Mission to Gygs
The first and final episode of the long-running game show Mission to Gygs, in which cast members of Mission to Zyxx compete to tell the best stories about their past jobs and side hustles.
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ALDEN: Hey everybody, Alden here with the second in our monthly series of one-off podcasts submitted by listeners like you over on our Mission to Zyxx Discord. This month's episode is from listener Potato Pete. He suggested an episode where crew members talk about jobs they've had in the past.
That's a great idea. As freelancers and comedians, we have had more than our fair share of ridiculous side hustles. Also, if you would like to submit your own ideas for these one-off episodes, you can do it over on our Mission to Zyxx Discord server, which you get access to when you're a supporter of the show on Maximum Fun.
So if you're not already and you'd like to support the show and help make Young Old Derf Chronicles possible, go over to MaximumFun.org/join. Join that Discord, say hello to all of us, and submit your ideas. So without further ado, here is Mission to Gygs.
Enjoy.
[game show theme music]
SETH: Well, hello, America. Thanks for tuning in tonight to Mission to Gygs. As you know, every weeknight on Mission to Gygs at 6 p.m. Central, 3 p.m. Pacific, three lucky contestants will compete to give the best answers to questions about their past jobs, side hustles, the weirder and more humiliating, the better. I'm your host, Seth Lind, and let's meet today's contestants. First up, Allie Kokesh.
ALLIE: Hi, happy to be here.
[pause]
SETH: Well, now that we've gotten to know you…
ALLIE: I'm sorry, you wanted more?
[Seth stutters "Tell, tell, tell"]
WINSTON: Did you think that a game show contestant would just offer the information to you?
SETH: Oh, sorry, I have this here on my card. I understand you're one of the creators of the hit podcast Mission to Zyxx.
ALLIE: I am, and proud to be.
SETH: Is there anything else you'd like America to know about you before we jump into this cutthroat game of job stories?
ALLIE: I play Dar, but I got Pleck Decksetter in the personality quiz!
SETH: Oh, wow, excellent. Our next contestant, Jeremy Bent!
JEREMY: Hello.
SETH: I understand you are one of the creators of the hit podcast Mission to Zyxx.
JEREMY: Wouldn't you know it, it's true, yeah.
SETH: Great.
JEREMY: I play C-53, but interestingly enough, on the Mission to Zyxx personality quiz, I got Bargie.
SETH: Wow.
ALLIE: Ooh.
SETH: And third, our guest, Winston Noel.
ALLIE: [laughter] Our guest, Winston, with the two contestants, Allie and Jeremy!
SETH: This is tightly scripted! Yeah. I see here you're one of the creators of, turns page…
WINSTON: Hi, Seth, glad to be here! Yes, I am one of the co-creators of the podcast Mission to Zyxx. I actually got… on the Mission to Zyxx personality quiz, I got AJ.
ALLIE: Oh!
JEREMY: Wow.
ALLIE: Wow.
SETH: Your actual character. I suppose we should link to that quiz.
JEREMY: We gotta.
SETH: In the episode notes…
ALLIE: We should.
SETH: Which… every television game show has episode notes. Alright, well, let's bring up the scoreboard here. We see zeros all around on the scoreboard.
WINSTON: Wow, you made this? Geez.
SETH: Yeah, that's tag board and glitter glue.
WINSTON: Nice touch.
SETH: Some puff paint.
ALLIE: It is, yeah.
WINSTON: Yeah. Spackle. How long did this take you?
SETH: I started this in 2002, 2003.
WINSTON: Whoa!
ALLIE: Wow.
SETH: And I've worked on it a bit each day. [rotates drill] And the reason we have a scoreboard is that this is not only a game show, it's a competitive game show. And what's going to happen is after each question… Winston, you're giving a skeptical look as if maybe just that most game shows-
JEREMY: Well, as opposed to a collaborative game show?
WINSTON: Yeah, I’m with Jeremy. It's a game show. It's competitive.
JEREMY: They're all competitive.
ALLIE: Ah ah ah! Amazing Race is a collaborative competitive game show.
SETH: Wait, that just means you have a team, right?
JEREMY: You're splitting hairs.
SETH: Not to argue against myself.
JEREMY: You're splitting hairs.
ALLIE: Okay, fine.
SETH: So: as you, our contestants, and of course our millions of viewers know, Mission to Gygs consists of a series of questions which you will answer competitively to be the most interesting, entertaining, surprising, which will be determined by your own votes. At the end of each question, you will hold up a card with the name of one of your competitors. You may not choose yourself.
[Jeremy holds up a card]
SETH: Thank you. Jeremy Bent holding up- Oh, everyone's holding up their cards. And then you will get points for receiving two votes. If it's a three-way tie, you each get one point, which is the same as getting no points, but feels a little better.
WINSTON: I'm sure this will all work out just fine!
ALLIE: Yeah.
SETH: I mean, listen, this show wouldn't have been on the air for thirty years—
EVERYONE: [laughter]
SETH: —if it weren't an airtight premise. What could go wrong? So you see the scoreboard has lots of zeros. Let me spray paint those zeros on tighter. [sprays can of paint] Okay, so let us begin.
WINSTON: Wow.
JEREMY: Classic Seth Lind panache.
WINSTON: I can see why this guy got the host gig.
ALLIE: In that prime 3 p.m. spot.
WINSTON: 6 p.m. Central? No eastern time slot?
SETH: Didn't I say 6 p.m. Eastern? Or did I say-
ALLIE: [laughter] No, you started Central time.
SETH: It's three hours earlier on the West Coast, which means they delay it.
WINSTON: Yeah.
SETH: Alright, let's begin with this question, which we call the sixty-four million dollar question.
[suspenseful music]
SETH: What is the most absurdly high amount of money you've been paid relative to the amount of labor for a gig?
JEREMY: Yeah, so I got hired once with some other comedy folks. We were making reaction videos to people's complaint tweets about the iPhone. We had been hired by Samsung to, like, troll Twitter. We were at a studio with cameras and we were going to improvise comedic responses to people's hate tweets about the iPhone. I think it was coinciding with the release of a new iPhone?
It was going to be like a three-day gig, we came in. We improvised a couple of things that I thought were like, you know, reasonably funny for branded content about cell phone hate tweets. And then some extremely serious Korean men from Samsung came into the room. They watched what we did for about 20 minutes. They left the room. And then about an hour later, we were all told they had decided to cancel the project. And then the producer immediately went, don't worry, we're all still getting paid. [laughter] And we were like, sounds like a deal, my friend.
ALLIE: Oh!
SETH: You got paid for a three-day project for being there for an hour?
JEREMY: For being there for about two hours.
ALLIE: And ruining the project.
JEREMY: Not a single thing we did ever was seen anywhere ever.
WINSTON: Really the dream.
ALLIE: Wow.
JEREMY: Yeah, honestly, if I could get one of those every month, I'd be delighted.
WINSTON: Yeah.
ALLIE: Okay, wait. I challenge Jeremy.
WINSTON: Okay.
SETH: Excellent.
WINSTON: This is how the game works…?
ALLIE: I had mostly very low paying jobs on my resume. But there was one that felt high-paying by comparison. So I was working at a temp agency and I was getting thirty dollars an hour.
JEREMY: Not bad.
SETH: Amazing.
ALLIE: This is amazing. And, but the job was I had to, three days a week, leave my apartment in Queens, travel by myself all the way to Connecticut. I don't even remember which town it was in because whatever station I got to, I then had to transfer to a cab and that cab would drop me at this estate. And at this place where they had a house manager, a nanny, and a personal trainer, they had me. I was the fourth person and my only job—and I had to spend like a full working day in this person's home three days a week—I was putting together her ancestry.com.
JEREMY: [laughter]
WINSTON: That's it. That's the stuff.
ALLIE: Yeah. And I had to go in person.
WINSTON: I was gonna say, why did you have to be on the premises?
ALLIE: Was not allowed to do this from home. Had to be there. Had to go all the way out to, I wish I could remember where in Connecticut. And I never saw the couple that I was employed by. A huge perk, however, was that they kept the pantry stocked.
JEREMY: Mmm, snacks, baby!
ALLIE: So many snacks. What I remember is they had like the little Diamond flavored almonds, you know, like those wasabi flavors, or those—
JEREMY: Oh yeah, those wasabi almonds!
ALLIE: Yes!
JEREMY: Those are good.
SETH: I literally thought you meant diamond flavored almonds. Like, wow, these people are rich. Winston, the heat is on.
WINSTON: Yeah, I don’t know if I’m going to…
SETH: These are two very solid stories.
WINSTON: So I think Jeremy might've done this with me a couple of times.
ALLIE: Oh, wow.
WINSTON: There was a random person who wanted musical improv shows performed. And it was in, like, the basement of a church?
JEREMY: Oh, I don't know that we did it together, but I did do it.
WINSTON: Yeah, and so you'd go down into the-
ALLIE: I'm sensing a collaborative competition right now.
SETH: I know, how does this work? It's sort of Jeremy's story.
WINSTON: Yeah, we've drifted into Amazing Race.
ALLIE: [smug, satisfied noise]
WINSTON: No, so we would go perform and like, it was never advertised. But I think we got paid, like, a hundred dollars to do an hour-long show and nobody was there.
JEREMY: I think I performed literally for five people.
WINSTON: Yes.
SETH: A hundred dollars per cast member?
JEREMY: Per cast member and the accompanist.
WINSTON: Yeah.
SETH: So someone's paying like around a thousand dollars to have a private musical improv show?
WINSTON: Yeah. Yeah, and five was usually like a generous crowd.
JEREMY: Yeah.
WINSTON: So I performed basically for nobody. I did it several times. So like, I must have made maybe a thousand bucks. And again, like nobody saw it.
SETH: Amazing.
WINSTON: Yeah.
SETH: Well, let us have our first reckoning. Think in your minds about the stories you just heard. Look closely at your cards.
[cards shuffle]
SETH: Has everyone made your mental selection?
ALLIE: Hell yeah.
SETH: Yeah. [cards shown] Oh, Jeremy has voted Allie.
ALLIE: I said it was both Jeremy and Winston because Winston submitted both of them.
SETH: Oh, wow.
WINSTON: I voted Jeremy
SETH:.Okay. And so that was one vote Allie, one vote Winston, one and a half votes Jeremy.
WINSTON: Oh, this won’t be complicated.
SETH: Two votes, two votes. This isn't getting complicated.
WINSTON: Half votes, yeah. We’re off to a great start.
SETH: Well, the first person on the scoreboard is none other than Jeremy Bent.
[chime plays]
WINSTON: Yeah!
SETH: I have to say Allie, in the thirty years this game show has been on the air, no one has been bold enough to vote for two people at once and you just broke the mold. That's an amazing step forward in the history of Mission to Gygs. Someone's already updated the Wikipedia entry. Wonderful.
WINSTON: You're looking at Wikipedia while you're hosting the show?
SETH: No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm here on stage in Burbank.
WINSTON: Right.
JEREMY: Wait, so it records in Burbank.
SETH: Burbank, Connecticut.
JEREMY: Oh, okay.
WINSTON: Wait, but you're still in Central?
SETH: I can set my clock for Central if I… My heart is always in Missouri.
WINSTON: [skeptical] Okay.
ALLIE: Okay.
JEREMY: I'm proud to announce that I found the emails from the Samsung event.
ALLIE: And?
JEREMY: I was paid two thousand dollars.
ALLIE: Whoa. Pew pew pew pew!
SETH: Nice!
WINSTON: Thousand an hour, not bad. Yeah.
JEREMY: Yeah, basically. Paid for my whole apartment.
ALLIE: For months.
SETH: That's amazing.
JEREMY: [laughter] That was like three months rent for me at the time.
SETH: Let's see who has something for this next question, a little question we call Wheels of Fortune. [game show music] Tell us an entertaining story about a job that involved a vehicle or driving. Wheels of Fortune.
ALLIE: Okay, so I don't drive. This is a point of contention in my marriage, actually. But I don't drive. I don't drive. But when we lived in the Netherlands, obviously the only way to get around is by bicycle.
JEREMY: You gotta bicycle.
ALLIE: I applied to so many jobs when we first moved to Amsterdam and I got no bites. Nobody wanted to hire me. I finally got a job folding towels and checking in guests to a HIIT-type workout studio. I had to upsell people on smoothies. And then when everybody left, I had to mop and vacuum and close it out and get back on my bike and leave.
And I'd go there at five in the morning and my shift ended at one. And at a certain point, I said to my husband, "why am I doing this job? I hate it." And he agreed. He was like, "I have no idea why you're doing this job." And when I quit, I never got paid.
SETH: Never?
JEREMY: Whoa.
ALLIE: They never paid me. And I used to get up at five in the morning, bike out to this neighborhood, nowhere near me and open the gym—
WINSTON: That's a trade deficit. That's wild.
ALLIE: Yeah, yeah.
WINSTON: Okay, I've got one.
JEREMY: Okay.
ALLIE: Okay.
WINSTON: Mine is, I worked at a mortgage company for summer and it was like my lovely neighbor of mine took pity on me and hired me and she had me—one of, I was doing kind of, all kinds of odd jobs. I wasn't actually doing mortgage stuff. So one of the things I ended up doing was—Her son, who I knew, I ended up driving him and his girlfriend to a pizza place for them to go on a date.
And I like went on the date with them and drove them back to their houses. So, like, I like, during the workday, she's like, "can you do this?" I was like, "yeah, sure." So I like picked her up, picked him up, drove them to Pero's Pizza, sat with them in the booth as they went on a date and then [laughter] took them home. Both to their houses.
SETH: You were—
ALLIE: [gasp] It's the sitting in the booth with them!
WINSTON: [stammering] Well, I guess I should have sat in another booth but I was like, I'm-
ALLIE: Or in the car! Wait for them in the car.
WINSTON: I think I was also tasked with like facilitating the meal. I don't know. Or like-
ALLIE: Oh, cutting up their meat.
WINSTON: Yeah, right.
ALLIE: Feeding them. [laughter]
WINSTON: I drove him around a couple other times that summer too.
SETH: Wait, how old were they?
WINSTON: I mean, he was, he was maybe like 12 or 13. So like old enough to not want to be driven by anybody. So yes, that was a, that was a driving gig.
ALLIE: I love it.
WINSTON: Yeah.
ALLIE: This is very good.
SETH: Wow. Alright. Jeremy Bent.
JEREMY: Okay, so I did this for like two and a half years. I booked a gig to be a host on a bus tour of New York City. But the trick with the bus was that they had stripped out all the seats and put them back in sideways, so that there was three rows of stadium seating inside the bus facing one wall that was all windows.
It was called The Ride and I was a host on The Ride. And there was a—we went around a specific route of Midtown Manhattan and you saw like the Chrysler Building and Columbus Circle and Carnegie Hall and all these like Midtown landmarks. And we had sort of a routine. And I was on there with another female improviser and we would be doing… sort of patter and we could play music and we could blast sound out to the street. And there were performers on the street who were part of the show.
It was truly one of the most, it was, that's probably the biggest expenditure of money I've ever been involved in. They spent so much money trying to make this work, but they did not hire anyone who had experience selling tickets to tourists.
SETH: Oh wow.
JEREMY: So for the first six months, we were doing so many rides to like ten people. Also the first month that we did it, we were hit with huge blizzards. And so the rides were taking at one point up to three hours. The show was supposed to take seventy minutes and there is no amount of improv comedy that will fill one hundred and ten additional minutes of a show. So those got pretty rough, is what I'll say. And customers were not happy about it. [laughter]
ALLIE: Damn.
JEREMY: Yeah. But the buses, they were also like… really finicky. Like the tech on them was like, it broke down all the time. The air conditioning broke down all the time, which was brutal in the summer. It was rough.
SETH: Wow.
JEREMY: But I used to know a lot of facts about Midtown Manhattan because I had-
ALLIE: Give us one right now.
JEREMY: Um… Oh, okay. Here's one. We would drive by the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. Do you know the name of the two lions outside the front of the New York Public Library?
WINSTON: Me! I know!
JEREMY & SETH: Winston.
WINSTON: Patience and Fortitude.
JEREMY: And do you know why they have that name?
WINSTON: No.
JEREMY: Those were characteristics that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia thought that New Yorkers would need to survive the Great Depression. There's a New York fact for you.
SETH: Wow.
ALLIE: Wow.
WINSTON: Well, it's funny because the ride was like, in UCB—
JEREMY: A lot of our friends were on it.
WINSTON: Everybody was—And so I applied and got trained.
JEREMY: I was going to say, I thought you did it!
WINSTON: And then it folded. I don't think I ever actually did one.
JEREMY: Yeah, because Alden was a host with me as well, as was Justin Tyler, aka Derf. Lydia Hensler, who's Squirlt in season one, was one of the hosts. She and I used to work together all the time.
WINSTON: Yeah.
JEREMY: Yeah.
SETH: Well, it's come time to vote. Now, as a recap, we began with Allie, a story about bicycling to a gym where you upsold smoothies where you were never paid. Winston Noel, chauffeur and chaperone to a wealthy 13-year-old boy. Jeremy on a failed multimedia bus tour of New York City.
ALLIE: Okay.
SETH: And?
ALLIE: Winston.
JEREMY: Winston.
SETH: Winston is on the board!
[triumphant jingle]
WINSTON: Yes!
JEREMY: I mean, The Ride was bizarre, but at least it was a job. Whereas Winston's was like… I don't know that someone should be doing that.
WINSTON: Honest day's work! Sweat on my brow!
SETH: Yeah. Yeah.
JEREMY, ALLIE, & SETH: [laughter]
[jaunty music]
SETH: This next question is something we like to call Let's Make a Dawdle, The Biggest Snoozer, Slack Channel. What is the easiest job you ever had, the longest you went without working, the most epic bout of slacking?
JEREMY: When I first got to New York, I was a temp for a long time. And some of those temp gigs were not hard. And you sort of, you know, it's like big, especially big corporations in New York, they're not paying attention to what people are—They're too big to have that level of oversight. And so I worked for Ralph Lauren, the fashion company. But specifically, I worked for a division that, like, prepared these Excel documents that would tell stores, it's like, this is how many of a store of this size is going to order of each of these garments from these collections.
I did not make the decisions about that stuff. I just updated the Excel files. That happened maybe once a day. And it would take me like a little bit to do that once they handed me the updated file. But like, when I say a little bit, I mean like an hour. And I worked there eight hours a day.
ALLIE: Wow.
SETH: Wow.
WINSTON: [laughing]
ALLIE: This is, okay, so that same temp agency that placed me with the Ancestry.com person, placed me with another person the other two days a week. And this actually I think is the best job I've ever had. So I worked for this woman on the Upper East Side. But I was hired by her live-in Dutch boyfriend who told his girlfriend, I'm hiring you a personal assistant. And so I showed up to their apartment and the Dutch boyfriend like pulls me inside and says, okay, now here's the deal. You're not actually here to be her personal assistant. She thinks you're here to be her personal assistant. You're actually here because I need you to help convince her to throw things away. And the apartment was immaculate. Like it felt so minimalist and wealthy. And then you go into her office, which is in the back and it is chaos. And every day I would show up. I would sit there. She would talk to me. Occasionally I would point out like, "hey, that lamp is broken. Should we get rid of it?" And she'd say, "no, it's very expensive. I might get it fixed." Or like if you opened her closet, just stacked full of papers. "Oh, this calendar is from 1977." "Sure is. But I might show the pictures to my grandson one day." So I worked for this woman for months. I showed up two days a week. I never once, never once got her to throw anything away. Got paid thirty-five dollars an hour.
SETH: [laughter]
JEREMY: Not even one time?
WINSTON: That’s amazing.
ALLIE: Not one time. And I'm telling you, I would be like, "you gotta throw away," like, you gotta throw this away. This is garbage. And then all of a sudden me saying that, she'd be like, "it's certainly not garbage. I gotta keep it. We gotta use it for something." And I did not have the heart to fight her on any of this, because she didn't know I was there to make that happen.
WINSTON: What happened with the boyfriend? What did the boyfriend do?
ALLIE: He was very cross with me. He was like, you're making no progress. I'm like, yeah, I’m not.
JEREMY: And he opened a gym outside of Amsterdam years later…
ALLIE: [shouting] Oh my God!
SETH: Oh boy. Winston, Winston's up.
WINSTON: Yeah, so my first job was also a temp job. And I was working at an investment bank where I made PowerPoints for them from 5:30 in the evening until 2:30 in the morning.
ALLIE: Whaaaat?
WINSTON: And then on weekends, I would do it from noon until 10:30 at night. And it was like, I would pick up like four gigs a week, you know, something like that. So my early years in New York, I had, like, very little social life because I was like working these weird hours.
And it was either that I was like working all night on a big project, or there was, like, nothing to do. I'd get, like, assigned to a banker. And they would be like, yeah, I'm still waiting on it from my boss. And then you might just sit there the entire day and do absolutely nothing. And so streaming had just kind of started. It was like, ‘06? And like, I remember watching, like, all of Heroes, the show Heroes and, like, 30 Rock, like NBC.com. I was just like, watching all the shows on NBC.com. Just watching television. It was feast or famine, but the famine, it was just like, there's nothing to do. And it's also, you're in an empty office building.
ALLIE: Until two in the morning?
JEREMY: Whoof.
ALLIE: And on the weekends?
WINSTON: Yeah, and sometimes on the weekends, and sometimes I would… sometimes I would say good night to them. I'd be like, well, see you later at like two in the morning. And then one guy, I saw him on Thursday night or Friday night. And I saw him again on Sunday. And I'm like, hey, how's it going, man? He's like, I haven't left the building. He just has, like, gone down, showered and, like, slept somewhere in the building. And it was just like that kind of stuff. So anyway, I didn't do much. Then I had another job where I fell asleep in the stock room. But I worked most of the time on that.
[jaunty, elevator music-esque tune]
SETH: Well, we would normally have a commercial break here, but we have no sponsors. So this is the point where the host gets to throw in a little story of his own. Don't worry, this one's not for competition. Can't get any votes.
ALLIE: [laughter]
WINSTON: Wait, in lieu of ads, you tell stories?
SETH: Gotta fill that time! Live show, live to tape for the West Coast. No editing.
WINSTON: Again, I'm just baffled by the logistics.
JEREMY: So many questions.
SETH: My senior year of college, we rented an apartment, like the floor of a house. And there was another unit that wasn't rented. And the landlord lived in the suburbs and didn't want to have to come in to show it?
So he said, he asked, he said, like, I'll pay you 10 bucks every time you show this apartment. But he had it dramatically overpriced. So people would come and look at it and say, "no, no, no." So it literally was like every single one was like a one-minute tops interaction. And I showed this apartment 55 times.
JEREMY: Wow.
ALLIE: Spit take!
SETH: In like a few weeks. Fifty-five times. And I wrote down the names of every person. And I remember telling him like, you owe me $550. My rent, I shared one of the bedrooms, my rent was $230. In this apartment in, in St. Paul, Minnesota. And then we were like, "what should we do?"
Like, we shouldn't just split this money. So we're like, we're going to go out to eat at the nicest restaurant in Minneapolis with like the four of us who… we went to Goodfellow's restaurant. And I remember I ordered rabbit. Anyway, awesome, awesome night out. I remember one of my friends, he said, "cheers to internet millionaires!" This was the year 2000.
WINSTON: Right.
JEREMY: They were happening then.
WINSTON: Long may they live!
SETH: Yeah, exactly. And, and then fast forward several months later, we move out. He takes that exact amount off of our security deposit.
ALLIE: No!
SETH: Anyway, but it was an easy gig while I had it. And so we went to the restaurant. Well, that's the end of our commercial break.
[music stops]
It's time to vote. And we've got "Excelling at Excel," "Failing to Declutter," and "Streaming in the Bank." Those are—
WINSTON: Well done! Okay…
ALLIE: Okay.
SETH: And vote.
ALLIE: I voted for Seth because I thought that was really good.
SETH: Wow! Breaking the mold once again, but we had two votes for Allie from the other, from the other two. So Allie is on the board.
JEREMY: I honestly think if you had even got her to throw one thing away—
WINSTON: Yep, it’s the fact that you failed.
JEREMY: —the fact that you threw nothing away for months is like, that's the best.
ALLIE: Never.
WINSTON: Uh-huh.
SETH: Well, folks, we are tied at one point each. And what does that mean? That means we go into a lightning round where it's the first person to answer with something legitimate for the question! They will get a point, and here's a question.
[trumpet-heavy, excited music begins]
Get your hands over your buzzers. A question we like to call Dress Your Luck, a fashion emergency at work.
ALLIE: Oh, buzz buzz buzz!
SETH: Allie Kokesh!
ALLIE: Look, so when I started, this is such a dirt bag thing I used to do. Pre COVID, pre COVID. I did this a couple of times.
WINSTON: [laughter] Tough, tough start. When you have to categorize it.
ALLIE: I have to be like, okay, hold on, hold on!
JEREMY: I would never do this now!
ALLIE: Okay. I, when I started dating my now husband.
SETH: Sure.
ALLIE: I, uh, sometimes unbeknownst to me after a date, I would stay over at his place, but then I'd have to get up and go to work in the morning. Of course I had nothing with me. So the scumbag dirt bag thing I used to do, I used to go into the Anthropologie that was nearby. I would find a shirt on sale. I would wear said shirt with the tag on. I'd go into work and then at the end of the day, I'd change back into my clothes and then I would return the shirt.
SETH: It's also funny that you chose one on sale. Is that just in case you couldn't return it?
ALLIE: Yes. And 'cause there was this one time where I did this, but like the tag… Okay. Again, pre-COVID! Scumbag, but pre-COVID! I was so sweaty at work that the tag, like, stuck to my body. And when I went to take off the shirt, the tag removed itself from the shirt and stuck to me.
SETH: Oh no…
ALLIE: Oh yeah, baby.
SETH: You couldn't return it?
ALLIE: I mean, I had to keep it.
WINSTON: Yeah, that one… that’s a keeper.
SETH: Alright. Allie Kokesh up on the board with the first lightning round answer.
[cheerful chime]
SETH: The next lightning question is a question we call the $100,000 Pyramid Scheme. [trumpet-heavy, excited music plays over question] Have you ever participated in an MLM? Also known as multi-level marketing, also often accused of being pyramid schemes.
[ding]
JEREMY: You mean other than UCB?
ALLIE: "Other than UCB?"
WINSTON: Whoaaa, snap!
SETH: Wow.
JEREMY: No, see, you take the classes and then you teach the classes. That's how you win.
WINSTON: Point, next question.
ALLIE: Yeah.
[cheerful chime]
SETH: Wow. Alright, point, Jeremy Bent on the board for the next one.
WINSTON: Nice.
SETH: Let's check in with the scoreboard. [spraypaint sounds] Let's see, I'm spray painting. We've got some glitter glue peeling off. Here's some numbers that are normally used to put on mailboxes. And this of course is a bit of that original Basquiat. Oh, that's not good. This is a high budget game show. We have Winston Noel—
WINSTON: Yes!
SETH: —with one point from the original round. We have Allie Kokesh with two points. One in the original round, one lightning round. Jeremy Bent also with two points. Heading into the end for our final question, our final lightning round question here in Mission to Gygs, streaming live into the bank. The Out of Stating game! What is the strangest gig that you needed to cross state lines for? [cheerful chime] Winston Noel.
WINSTON: I performed at a mattress convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. I performed with the group Improv Everywhere, Charlie Todd and Cody Lindquist. They were the hologram hosts in season five of Mission to Zyxx.
SETH: Themm and the Holograms?
WINSTON: Themm and the Holograms. And so they would do this thing where they had an interrupting musical. So, somebody would be speaking and then there would be musical interruptions. Like somebody would just start singing and it was like a keynote speech that turned into a musical number. So this was for Surda's Salesperson Mattress Convention. So it was like mattress salesmen from the Midwest, like all wanted to eat steak and play golf. And they're watching the keynote and I start singing different lyrics to Tomorrow from Annie. And that's the first song. And we did five others that weekend. We kept coming up over and over again. And the funniest, one of the hardest I've ever laughed in my life was they were like debuting a brand new mattress. And it was called The Perfect Day. And they're like, and this truly happened. "They said, ladies and gentlemen, The Perfect Day." And this mattress is unveiled, hoisted 40 feet into the air. None of this is a lie. Pyrotechnics, flames like 20 feet high, like fireworks inside went off. Confetti cannons went off. And it's like an inert mattress being just, like, lifted up into the heavens? All the mattress salesmen are on their feet clapping for this mattress that they're going to sell. And then a scrim falls down and it's like six of us and we're all clapping our hands above our heads. And we start singing a changed version of Kool & The Gang's Celebration called Celebrate The Perfect Day. And Eugene Cordero, who is a great performer, was on The Good Place. He's just, if you've seen him, you're like, yes, he's the best.
JEREMY: Yeah, Lower Decks, yeah.
WINSTON: Yeah, and he was like leading it, this one. And he had like an inflatable saxophone. And he was like, "nobody look into my eyes. Let's just do this and get it over with." And so we all like did it. And it was just like, we were all laughing because it was just so crazy. We were, it was a three day gig and we were in Las Vegas and that is me traveling over statelines.
SETH & ALLIE: Wow…
[cheerful chime]
SETH: Wow. And that dear viewers, dear contestants, means we have the first ever three-way tie in the history—
WINSTON: Really? The first ever three-way tie?
SETH: The first ever three-way tie.
ALLIE: In thirty years!
WINSTON: In thirty years…
SETH: In thirty years on the air. You'd have no reason to know this because it's the first time in the history this show’s has ever happened, but when we do have a three-way tie, you each get a chunk of this scoreboard. [begins sawing scoreboard into pieces] Be careful if you get the piece with the Basquiat in it.
JEREMY: Mm.
SETH: You don't seem excited about the prize.
WINSTON: I mean…
JEREMY: I mean, I mean, I guess if it was a whole Basquiat, I could do something with it, but…
ALLIE: Yeah, like never work again.
JEREMY: And it's not even a whole scoreboard.
SETH: It's true.
JEREMY: I can't score my own things at home.
SETH: You guys, these are such great stories. Thank you for enduring this amazingly rickety game show premise.
WINSTON: I mean…
ALLIE: We loved it.
WINSTON: Here's the thing.
JEREMY: I didn't even tell one of my weirdest stories!
WINSTON: I know, I was like, I still got a couple in the back pocket.
ALLIE: I know!
JEREMY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ALLIE: I didn't even get to talk about how I used to write the weather forecasts as a sassy cat.
JEREMY: Yeah. I didn't talk about how I got to be a digital 3D face at an ad convention and I got a girl's number.
ALLIE: Oh, hell yes.
WINSTON: I didn't talk about how I was a substitute gym teacher at the Nightingale School on the Upper West Side.
JEREMY: I didn't talk about getting paid to fake propose to someone!
WINSTON: That's a good one. I didn't talk about how the startup I worked at was shut down by the Supreme Court.
JEREMY: Whoa!
ALLIE: I didn't get to talk about how I worked for Jay Leno.
JEREMY: Just polishing cars at the garage?
SETH: Well, I mean, those would be amazing stories if Mission to Gygs hadn't, and I just got this news, just been canceled.
WINSTON: Oh no!
ALLIE: [hysterical laughter]
SETH: It's awkward since this episode is still-
WINSTON: Wait, in every time zone or just Central or?
SETH: So far it's-
JEREMY: Just the live show or the live show and the tape?
WINSTON: Right!
SETH: So far it's canceled in Central. It's tape delayed. I suppose they could change their mind before the tape delay.
WINSTON: Yeah, before it hits the West Coast!
JEREMY: There's a window! There's a window.
SETH: Yeah, yeah. It's awkward that they're canceling it mid-broadcast.
WINSTON: Was it because of the tie? Was it because of the tie? Was that too much?
SETH: It's because Jay Leno is the executive producer and that was not the right response.
WINSTON: Remember Allie? I remember Allie!
ALLIE: Oh…. [Jay Leno impression] Have you heard about this?
JEREMY: [Jay Leno impression] Hey Allie, have you heard about this?
[slightly sped up jaunty, trumpet-heavy music underscores outro]
SETH: Well, a big thank you to Potato Pete on the Mission to Zyxx Discord for suggesting this idea for our episode. We'll be back next month with another out-of-character episode leading up to The Young Old Derf Chronicles premiering later this year. We'll of course have new episodes for supporters that'll come out on the Maximum Fun bonus feed. So please, if you haven't supported yet, go over to MaximumFun.org/join. You will get all sorts of amazing things.
WINSTON: Thank you, listeners!
JEREMY: Thank you.
SETH: See you soon!
WINSTON: Bye!
ALLIE: Bye!