You walk into a restaurant, a hostess seats you and a waitresstakes your order, but what you don't know is, neither of them worksfor the restaurant.
So while you're waiting for your food to arrive, they're busyworking on a scheme.
The main objective -- to make a fool out of you on their hiddencamera show.
Situations like this abound on Girls Behaving Badly, an Oxygennetwork series, now in its third season.
The all-female cast prank show, which airs Sunday at 8 p.m.(CST), has been a hit with both women and men. The quirky group ofwomen consists of: Chelsea Handler, Melissa Howard, ShondrellaAvery and Kira Soltanovich.
Soltanovich, the newest cast member, has been with the showsince the second season.
Her behavior in the past actually parallels her behavior on theshow, she said.
"I never knew there was such a perfect job out there for me,"Soltanovich said. "It's really right up my alley. It's all aboutpulling pranks on people and seeing their reactions."
She grew up in San Francisco after she and her parents emigratedfrom the former Soviet Union.
The prankster has been commanding attention since grade school.Although she said, she wasn't one of those kids who wanted to befunny, it just happened.
"I really just wanted to get into trouble," Soltanovichsaid.
So of course, her decision to become a comedienne wasn'tnews.
It was more second nature.
"I knew and everyone else around me knew," she said. "It was nosurprise to anyone."
Since then, she has performed at countless comedy clubs andcolleges across the country. She has been featured in comedyfestivals, showcases and competitions.
Behaving Badly has exposed Soltanovich to a wider audience.
Soltanovich said the people in the pranks aren't usually thebutt of the jokes.
"We're the ones actually making fools of ourselves," she said."We never want to make people uncomfortable."
Except maybe the guys. She said they like putting them instereotypical situations.
Almost always, a guy is either lured into making a music videowith beautiful women while his boss watches from another room, orasked to look at a lineup of stripper-esque women on posters, oneof which is always his mother or girlfriend.
Soltanovich said her favorite prank is when she and Avery gointo clothing stores and try on tight clothes. They twist, turn andbend in front of the mirrors taking in every possible angle, whilea guy looks on in horror.
Then the questions come -- "Does my butt look big in this?" or"Do I look fat?"
The guy, speechless, comes up with something, "Maybe pull itdown a bit," he said.
It's obvious he wants to burst out laughing seeing her squeezeinto a size two miniskirt or extremely tight pants with a bustedseam.
In real life, however, she said her guy/girl situations aren'talways as funny.
Once after a show a guy came up to her and said "You're reallyfunny for a chick."
Soltanovich was stunned, she said.
"You're really funny for an ***hole," she said in rebuttal.
It's even stranger when she's asked out for a date. Usually theguy thinks he knows her because she's on TV, but rarely do peopletake her serious, she said.
"I had 18-year-old soldiers asking me out," she said referringto when she performed for troops oversees in Japan. "I'm 30. Ihaven't had an 18-year-old buy me a drink since I was 12."
Aside from her dating experiences, life for Soltanovich seems tobe normal. And it's possible she gets her funny bone from herfamily.
"My family still has a little of that old immigrant'smentality," she said. "My mom is really superstitious. She has thisfear where you're not allowed to go back into the house once youleave if you forgot something. She thinks something bad will happento you."
And of course, Soltanovich was never allowed back into the housewhen she was a kid.
But to make matters worse, she would always leave her lunch boxor jacket behind.
She said her mom would yell from the apartment, "No don't comeinside," and then she would drop Soltanovich's things out of thethird-story window.
"I would have like zipper lacerations all over my face," shesaid. "But don't go in the house, because something bad is going tohappen, right?"
Though things are currently going well for her on the show,Soltanovich said she'll always stay true to her first love.
"I will always be a stand-up comic," she said. "When you're astand-up comic, you're everything. It's a different feeling alltogether. You are autonomous."
