31 Evanston Ave.

The girls at 31 Evanston Ave. knew the boys next door were pranksters. What they didn’t know was that the ultimate prankster lived among them.

Class of 1999 alumnae Amy Zanglin Doran, Joanne Driscoll and Jodi Girodat Coyro said pranks were a staple of the house where they lived with Lindsey Spath Roth, Leslie Riley and Natalie Alfers.

It started innocently enough. The boys would steal all the toilet paper from their bathroom or take the TV remote to change the channel from the front lawn. But then things escalated. The boys started sneaking into the house to play pranks as the girls slept. 

“One morning, I remember waking up to hot sauce on my lips,” Doran said.

“They were on fire. I ran into the kitchen and dunked my face into a bowl of milk!”

Although the girls almost always came up short in their retaliation efforts, one roommate pulled off the ultimate prank on national television. But this time, the joke was on America.

Driscoll, an avid daytime talk show fan, kept the TV on in the house all day. One fateful day her junior year, she had been at the house with friend Jamie Whitehead ’99, who would often stop by as a respite from his room at Irving Commons. They sat down to watch the infamous Maury Povich Show and saw it was seeking stories of secret crushes. 

“I looked at Jamie and said, ‘Will you go on with me?’” Driscoll said. “He rolled his eyes.”

This was her chance. Driscoll called the number and left a message telling producers that six people lived in her house, which (technically) was true — five girls and one guy, Jamie (not true) — and she was secretly madly in love with him (again, not true). 

A week later the producers returned her call. They’d bought it.

“I’m pretty sure Jamie was ready to kill me at that point,” Driscoll said.

But who could pass up a free trip to New York City to be on TV? The two boarded flights and checked into their own hotel rooms. On the day of the show taping, though neither of the two were theater majors, the pair put on a good show as Whitehead pretended he had no idea Driscoll was infatuated with him.

Two weeks later, the show aired. The girls at 31 Evanston Ave. and the neighboring houses brought their TVs outside and set up chairs on the front lawn for a watch party.

When Maury Povich asked Whitehead what was going to happen when he and Driscoll got back to Dayton, he had a perfectly sly response: “With Joanne, you never really know what’s going to happen.”

Illustration by Kevin Johnson.