The Last Time This Happened...

The last time I went through a long period of under/unemployment was while I was living in Portland, OR. I sent resumes out every day and hear back maybe once a month. I moved up there with my long-term SF job, but when the dotcom bubble burst, I was covered in soap shrapnel and left on the banks of the Island of the Jobless with my wife, the grad school chick. There just were no jobs to be had. Different situation than today in L.A. in which there are great jobs here and there, but WAY too many applicants for each. Portland was a great rainy cave to hibernate for several years. It is the largest den of slack I have ever encountered. Makes for truly great conversation in the coffee houses, but not much in terms of career development.

At this point, the whole baseball card angle wasn't even a twinkle in my mind's eye. Thinking back, we might still be living there if it had, cost of living being as low as it is. I spent my days drinking coffee, puttering in the recording studio with occasional clients or alone with my guitars, and perusing the barren landscape of the Portland Craigslist job boards.

One particularly desperate afternoon, May 2004, I checked out the "Creative" section in "Gigs." Unlike L.A., this section gets at most 10 posts/day, and they almost never involve pay. On this day, however, there was a promising lead looking for actors for a corporate job. I had ZERO acting background, but figured that a guy like me who has played in bands in nothing but my underpants on several occasions should have the gumption to fake it through a casting. So, I called, got an appointment and showed up a few hours later. The room was filled with guys holding headshots who had been sent by their agents. There were all dressed business casual with horn-rimmed glasses. It looked like a Weezer fan club meeting. Me? Jeans and T-shirt. I didn't get the memo. What the hell - they had magazines and snacks and coffee. In Portland, any excuse to drink more coffee is a go.

I eventually got called in and met with a big blonde guy in his early 40s from an ad agency in L.A. and his assistant, who ran the video camera. They gave me the rundown, which was that the "Dex" Yellow Pages, which had been running a series of pretty damn funny TV commercials featuring a character actor you've all seen elsewhere anthropomorphizing the yellow pages. He'd be crammed into a cabinet above the microwave and someone would open the door and ask him where something was and he'd give way too much information very quickly before being shut back into the cabinet. So, the company had hired this agency to create a week-long event in which an actor would spend a week living on a billboard in NW Ptown, waving at cars, being interviewed on radio spots, and showing how to do something on camera every day, e.g., bonsai or guitar repair. "Dex Knows..." Food from the best restaurants in town would be brought up to Dex to sample and comment on, etc., etc.

So, long story short, I got the gig. Yes, this surprised me too. Looking back, the first three choices must have turned it down, but being as broke as we were, I took it; only, it had changed and morphed before the date. It seems that in the 11th hour, the corporate dickheads who own the Dex pages started to worry about their corporate identity, blah blah blah, and scaled the whole project down to me up on a billboard (one of the side of a building types, not a free standing one) for a week waving at cars while clutching an umbrella to prevent 3rd Degree sunburn (this kindness was granted to me on the 3rd day after my desperate pleas finally stopped falling on deaf ears) and risking life and limb getting on and off the board because no ladder had been erected. I had to repel up and down the wires and hook of the pulley system that raises the board up the side of the building while wearing a pair of dress shoes they insisted I wear because it was what the actor wore on camera. This made it about 50x more life threatening. Maybe 1 out of every 500 cars that drove by realized I was up there and honked clearly thinking a crazy person was on a billboard for no apparent reason. I am SURE that not one of them said to himself, "Hot damn! That guy is wearing those same Kenneth Coles as that funny guy on the teevee!"

On the first morning, there was a 30 second live radio spot for a local AM, and THAT'S IT. I was on my own, frying, singing to myself (I wrote 2 songs from my "Walk under and on" record entirely in my head and then came home and figured out on guitar), and losing my mind. No food was provided from Portland's finest eateries. Instead, a few times a day, I would shimmy down the pulley system, appealing to deities long since abandoned, and grab whatever was most edible at the crappy corner market in the bottom unit of the building. I would also use their restroom, but the rest of the day had to resort to a system of emptied water bottles. The more times I had to get up and down off the thing, the more chances of dying horribly in a public spectacle. To avoid sunstroke, I was guzzling as much water as I could, and it would go through me in that June afternoon sun in minutes. The trick is to get the water bottles with the wide mouths, but that's as much info as I'll offer on this subject.

I was up there for 8 hour stretches Monday - Friday, after which I was lobster colored, dehydrated to the point of considering hospitalization, etc. This was the weirdest week of my life. WELL, until I did it AGAIN in Seattle in October, but you'll have to wait until the next episode to hear about that...