M and I planned to meet up to discuss a game known as Three Rounds that we both learned from our friend, J. He, unfortunately, was unavailable to talk to me due to deadlines the past few weeks. As M and I began reminiscing about our friendship with J, M mentioned the action of jigging.

M: When I say jigging, I don’t mean the weird possibly Irish dance. In our house, jigging has a much more destructive connotation. One night at a party, J was going through some serious depression and decided he wanted to stop the music. Upset, he unplugged the speakers and yelled “the jig is up.”

L: What does that mean?

M: To be honest, I don’t know where he got that, but he’s said it before when he’s feeling awfully low. I know he mentioned it was a family thing or a friend thing. The details are slightly sketchy. Anyways, he stopped the music and pretty much told people to smash their glass bottles on the floor. Surprisingly almost everyone there did it. When I got home later that night it was like it had snowed shards of glass.

L: Was this the first time or a one time kind of deal?

M: This was really our first initiation into this club of jigging. We’ve even had jig parties before to get aggression out. It’s morphed into this tradition of anyone can yell “the jig is up” and we all go outside to smash some things.

L: In my show Basement Admission, we actually had something similar but it wasn’t called jigging. It really didn’t even have a name, but still had the same mindless destruction.

M: Yeah, jigging isn’t strictly limited to breaking bottles. It’s just uninterrupted destruction. We’ve jigged a couch apart and many boxes.

L: Do you think you’ll quit jigging once you leave that house?

M: Probably, by I know for J and Y it has become an integral part of who they are as people. They’ll probably carry that with them wherever they end up going. Anyone can jig, that’s why it is incredibly inclusive, but you never forget your first jig. It’s kind of an initiation of sorts into the depths of madness. It’s hard to explain until you really get involved doing it.