One of the things I like most about my job is that I never know what to expect. So this week, when I was asked to participate in the "we love Iowa State's campus swans, Lancelot and Elaine" video shoot for the university's sesquicentennial traditions video, I didn't know what to expect.
I will say my track record with this particular video is perhaps not the best. At the shoot for the first segment, in which I assisted but was mercifully not on camera, I fell down in the parking lot. So there's that.
But that was over a month ago, and I arrived at the set (Lake LaVerne) Tuesday ready to rock and roll with a fresh new confidence in my upright, sober walking abilities.
My co-worker/co-star and I were told that our first order of business was to round up the swans, who were hanging out in a corner of the lake (okay, it's a pond that is ridiculously named "Lake," but whatever) that didn't necessarily have the most aesthetically pleasing background, namely a construction site and a busy intersection. That's where I'd be if I were a swan, too. There are probably hunks of rotten gordita tossed out the car window by college students two months ago, or the remnants of Ring-Dings that were eaten on the construction site, worth munching (Elegantly munching, of course, because Hey! You're a swan. Everything you do is elegant! Even snarfing garbage off the curb!). But we had a whole bag of moldy wheat bread, so we knew we could entice them over by the tranquil and much-more-video-worthy park bench area.
And it worked. We congratulated ourselves on successfully positioning the swans for the video and were about to chill on the park bench when all hell broke loose. Two Canadian geese came seemingly out of nowhere and swooped down to scare the swans away and claim the bread. The geese are much more aggressive than the swans, by the way, and decidedly less elegant. The swans paddled their elegant butts out of there while the geese approached us on foot, rapidly and with a strong sense of purpose.
"Give me some of that moldy bread," one seemed to hiss at me. "Bitch."
"Okay, okay," I relented, frightenedly hurling crumbs in the opposite direction and speaking directly to the geese in English like a giant dork. The other goose in the pair lunged at me, and I threw a whole wad down the sidewalk. They were eating the bread faster than Sara and I could throw it. It really escalated quickly, though last time I checked I did not end up killing a man with a trident.
We were finally able to entice the geese to go another direction and were able to re-focus our attentions on luring Lancelot and Elaine (though both of the swans are male, one of them is forced to keep the name "Elaine..." sucks to be him) back toward the shore with the coveted moldly bread. Things were going quite swimmingly, and Sara even had one of the geese, let's just say for argument's sake it was Dude Elaine, eating out of her hand. That's when she turned around to get another piece of bread and about leaped out of her Cole Haans. Like some scene out of a really bad and not-at-all-scary horror movie, the geese were right. freaking. there, staring her in the face. That's right, the geese snuck up on us.
And that's the day we got mugged by geese.
