Corporate Acting Gigs

Did I have to wear that outfit? I'm sure that's the first question you ask yourself when you see that picture. And the answer is yes. We were outside the WGN building on Michigan Ave. acting as mimes and encouraging passersby to sit in these ergonomically amazing superfly chairs. One of them is worth $10,000. At least that's what the marketing company was telling everyone. And it was used in the new Star Trek movie for Captain Kirk to sit on. As well as the Bond movie. It sounds neat. But after about 2 hours of an 8 hour day, you start to wonder if you are selling out by allowing yourself to get paid to dance around in an astronaut suit whilst sweating your ass off and manuevering a stick attached to your back coming above your head that says "Now more then ever." What does that even mean? And for office furniture? The beginning of the gig was fun, we were hired to do a comedy act every hour. That started out as we thought, but eventually faded and they really expected us to harrass people and pass out flyers instead of what we were actually hired to do. This didn't surprise me, the job description is often misleading. Once you get there, and the big guys are standing around nervous about their big marketing launch, they get micromanagerial and ask you do retarded things like play with some balls that they brought along because they thought that would look cool. While it makes me cringe to be treated like a monkey, when the metrosexual Igor with black dapper tap shoes and his stone washed jeans approached me and said "here play with these" I couldn't help but laugh in my head that he had just asked me to play with his balls. My feet hurt at the end of the day and I was pretty sure I might die, but I went back the second day anyway. We ended up getting rained on and went home early, thank goodness. It's amazing what companies are willing to pay in order to get their name out there. Some people laughed at us. Others sat in the chairs willingly. And a homeless man tried to spit on us. I couldn't really blame him. While the money was good for us, we were kind of being assholes.