Strange Jobs to Pay the Bills! (Tim)

Hello Acting Manitou,

So we begin our blog series: “Strange Jobs to Pay the Bills” with an entry by Tim entitled: “Corpse Duty”.

Shortly after graduating college, while Tim mixed theater education and acting from his home base in Princeton, NJ, Tim stumbled upon a lucrative but bizarre acting gig: corpse duty.  For $100 an hour (!), Tim would wake up at ungodly hours and travel to the Hyatt Regional Hotel outside Princeton.  The assignment began at 7am and Tim was instructed to wear “clothes that will best show off massive amounts of bloody make-up”.  Grey jeans and a white t-shirt were selected (little did he know he would be buying a five pack of white t-shirts at Walmart and going through them rapidly).  The Hyatt, besides its regular hotel duties, served as a corporate conference meeting center.  Companies could hire out Tim’s programs for a very unique brand of corporate training for their employees.  Instead of spending the day doing trust falls and sharing intimate secrets, employees would start a pretend meeting about job safety but then be quickly interrupted.

Into their meeting room would burst an out-of-breath hotel employee, shouting about an emergency and having to evacuate the room immediately.  The confused employees would grab their coffees and croissants and hustle frantically outside where they would be confronted by….

THE SCENE OF A MURDER!  Sirens wailing in the distance, the employees would see on the grass by the edge of the woods, a grizzled detective bent over spent bullet casings and a white blood-stained blanket covering a body-like lump.  As they moved closer to the crime scene, the grizzled detective would stub out his cigarette and bark at the startled employees to stay quiet and listen up…pointing at the white blood-stained body-shaped blanket, he’d say in a growl: “There’s been a murder.  And I need your help to solve it.”

Cut to Tim.  That’s him under the blanket.  It’s early December in South Jersey so the ground is frozen and the grass is wet.  He’s trying not to shiver under the blanket.  Any move and he may lose his 100 bucks.  Easy money, right?  Just lie there and pretend to be dead while a crime scene is investigated.  How hard could this possibly be?  Very hard, actually.  When you try not to breathe noticeably, you end up breathing much more noticeably than you had hoped, eliciting comments like: “if he’s dead, why is the blanket moving up and down?”  To which the detective replies: “that’s the body going into rigor-mortis.”  Plus, Tim forgot to explain to the company that he was allergic to cut grass and the grounds had been mowed that day.  Sneeze!  ”If he’s dead, why did it sneeze?”  ”Rigor-mortis.”  ”If it’s dead, why is it laughing”  ”Rigor mortis.”

What Tim never could have anticipated was that the corporate trainees weren’t buying what he was selling.  And they would do anything they could to pull away the curtain to reveal the man behind the wizard voice, or in this case, the bloody white sheet.  He was kicked, poked, and pulled all the while trying not to breathe or laugh or sneeze.  One woman, perhaps her coffee had a little extra kick to it, even went so far to say: “the dead body underneath the sheet is gorgeous.  I like its curves.”  Ick.  And the detective was no help, always turning his back and letting the trainees abuse the corpse, never warning when a group of trainees was coming down the hill and it’d be best to stop talking.

Somehow, some way, the higher-ups thought Tim was excellent at the job.  So, they asked him to recruit other actors for corpse duty.  Suddenly, he was a corpse duty administrator, pro bono, of course.

And then his big break really came.  He graduated to murder mystery dinners on cruise ships.  He got to burst into a room, wearing a ski mask and flailing a gun around before being taken out by the handy detective on the scene.  Tim would sit in some closet dubbed the green room, eating the entree the guests were being served and mentally preparing himself for his big moment as “The Gambler” when he got to re-enter without a mask or a bloody sheet, talk to guests for a few minutes, before dying a second time, this time apparently from a poisoned cocktail.  Finally, when the guests stared in horror at the corpse on duty, he was not hidden under some sheet – his hair was slicked backed, he was wearing pinstripes and he was trying his hardest not to breathe.

Tim had made it.

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