It’s always a joy to support the vibrant creative community here in Las Vegas, so with that in mind I headed last week to the fun “Piece of Me” 80s Prom Murder Mystery Dinner, a benefit at downtown’s highly cool Millennium Fandom Bar.

The event raised funds for the cast of the new “Piece of Me” murder mystery/dark comedy web series about the COVID-19 pandemic—the pilot for which is now streaming on IFT Network—and The Shade Tree of Las Vegas which assists the women, children, and pets at their shelter who’ve survived domestic violence, human trafficking, and homelessness. Watch the “Piece of Me” trailer here. All six episodes will eventually stream on IFT, an online  platform for indie films and off-Broadway plays, later this month: http://www.iftnetwork.com

I caught up at the event with Darlene Dalmaceda, the producer, actress, and screenwriter who owns ACE Vegas Studios, an independent film production company. She wrote most of “Piece of Me” (collaborating with another screenwriter, Randall Potts) and stars in it as Lisa, the main character.

What exactly inspired “Piece of Me” which was filmed in Vegas and directed by Nicholas Grant?

“It’s based on a real-life incident right before the pandemic when a nerdy young pizza delivery driver came to my door and asked me all kinds of inappropriate questions that creeped me out,” said Dalmaceda. “After I called and complained to the female manager who seemed to know who I was talking about, I wrote the first draft of the pilot. I put it away for a while, but when the pandemic hit, I decided to create a limited web series about it. I couldn’t work on my bigger scale projects because of the Covid restrictions that were in place last year, but I still wanted to do another film project, just on a smaller scale.”

Dalmaceda went on to elaborate that “Lisa is a paranoid young woman who takes social distancing to the extreme. She’s being stalked by an obsessive pizza delivery driver while under quarantine at her apartment and must figure out a way to escape from him, even if it ends up in murder.”

The pandemic has definitely kicked all of our collective asses, and in some cases inspired creatives like Darlene Dalmaceda to use it as a thematic jumping off point for their projects. With “Piece of Me,” Dalmaceda has created a dark comedy designed to get under your skin and follow you around like a stalker.