But First, Some Comedy

From Rob:

The show was for a group of information technology programmers. They were about 200 or so of them, grouped in their cafeteria with a small stage at one end for us to perform on.

Before we got up there, the CEO took the stage and spoke in Dutch. After about two minutes of a weirdly restless but attentive audience, an audible groan of what I can only describe as disbelief roses. I asked our contact person for the show to translate what just happened.

"The boss just told everyone they're being let go next month. Hey, that's your cue. Good luck!"

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. 

A Three-Hour Dour

From Jeremy:

When I was just in Chicago for the first time, one of the first jobs I had was working at the Organic Theater box office. The theater was rented out for a production of "Gilligan's Island, The Musical." It was terrrrrible. (Sample lyric: "Hey little buddy, that's terrific. / You just spelled 'hieroglyphic!'")

But they were spending money and hiring Equity actors, and the theater was broke, so there it was. The cast was extremely game, by which I mean they tried hard. The songs were gamey, by which I mean they stank. And the book was worse. The show was panned. I'd say it was "brutalized," but all the reviews were doing was telling it like it was. Not a good show. And the houses were small, and got smaller over the eight week run.

All the actors were imports except for two of the leads. One day late in the run, I was in the box office and one of the local leads was walking in. (I'm not protecting the guilty -- I just don't remember the actor's name, and I doubt he put it on his resume.) I waved hello, but he didn't see me. His head was down, and he was muttering.

As he passed the window, I heard what he was saying, over and over. "An actor has to eat. An actor has to eat. An actor has to eat."