not expecting this to be a fully realized scenario. They were expecting their trainer buddy, Officer Carmen, to answer the phone, so they had a female officer who apparently has a flirty relationship with him make the call. But when my brother and I answered and started making demands I think they had to switch gears in a big hurry.
Before long another negotiator was on the phone, although mostly they were stalling and not really negotiating. We hung up on them several times because they were just giving us platitudes and no real answers and we had a woman bleeding in the theater and several hostages getting antsy.
Turns out they really were stalling because while we were still on the phone SWAT came in HARD and just started greasing everyone. I had my hands up immediately and got shot by at least two dudes. So, uh, I guess we know Daytona's policy on negotiating with terrorists.
One of the demands we made was media coverage, and specifically Claire Metz, who is a (now retired) local news personality of some renown. One of our guys ended up holed up in the production booth and i think his final words were "The next sound I hear better be the voice of Claire Metz" before he got shot. the punchline there was one of the cops actually knew Claire and got her on FaceTime just as Joe got wasted. Poor bastard.
Anyway, that was fun. Having several ARs pointed at your head is certainly an adrenaline booster, even if they do have chamber flags in them.
This is the young lady who originally tried to talk us down. I said some awful things to her on the phone. She didn't hold a grudge (I hope).
