Free Haircut

It took about 4.5 weeks (33 days to be exact) for Sarah to tire of me.

I’ve been feeling really great about my transition to not working. Our spending is way down to account for no longer having a salary. I’ve been taking a good chunk of the load off of Sarah on the kid rearing side of things. Not to mention I get a ton of time with Sarah. Everything has been idyllic. We planted a garden of seeds in our front yard for God’s sake…and about 30% of them are sprouting.

So I was a little taken aback when on Wednesday morning Sarah suggested that I sign up to be an extra on a couple TV shows. She was so coy about it too. “Hey look! Two shows are casting extras and they need good looking guys in their mid to late 30s. You want me to sign you up?”.

Wow. Just a little over a month and she’s ready for me to go back to work. Oh well. I agreed. Sarah snapped a quick photo of me (note the amazing head of hair) and I went on with the rest of my Wednesday. Cormac and I headed out to the Y and Sarah went to a meeting at Cormac’s school.

After I dropped Cormac off at the Y day care, I did a quick email check before I started to mold my body into that of a Greek God. Quick step back — as soon as Sarah hit send on the emails earlier that morning I had forgotten about the possibility that I might be spending 12–14 hours doing very little for very little pay. I assumed that her emails to extra casting agents would enter a land of negligence or apathy and the thought of being an extra would disappear with them. However, as I sat in the Y lobby checking emails that Wednesday morning, it became apparent that both casting crews had procrastinated in gathering bodies for background people and I now had to choose between the two shows. One show paid a little bit more but was 2 full days of work while the other was 1 day and it came with a free haircut (actually a haircut that I was paid to get). Easy choice. Go with less work and free stuff. Plus, as you can see from the picture, a haircut couldn’t hurt.

That day, I showed up for a fitting and for an evaluation of my mane. The fitting was pretty straightforward then I was sent over to the hair and makeup trailer where I had the best haircut of my life by a great fellow named Lance. I saw a few actors from the show which was pretty cool and the crew was really nice.

The shoot was on Friday and it was fun to see the TV sausage being made. I met a bunch of people of all ages that were chasing their dream of being an actor or musician which was nice to see. I also got free food all day. For anyone that has worked with me in the past you know how much this means to me. My spirit animal is a vulture and free food is my roadkill.

I learned three things about being an extra during this experience…

1. There’s a lot of downtime. I’m guessing on average the days are around 12 hours. Next time I’m going to bring a better book.
2. You are more part of the set than you are an animate object. Similar to a picture frame or well maybe a well-placed napkin, you are there to make the scene look realistic but not really there to be noticed. Your name during the course of the day is “background” and you have about 40–50 brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts that are all named the same thing. You hear things like “background, shhhh” and “okay background, leave the set”. There’s not a better alternative. It does feel a little dehumanizing though.
3. Not having a cell phone sucks…

If you read this post, you know that I was gushing about the greatness of not being owned by my mobile phone for the past 3 weeks. So righteous. So free. Well when reality sets in you realize how much the world has changed and how much of a freak you are when you don’t have a phone. We had booked all of our apartments for the weekend. We planned a trip to stay at a farm outside of Athens to try out the country life. Sarah had the phone since she had all the kids which meant I had no way to get in touch with her without assistance. There was no wifi in the studio so I couldn’t email from my wifi only first generation ipad mini.

I was desperate and needed to align plans with Sarah. Many of you will cringe right now. I sucked it up and asked a fellow backgrounder if I could borrow their phone. It felt a little like I asked him to borrow his underwear. Or maybe a little like I had approached him on the street to ask for some “gas money” because my car “ran out of gas”.

I told him that I didn’t have a cell phone. He pretended to brush it off and tentatively typed in his passcode to let me call Sarah. I can only imagine that he was watching to make sure I didn’t install some weird extension in his settings so I could access his camera in the future during some personal moment then extort him in terrible ways. He was actually super nice and didn’t mind at all. The pain and discomfort was mostly from my end. It’s an inconvenience on others when I don’t have a cell phone. God, I can only imagine the boardroom at AT&T or Verizon erupting with joy at that comment. Insert evil laughter here.

The next day, I experienced another pain of not having a phone. I headed out to Bishop GA to meet Sarah with my written out directions. That’s right. I used a computer to access Google Maps then hand wrote directions like it was 2005.

And you can imagine what happens any time someone from Atlanta heads to Bishop in search of a farm house without a cell phone. I got lost. I ended up pretty close to Athens by the time I realized I was lost so I doubled back to the closest gas station.

I went in to ask the gas station attendant to point me towards Jefferson Rd. He shrugged. No other response. Just a shrug. I started to head back outside and humanity kicked in. Not one but two different dudes stopped and asked if I needed directions. They pulled out their phones, fired up GPS like regular humans and sent me on my way. I arrived around 30 minutes late. Sarah was tired from 36 hours straight with 4 kids (and cleaning two apartments) so I took them to play with the AirBnB’s family dogs (6 of them), chickens and a pig named Ziggy.

The trip to the farm kicked off the first of many sleepovers that will happen over the course of the next month. Over the course of last week and this week we will have slept in 6 different places. More on this to come but the grandparents are worried.

As of now, I don’t plan on changing my job title to “Actor” any time soon, but I probably will do some more extra work, especially if more free stuff is involved. I still don’t plan on getting a smartphone but the words “burner phone” have been tossed around. We’ll see about that…