When I was on stage with John Scalzi at the L.A. Times Festival...

When I was on stage with John Scalzi at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, we were talking about cupcakes vs. muffins, and this turned into Scalzi talking about the time he promised to cover himself with frosting on Neil Gaiman’s lawn if he reached 30,000 Twitter followers. This in turn reminded me of the time we organized a Ballerina Pie Fight (but I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t want the whole conversation to derail into frosting and other foodstuffs.) We had a dozen ballerinas, and had to make hundreds of pies – which was a whole process, involving an assembly line. Each pair of ballerinas had a pas-de-deux with pies, and then it devolved into a free-for-all. The whole thing was photographed by a bunch of great photographers, including the legendary Eric Kroll (whose photo is above.)

The way the Ballerina Pie Fight came about was because we needed a magazine cover. Annalee and I were putting out a small indie magazine called other, and every few months we had a meeting about what should be on the next cover. Every time, I would say, “Ballerina Pie Fight!” and everyone would ignore me. Until finally nobody else could think of a better idea, and so they made the mistake of asking me what I meant. I explained that we could host an event, charge admission, and get people to photograph it for our magazine cover. It would pay for itself! We lucked out, because we somehow got connected with Joanne, a movie effects wizard who had made 50,000 pies for a movie pie-fight once. She knew all the tricks, and making a few hundred pies was nothing to her. Recruiting ballerinas was also pretty easy, and we had a tutu-making party. But the CLEANUP WAS A NIGHTMARE. We put tarps and garbage bags over every surface, and it still turned out to be a huge operation to get pie filling and whipped cream out of all the surfaces. We finally got done cleaning the place at three in the morning – until someone looked up at the 20-foot-high ceiling… and saw frosting up there.

Afterwards, people kept asking me when we were going to organize another Ballerina Pie Fight, because that was so much fun. My answer was, “NEVER.”