VANCOUVER, BC: JANUARY 08 2012 -- Participants in the No Pants SkyTrain ride
Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann, PNG
Nobody said anything when the two young men boarded the Canada Line at the Waterfront station wearing everything but their pants.
A father and his teenage son across the car kept stealing glances in their direction.
A man with a suitcase looked puzzled when he saw the men sitting cross-legged in their underwear, a zebra pattern showing beneath one of their jackets.
Two women stared hard into their smartphones.
It wasn’t until the pantless pair got off the train two stops further on that the conversation started.
One man said he had previously seen more than 100 people — both men and women — in their underwear on Georgia Street.
Earlier, on the Waterfront platform, Donald Seabury was equally puzzled. “I don’t really know what’s going on,” he said. “I just saw a guy pulling his pants off.”
What he and other confused travellers didn’t know was that Sunday was the date of the No Pants SkyTrain Ride, coinciding with similar no-pants subway rides in cities around the world, including New York, Amsterdam, Jerusalem and Toronto.
The ride is an offshoot of Improv Everywhere, a movement that started in New York in 2002, according to the event’s Facebook page.
Nearly 260 people signed up on the event’s Facebook page to take part in this year’s event in Vancouver.
Following the page’s instructions, about 100 fully clothed people, mostly under 30, gathered below the escalator at the Broadway SkyTrain station.
Many wore nervous grins as they talked to reporters, and filmed each other on their smartphones. One couple wore large sunglasses, and had their hoodies pulled over their heads.
At around 1:30 p.m., the crowd surged up the escalator and onto a train heading to Waterfront. When the doors closed, the flash mob flipped off their shoes and pulled down their pants.
One young man in half a business suit checked his email, while passengers eyed his maple leaf pattern boxers.
At Waterfront, a middle-aged man stepped off the crowded train wearing a purple dress shirt, an overcoat, black shoes and little else. He tried to convince a person near him that a late night and a forgetful morning caused him to leave his pants behind.
Once he got on the SkyTrain, it was too late, he said.
The event rules tell participants to act “as you normally would” — read a book or a newspaper.
“If questioned, tell folks that you forgot to wear pants,” the rules state. “Insist that it is a coincidence that others also forgot their pants.”
Most importantly, the rules say, be nice, friendly and “normal.”
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Pants+SkyTrain+Ride+2012+catches+riders+with+their+pants+down/5964952/story.html#ixzz1jFCVmlmo
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