A fill-in-the-blank story about the public meeting every economic developer has survived.

Remember Mad Libs? This one is set in a high school gym at 10:15 p.m.

You’ll fill in nine blanks without knowing the story yet: a snack, a sound effect, your old high school mascot, and a few more. Then the story writes itself, and you read it out loud to the person next to you. It will be ridiculous. That’s the point.

Underneath the laughs is something true. Anyone who works in a community has stood at the front of a room where the slides say “win-win” and the crowd isn’t so sure. And sometimes the moment that matters most happens after the meeting ends, with the one person who noticed you stayed.

Fill it in, read it out loud, and then answer the question at the end together..