I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 by Annabelle Gurwitch Page B

well do you balance running on wet cobblestones? Have any anger management issues?
How about wondering what kind of person jumps at the chance to run through the streets with a lit torch? Nope.
    “Is there anything we should know about these torches?” I ask casually.
    “Oh, we’ll do fire training.” But as he steps back into the shadows, the shot is called.
    “Action. Villagers with torches run toward the troll,” I hear the director say from behind a video monitor, where he’s viewing a live feed of the footage being shot.
    A mob of two dozen peasants rushes forward, jostling for position. Each one of us principals knows that if you aren’t recognizable on camera, you will not earn residuals. Each one of the background people knows if they are recognizable, they have a shot at being upgraded to principal. It’s clear that no one in charge cares about which of us are seen.
    It’s been almost thirty years since I worked as background, and that’s what this feels like. I was always sure that my talent would catch the eye of the director. Now I’m just trying not to slip and fall.
    “Bait the troll with your torches!”
    Villagers are thrusting their torches at the imaginary menace.
    “Now turn and run.”
    As I pivot, something hot brushes the back of my neck.
    “Uh, you.” He points to the bonneted female extra whose torch is dangerously close to my hair. It’s my PTA buddy. “I love your enthusiasm, lady, but we don’t carry that much insurance. Hold your torch a little higher.” And that’s the extent of our fire training. “I can’t sell cupcakes at Jazz band B’s concert on Friday night if my head goes up in flames,” I say, trying to remain friendly, but I catch a glint in her eye that tells me she’s vying for a good position. It’s every serf for herself, and I’ll have to watch my back. We repeat this several times. Each time the director adds and subtracts extras from a seemingly endless supply that emerges from the background tent.
    “Did you put mascara back on?” the makeup person shouts over the chaos. She has singled me out between shots. PTA mom is wearing frosted coral lip gloss, another gal has visibly feathered bangs, but something about me just irks her. I actually have put mascara back on.
    “No, I didn’t.”
    She swabs more dirt on my face and then pulls out a wimple and pushes it over my hair and low down onto my forehead and retreats to the sidelines. I ask one of the assistant directors if he thinks it will be a continuity problem that I now am wearing a wimple, as I’ve been established without it. He explodes into peals of laughter. “All of you peasants are, like, this big in the frame,” he says, pinching his thumb and forefinger into an inch. Yes, my mascara must certainly be distracting in the infinitesimallyminiature pixel it is taking up in the frame of the commercial. I am basically a lumpy sack topped with a doily. On the other hand, it’s surprisingly freeing to have any burden of beauty lifted.
    After the shot, the production team begins setting up on another part of the street and the principals are dismissed. No one comes to check in on us for the next three hours. It’s forty degrees and the sewer smell is so strong that we can’t close the door to the honey wagon, so we’re shivering. We abandon ship, head into the background tent to warm up, then set off in search of information. We run into a crew guy who is handing out army blankets. We wrap them around ourselves and wander over to an area we can see lit from several hundred feet away. They are shooting another vignette. Only background actors are in the shot. PTA mom is pushing a rusty wheelbarrow piled high with dirt through a cobblestoned alleyway. I make a mental note to let her do all heavy lifting at school functions in the future—she’s an ox. We inquire if we are needed and the assistant director stares at us like we’ve asked him to explain string theory. “We’ll call you when