After one night, the creatives were having no more of that – day 2, we started planning our escape. Paranoid that mics and cameras were secretly embedded, a few of us flipped over a mattress, disassembled a room phone, and took down a few vent covers to ensure our plans or need for social contact were not being listened to. Nothing found, so nightly masked parties began in the fire escape stairwell. Not sure how it was done, but party stuff got smuggled up and past the hall police. It was the nightly storytelling and peeks into the other contestants’ backgrounds and design philosophies that got us thru long days in front of cameras on cold sets with milquetoast lunches.