Prank Calls Are Back, Baby

Over New Year’s, I went to Atlantis with a couple of my closest friends. And after two days of gambling, drinking piña coladas, and making sand sculptures, I suggested a new activity — well, not exactly new. Rather, a favorite pastime of mine: prank phone calling.

We called chain restaurants in the most obscure cities possible, claiming that we were stuck in their walk-in freezers: “Please hurry because I’m so, so cold!” (Sorry, Denny’s. Your pancake puppies will always be famous!) The room hummed with stifled laughter, each of us jumping in to keep the bit alive.

I don’t know much about religion or if there’s any true order to the universe. All I know is that more than a decade ago, when I was 14, I found my personal higher power: *67, the code that blocks your caller ID. Every weekend thereafter, my two best friends — a pair of twins named Brody and Bailey — and I would use our newfound anonymity to create utter chaos.

We started small, dialing up two different Pizza Huts and conferencing them in, eavesdropping as they screamed and swore at one another over who had called whom. (E.g.: “I didn’t call you!” Followed by “No, you called me?!”)

One day after school, while I was visiting the twins at the SoCal chain juice bar where they worked, we discovered the holy grail: a database with the phone numbers of every single customer with a rewards account. And when I realized that the chain had locations everywhere from Laguna Beach to Beverly Hills, my brain short-circuited from all the possibilities.

“I’m not sure we should be doing this,” Brody said, his voice quivering as his cursor hovered over Lauren Conrad’s number.

“Give me the f*cking number,” I snapped at him.

Once Brody relented, I took a deep breath, dropped into character, and dialed.

When I was 14, I found my personal higher power: *67, the code that blocks your caller ID.

For LC, I pretended to be a vocal-fried publicist from Bolthouse Productions — a nightlife company prominently featured on The Hills — who expressed alliance with Lauren’s infamous decision to skip an opportunity in Paris for Jason Wahler. She was so much more than the girl who didn’t go to Paris. When we found Tim Gunn’s number, I claimed to be a young designer with a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction. (To his credit, he was really helpful.)

The reality TV stars almost always fell for the bit, but we didn’t stop there. Sometimes, we’d randomly select a name and number, embracing the unknown. One such call connected me with a divorcee in Rancho Cucamonga, with whom I bonded over the complexities of our failed relationships. (Mine, an eight-month on-and-off-again relationship that was newly off again. Hers, a 34-year marriage that had crumbled in a matter of days.) Our conversation lasted long enough for guilt to set in, prompting me to confess. But when she laughed and told me she had also enjoyed shooting the sh*t with a stranger, I realized something. The goal of a prank call isn’t necessarily to provoke, anger, or troll. The best prank calls foster a brief connection with someone you’d otherwise never meet.

Today’s version of anonymity, mostly experienced online, feels colder and harsher. People wield it as a weapon, hurling insults or picking fights, making conversations with strangers seem more like threats than possibilities. An anonymous phone call, though, feels radically different — a spontaneous, open-hearted exchange that fosters connection instead of conflict. Well, unless you count that time I called a Red Lobster server ranting and raving about some made-up affair... only to find out he was actually stepping out on his wife and was terrified he’d been found out.

And, as juvenile as it sounds, prank phone calling was my first brush with acting as a craft. It was how I learned to improvise, to commit to a bit, to push the limits of believability without breaking. Each call was a test of my impulses, in which the stakes felt high — could I keep the story convincing? Could I ensure that I wouldn’t break and ruin the bit?

Now that acting is my actual hustle, you’d think I’d have retired *67 for good — but nope. I will continue prank phone calling until you see my name roll in an “In Memoriam” video (which will more likely air at the Razzies than the Oscars) because I refuse to take myself too seriously. And honestly, I wish the rest of the world would lighten up, too. At a time when everything has started to feel unpredictable and scary in a bad way, it’s nice to know that a silly, random moment of connection is quite literally just a phone call away.

At the end of any number you dial is a person, much like you or me. Especially me. Actually, please feel free to prank call me as much as you’d like. As nearly every restaurant worker in the greater San Diego area can attest, I deserve it — plus, I welcome anyone who can beat me at my own game.