First off, I have a monstrous love-hate relationship with Pinkberry. The job is easy and it gives me tons of time to catch up on my reading while hanging out with, in the words of Lucas in Empire Records, "all the beautiful, tattooed, gum-chewing freaks." On the other hand, it's responsible (and I blame it directly (there are way too many parenthetical comments in this entry already)) for how ridiculously unfulfilling my Halloween was.
This is but a symptom of a much larger problem. Halloween was just a pointed example. Since I'm not anywhere near a satisfactory amount of hours, I called a couple other locations around LA to see if I could pick up hours anywhere else. I was asked to come in both Friday the 31st and Saturday the 1st to the Century City and Playa Vista locations, respectively. Both times, the managers called me within about an hour and a half of my shift, saying I didn't need to show up. Awesome, I have some free time, but too bad I can't make any money and therefore am that much closer to not making rent.
I wouldn't have minded working Halloween night. There would have been something noble and adult about it. "I can't dress up and go out drinking tonight, I'm working." I felt very mature and in control. Suddenly, that option wasn't available to me, and it was way too late to make plans, so I spent my Halloween alone and bored.
Now, a storm has been a-brewing since I had dinner with my stuntbuddy Emily, who is so incredibly empathetic that she may very well be me without me knowing it. She talked about all the TV shows she had gotten extra work on in her brief time in town, and how she was already up two out of three SAG vouchers. I had heard of Central Casting before, and I had always meant to register, but I hadn't gotten around to it. I finally did, and today was my first experience with them.
The message said to wear a suit and to bring two changes of clothing just in case. "Insufficient or improper wardrobe will result in you being sent home without pay". Oh god, already the odds were against me. I've only got so many nice clothes out here. So imagine my terror when the wardrobe guy dismissed my backups as "too cas". Kacey got it when I typed it, but for the rest of you: he left off the last two syllables of "casual". I wanted to hug him and say I was so sorry about Prop 8, because nobody can use that contraction without being incredibly, flamboyantly gay.
Regardless, my cas backups weren't needed as my suit passed the test, and I joined a bunch of other twenty-to-thirtysomethings in a bar set in the CBS studios. The show is called Samantha Who? starring Christina Applegate as a woman with amnesia who continually discovers that her old self was not too nice a person, and she strives to make up for past wrongdoings though she can't remember them. It sounds cute. She's very cute in person. I wanted to commend her for her bravery in the face of breast cancer, but she was justifiably busy and I thought she'd appreciate not being bothered more.
By the end of the day, I had made some friends, made some money, and eaten my weight in catering. I'm getting a thought in my head, and based on my calculations (because I'm the type to endlessly make calculations. If I make this much per hour and work this many hours per week I can make this much per month, etc.) I can totally quit Pinkberry (who dash my hopes to the ground).
I present the following chart, which makes a few assumptions:
This information is based on a few things. I get about 20 to 25 hours a week at Pinkberry, making not very much every hour. If I try to get more, it invariably backfires and causes me to lose a day in planning. Working as a background extra today, I worked from 9:30 AM to 8:30 PM with a one-hour lunch break. I got half my Pinkberry hours for a week in one day, making only slightly less an hour. I also made friends in the business I intend to make my livelihood, and saved a ton of money on groceries by gorging myself on free food. I can basically do background work as often as I can wrest the booking lines from the grips of other people registered with Central Casting, which is to say I could work seven days a week if I felt like it. The previous chart compares me working 25 hours a week at Pinkberry (generous) to 32 hours a week doing background extra work (which is so very, very conservative). Recall that, because working over eight hours amounts to time-and-a-half, I put in 11 hours today. I can make more money than I am now by working three days a week.
The final bonus and a feather in my oft-worried cap is that along with working as often as I want, I can choose to not work as often as I want. There is no calling to request holidays off.
Life just got good.
