I have to confess an ugly secret: watching people getting scared brings me so much joy. Scaring people and people falling down. OMG, if a person falls from being scared, it’ll keep me laughing for minutes. I am, in fact, a very good sport about being scared, which is helpful because I am so easy to scare, so everyone does it. All of this is to say that I could totally hang with Yara Shahidi and her mom. Yara was on The Tonight Show promoting her show, Grown-ish, when she discussed how her family is all about pranks. After she and Jimmy Fallon played his game Catch Phrase, she sat for her interview and talked about still being traumatized from a time in her childhood when her mother hid under her bed and grabbed her feet.

I saw your mom backstage and she’s so sweet, I love her. But you told me it’s not the same at home, that you guys love playing practical jokes on each other. Are you a practical joke family?
One thing that has really stuck with me, all my life, is the fact that my mother – I love her – hid under my bed and I was walking from the bathroom, so she must have been under there for like a second, she grabbed my ankles. I was terrifying and I may or may not still check under my bed. But you know, I could be nothing but impressed because the level of commitment that that took…

How long was she under there?
I have no clue, to this day. But it’s what I aspire to be able to accomplish

So, yeah *waves hands at the screen* these are my people. I am so inspired by this story, I intend to go to my daughter’s room to see if I can fit under the bed as soon as I am finished writing (my son was clever enough to get a platform bed… but he still has a closet *evil grin*). I feel compelled to include the cautionary note that you not try this at home if you have family members who hate being scared or, you know, a heart condition.

Yara tells a story following the ankle grabbing about convincing her younger brother that “collagion” was an actual word and defined it for him, something he believed for years and subsequently got all his friends to believe. He found out it was not a word one day during a car ride when Yara said, “remember that time you thought collagion was a word?” and it was only then that he’d realized it wasn’t and he’d been duped. Again, this spoke to me because my parents and brothers did this sh-t to me all the time. And I still find out of their deception when they start a story with, “remember when you believed {fill in the blank}” – To. This. Day.

My whole family is getting together in a month. I best start plotting now.

Photo credit: YouTube and WENN Photos