It's in My Fake Blood

From Rachel:

For my first job out of college, I worked at the haunted house at Navy Pier. The casting process was awkward enough because they behaved as though you'd just won the acting gig of your life, when in reality they'd cast you if you could act like a cartoon and pass a drug test.

I remember them holding my headshot and saying, "Why haven't we seen YOU before?" and I sort of mumbled, "Oh, I just got out of the acting program at Northwestern," wanting to say, ". . . where I took a special class in haunting."

The house had many Disney-esque rooms full of moving parts, flashing lights, and special effects all cued to a soundtrack. Every day, you'd be assigned to one of your potential roles (Real Estate Agent with Knife through Head, Scared Librarian, Evil French Chef, etc.), and you would do your lines in tandem with the house's track. That meant doing a ninety-second scene followed by a thirty-second break that allowed "guests" to move into the next room.

Overall, a silly but often fun job – until the week before Halloween. As the weather got colder, the staff got sicker, and anyone who could work got overtime. We couldn't count on breaks at the end of the night since the house had to keep running until everyone in line got through, and the hours of repetition started to feel like a bright and shiny purgatory. As the crowds grew, it would take the entire thirty-second break for them to clear the room, and then you'd be bombarded again. Even with microphones, most of us lost our voices – one duo of French Chefs resorted to miming and smearing fake blood on each other's faces instead of saying their lines. 

On Halloween weekend, I played a chef – with no partner, since we were so short-staffed – and took to hiding behind a door during the thirty-second break so I could suck on a Halls that I kept in my pocket. After days of heavy crowds, my whole body, but especially my voice, killed, and I was more than a little slaphappy. At one point I lay down on the floor just to get off my feet for a second and did some zombie sit-up action when the crowd came in. The tech guys who watched us on monitors thought I'd passed out and almost stopped the house.

I hadn't, but I was so out of it, going on impulse, that when a little kid held a plastic spider ring up to me and yelled, "Cook my spider!" which sounded more like, "Cook mah spahdow," because he was just that adorable, I snatched it out of his hand and stuck it in my mouth, making a big show of gnawing on it. When I spit it out and looked back at him, he looked not so much scared or upset as stunned. 

I went on autopilot until he left the room, thinking both that he might at any second start crying and that he might have some terrible child disease that I'd happily put in my mouth. Gross. 

Beware the Venison Chorizo

Or, How To Survive as a Vegetarian on Tour in Montana

Weathered by Greg:

I was working as a sound operator/roadie with a production of "Always... Patsy Cline" that was touring Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado.  The day before a show in Sheridan, WY my buddy Dave from Bozeman served me some venison chorizo he'd had made from a deer he'd hunted earlier in the season.
 
It was about halfway through the first act, during "I Fall to Pieces," when the worst case of food poisoning I'd ever had set in.  I barely made it to the restroom at intermission and somehow got through the second act, despite intestinal distress equal in intensity to the nearby geysers of Yellowstone.  Needless to say, I have less than happy memories of the Sheridan Best Western where I spent the rest of the night in agony.
 
This was early January and the whole next week we were up on the High Line, across the remote and lonely Highway 2 in northern Montana just a little ways from the Canadian border.  We did 11 shows in 6 days in 7 different towns.  In the heart of cowboy country, I couldn't stand to even look at a piece of meat.  If not for veggie sammies from Subway, I would have perished alongside a cow skull somewhere outside Chinook.