WHEN YOU DIE, YOU GO TO TARGET
icbins Play Reading, In Numbers
5 actors reading 10 characters
1 casting director, 1 dramaturge, 1 director
94 pages in the script, read in about 70 minutes
2 pizzas
3 phases in the talkback
1 completely disastrous joke about birthing dogs (don’t ask, but it was even worse than it sounds.)
5 retail horror stories shared
2 last names, accidentally given to the one family
1 perfect bengali accent
1 passive protagonist
15 suggestions on how to make protagonist less passive
2 underdog characters everyone seemed to like more than I expected
3 pages, front and back of notes taken during the discussion
100 visions and revisions that I now plan on doing.
Thank you so much to everyone for generously donating their time and talent today. Next step: new draft. I’ll keep you posted!!
In the meantime, does anyone have any funny/interesting/depressing stories from working corporate retail? Share them in the comments!
icbins
jraemaldonado
misterpatches
lbferrel
chiatola
mannycbins
rmaranoff
1 *disastrous* lab birthing joke…? Au contraire.
This isn’t really a story, but when I worked at Sea World one summer, renting out strollers, my coworkers and I had to work long days in the Texas sun 5 days a week for crap pay. Our favorite part of working there, besides closing time and lunch breaks, was talking shit about Sea World. No one liked working there except our managers, who had handheld fans and got to sit in the shade doing paperwork and eating Dippin’ Dots. I worked with people who were either 3-5 years younger or whole decades older than me, so the only thing we really connected on is how much we looked forward to going home. We’d talk about what we’d do once we were “outside.” It was a lot like how prisoners talk in movies.
Here’s the depressing part. Some days when I was there working I would see one of my coworkers there, walking the park grounds in swim trunks, drinking coke from a 10 dollar Shamu cup. Every week I would see someone who I worked with at the park on his or her days off. The same people I’d talked shit with the day before were back, paying 10 bucks for a meal with their 15% employee discount. It was like we had no other options. My coworkers and I called these people “sucker fish,” like the fish that suck on the walls of a fish tank all day. The worst part about gimpy corporate retail jobs like the one I had is that they wear you down to where all you want to do when you go home is sleep. Then they give you days off on odd days like Tuesdays and Wednesdays when no one you know is free. All you can think of doing is maybe going back to work and taking advantage of your meager discount. That’s what turned a bunch of people into sucker fish. Down with soul-sucking Anheuser-Busch!
uh, yeah. That joke was not completely disastrous. It was completely excellent.
yeah, wait a second, that birthing dogs joke was fucking hilarious.