The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

When we last left our heroes, they were sitting in a tent on hard plastic chairs somewhere in Philadelphia. The sun had yet to rise.

And there we sat and waited, wondering why we had signed up for background work on this commercial in the first place. Luckily, Jim had found us a table by a space heater and using my Irish sweater as a pillow, I took a nap.

But not for long. People in red t-shirts kept interrupting us. First, they welcomed us and told us breakfast would be arriving soon. Breakfast consisted of rubbery eggs stuffed into damp bread, but I was hungry, and with ketchup it wasn't all bad. I tried to nap after that only to be woken up by another red shirt asking if any of us had friends that would be interested in joining us for the commercial shoot. Turns out, we hadn't started shooting yet because we did not have enough extras.

Other people complained throughout the day that the casting agency should have booked more extras. I'm not so sure it was their fault. Who set the 5 am call time for the shoot? I would guess it would be the production team. I'm sure the casting agency did the best they could but 5 am? It's ironic (if I'm using that word right) that the production team wanted the call at 5 am in order to make the most of the daylight hours and yet we wasted a lot of hours because people did not show up because of the 5 am call time. I'm sure that was a run-on sentence but you get what I mean.

So we waited some more and I napped some more. I also kept trying to get coffee but every time I went up to the station, they were out. I staked out the coffee urn and finally snagged a cup; it tasted just like it ought to in a tent in the middle of Philly--weak and acidic. It did the job though.

We got our photos taken, met some other people at our table, and traded stories about how we came to be there.

At last, we were escorted out to the set, or 'to set' as they say in the biz where we encountered a giant pinata. Not just any giant pinata, a world-record setting giant pinata...

To be continued.