Put Me on Top or Change the Odds
It is the end of a twelve hour work day and I am catatonically smoking, crying, and staring at a concrete wall. “I can’t even write about it,” I sigh, “which is the only thing that would make the whole fucking experience worth it.”
“Well, you can just change some of the details,” Anthony replies.
“Nah, people could still use context clues to know what I’m writing about. That’s what happened when the guy who used to beat me tried to sue me for libel.”
To this, he has no reply. I take a long drag of my cigarette and continue to stare blankly ahead. “Liiiiibellllll,” I slowly repeat, exhaling smoke.
Eh, fuck it. I’ll try.
Today is the second of three in which I am expected to wake up before the sun in order to sit on my ass. If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have woken up at all — I prefer unconsciousness, as I never remember my dreams. Caffeinated hands quivering, I navigate my recently repaired (total price: $714), eleven year old car toward a studio wedged deep within the San Fernando Valley. I’m blasting Aimee Mann’s “Put Me on Top” on the stereo; I sing along so loudly, so frenetically, it makes the veins in my throat bulge:
I should be knocking at the door of the pearly gates
Why keep a poor man alive in a job he hates
I've heard that good things will come to he who waits
I should be riding on a float in the hit parade
Instead of standing on the curb behind the barricade
Another verse in the doormat serenade
Won't you put me on top
Won't you put me on top
Or change the odds
Won't you put me on top
Or at least put some hope in the bottom of the box
My fellow background actors and I have been told to bring our own wardrobes and arrive to set “camera ready.” We are working for a multi, multi billion dollar corporation who is already paying us less than the SAG-standard background rate. The amount of effort I expend on being “camera ready,” as a result, reflects this. I care so little, my dress isn’t even lined.
Yesterday, the makeup artist attempted to shame me.
“Are you wearing any makeup?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
Her eyebrow arched. I assume she also pursed her lips, but I’ll never know the truth — a KN95 mask obscured her mouth. “Did you know you were supposed to arrive camera ready?”
“Yeah. But I don’t wear makeup.”
“You don’t wear any makeup? Are you allergic?”
“No.”
Had she asked for my reasoning, I would have replied “moral opposition,” but it didn’t come to that. She was, instead, called to set in order to touch up the gloss of a featured actor who had stood and yelled “lip!” despite the fact that the shot being filmed was a wide of everyone’s backs.
Another fresh faced background actor the makeup artist had attempted to shame commiserated with me. (“Just buy some burgundy lipstick,” the actor said she scoldingly instructed. “You can get it at the 99 cent store.”) “For this money,” I told my cosmetics boycotting compatriot, “if you want me to look like a woman, you fucking do it.” A peal of laughter emerged from her throat. “Yup,” she nodded. In this environment, we were the outliers — scattered, smothered and othered. The other background actors were content to relentlessly reapply their own makeup between takes while gazing into the front facing cameras of their phones.
Side Note: You cannot pretend to fly the flag that is inclusivity — embracing all races, body types, gender identities, et al — and also demand women be tarted up in order to properly present as female. My pores, my choice.
This morning, my new friend flags me down as I enter the holding area. “I tried today,” she says. “I put some mascara on.”
“You let that bitch get to you?” I ask.
“I love you!” she squeals, grabbing my arm. “I told my husband last night, this chick doesn’t care about anything!” She asks for my number and name, which I give her; she says she’ll add me to her contacts as Megan Thee Stallion because that’s what I am — strong, untouchable, unflappable. Less than twelve hours ago I was sobbing.
I am not above doing background by any means — in fact, under normal circumstances, I quite enjoy it. Not only is it anthropologically fascinating, it’s (relatively) easy money, the crafty cans of Coca-Cola flow like wine, and it gives purpose to a union membership I was forced to buy into when I acted on a pilot that didn’t get picked up (why, you may ask, did it not? Because it was good). Background actors are treated as scum, yes, but I also dig through the garbage for money; to pretend as though I possess pride would be disingenuous.
“It’s crazy,” I overhear one background actor tell another. “Some people would pay to do what we do.” This fact is as true as it is miserable.
It is lunch time and I am famished, but we cannot eat until the “talent” has hit up catering’s heated troughs. Said “talent” is comprised, for all intents and purposes, of my peers, to the extent that multiple “talents” have performed on shows I have hosted. I have more in common with them than my fellow background actors — who, while perfectly nice, I find wholly unrelatable. One spends the downtime between set ups pouring over a gleaming new paperback copy of Love Smart: Find the One You Want — Fix the One You Got by Dr. Phil (“In this book, you’ll learn to: Bag 'em, tag 'em and take 'em home,” the back cover promises. “Learn how to negotiate the relationship you desire and then close the deal.”); another says she recently took pole dancing classes because she had an audition to play a stripper (“and I didn’t even get a call back!”).
To graduate from background, to emerge from the blur and become a featured extra, is to play a stripper in a NCIS spin-off or a raped and eviscerated corpse on a Law and Order spin-off. To me, this is not a career goal.
In taking the job, I wasn’t suffering under the delusion that I’d be upgraded to star, in much the same way I’ve never suffered under the delusion that the entertainment industry is a meritocracy, but I was lead to believe I would be used in some sort of comedic capacity and not solely as a warm body — it was, to be honest, the only reason I accepted the gig in the first place. Someone affiliated with the show emailed a friend of mine and requested me, specifically, by name. By having me simply sit there and do nothing, however, the scripted program immediately became a prank show designed pointedly to grip me, and only me, in psychological terror. Every take feels purgatorial.
I now understand why Howard refuses to do background on any show in which he may run into someone he knows; it is humiliating. The experience is debasing, even for me, and I’ve had cameras shoved up my ass for money. It is probably for the best that the one time I asked to do background on a show I had already guest starred on, the co-creator texted back, immediately and without capitalization, “no.”
I have been doing comedy for one metric fuck load of years, yes, but I am nowhere near a success — hell, most comedians don’t even know I am a comedian. I have reconciled this fact as best I can.
I am used to feeling like an outsider in my own field, but, y’know, remotely. Through the power of social media, the news of other people’s successes are now brought directly to me, regardless of where I am — be it sitting on the toilet or lying in bed with the curtains drawn. Thankfully, most of these people have achieved things I don’t even want, so it’s pointless to become upset by their triumphs. In this environment, though, I am litchrally [sic] on the outside looking in, eating their scraps alone at a folding table while they sit in trailers with their names on the door. I feel as though I am in high school again. I graduated high school twenty years ago.
Put some hope in the bottom of the box for me
I need it