The following is an excerpt from my book, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life, which no, I still haven't finished and, yes, I am trying to finish. Except that I've been binge-watching all eight seasons of 24, and even for me that's unhealthy. But it does explain why I haven't posted in a while. I'm almost done, I swear. With 24, I mean. Not the book. I'm pretty far along with the book, and what follows is, I hope, a fairly representative sample. Which means that you can basically decide right now whether you want to read it or not. Provided I finish it. Fuck, I'm rambling. Here's the excerpt:
The first commercial I ever did I
was dressed up as a giant green number 5. No shit. The Texas Lottery was
launching a new game – or, as some would state it, a new way to take money from
desperate people who had a better chance of being struck by lightning while being mauled by a grizzly than
they had of winning the lottery. The game was called Pick 3, and some ad guys
in a room somewhere, who drank way too much coffee and probably never liked
actors, thought it would be a capital idea to dress ten people up in giant,
foam-rubber Gumby costumes shaped like numbers. I was the fifth of those people.
Like so. Except I was Number 5. Also, I'm not black.
I think we shot the commercial on the stage of The Majestic Theater in
Dallas. I also thought the Majestic had not been paying its utility bills,
because the A/C was off, and it was summer, and I was in a black unitard and
wearing a huge foam costume that sealed in, rather than ventilated, heat. I
later learned that the producers turned off the air conditioning because it was
too loud, and it interfered with the recording of our dialogue. That there were
ten of us in suffocating costumes, in an old theater in the middle of a
sweltering summer, with no conditioned air, seems not to have bothered – or
even occurred – to the director, producer, and ad agency folk. At least, not
until a couple of the female numbers started to pass out from heat exhaustion and
dehydration.
I was the “spokesperson” for the spot, which meant I had the most lines.
There weren’t many, as this was only a thirty second commercial. But I found it
difficult to concentrate, suffocating as I was and about to drown in my own
sweat. People who work on commercials very often have to solve problems on the
fly, because when ad agency guys think up the crazy shit they want actors to
do, they rarely pause in their brainstorming to consider potential problems.
Example: Once we all got into our costumes (no easy feat), we soon discovered
that mine had a problem. Picture the number 5 in your head. See that straight
line across the top? That was resting on top of my head, and my face was poking
out in the side wall of the 5. Except the costume was made of foam rubber, and
so the top line of the 5 drooped on either side, making me look like a very
depressed and sad number. What was needed was something to place on the inside
of the top of my costume that would keep the foam rubber straight and true.
Somebody’s ingenious solution? Glue a piece of two-by-four inside the
top of the costume. And it worked. The
top of the 5 stayed straight and true. The problem (only for me, and nobody
else) was that the two-by-four now rested on
my head. And the costume weighed in excess of twenty pounds. And I wore
that costume for ten-plus hours. I still have a groove in my head, in the shape
of a two-by-four.
I wasn’t the guy who got the worst of it that day. The dude who was
Number 0 was asked by the director if he’d be willing to try a cartwheel across
the stage – because what’s funnier than a cartwheeling 0? As we all wanted to
make the director happy (because a happy director might remember you for his next commercial shoot), our intrepid
number 0 said yes, he could absolutely
do a cartwheel across the stage. So the camera begins to roll, and 0 takes a
couple of halting steps (range of motion in these costumes was a joke), and
begins a cartwheel, realizing too late that his arms are forced forward because
of the costume, and he cannot get them over his head, and so what hits the
stage is not his hands but the top of his skull. For one awful second he was
frozen in that upside down position, before collapsing in on himself like a
jelly donut with its filling suddenly, violently sucked out of it. Many hands
rushed to the stage, to see if 0 was still alive, which would determine whether
they gave him medical treatment, or whisked his corpse away to a rock quarry
somewhere far out of town.
0 survived the incident, and I think the first half of his failed
attempt at a cartwheel actually made it into the final spot. I lost five pounds
(mostly water), and required an IV drip to rehydrate, two numbers went down
with heat exhaustion, and 0 sustained a mild concussion. All in the name of a
lottery commercial.
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