Extra, extra: I'm an extra

Wikipedia Commons, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I do love Peter Bruegel the Elder, the hyper-creative painter of this group painting. His work is like a 1559-version of Richard Scarry’s What Do Peole Do All Day? I love how each quirky individual contributes to the whole.

I relate to the subjects. I have my thoughts and the limited space around me on the subway. While I emerge above ground to walk to work, I become part of a bigger New York City picture, one seen from above.

As I build the next half of my career life, I am temping in the Financial District. And a bit in the Meatpacking area.

Almost everyone in Corporate America is nicer to me than they were when I was in the nonprofit world, at least to my face. I’ve learned so much about efficiency. And some places are nutty.

On my first day at one firm, for example, I was asked if I could sew. That’s right, SEW, because the owner’s wife had a fashion company that she operated squatted within her husband’s hedge fund. That working relationship lasted precisely five days.

Mostly, I appreciate working with new colleagues, some fresh out of college.

I temped with a young woman recently, a 20-something actor who reminded me of me at her age. She hooked me up with a casting company. Within a week of signing up, I was asked to be part of a Netflix show. I played a reporter. All of my crowd scenes featured a lot of people surrounding one famous person. A very famous person I cannot mention.

For hours and hours and hours, 15 total, I stood in the cold in Lower Manhattan. Some of my lines included these chestnuts: “Mr. President, we want answers!” and “What are the terrorists’ demands?”

Background work is like community service. In exchange for binge watching on my couch, I suffer a bit to build crowd scenes. Hey, I spend a lot of time with the three sisters of streaming: Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix.

Now, I’m mesmerized by the people in the background because each second is precious, sometimes painful. Half of those people are getting blisters while the main actors stand in the foreground.

I am like one of the happy villagers in a group scene by Mr. Bruegel. An art teacher in elementary school got me interested in his work, which is never boring. All those background people are distinct! As I creep toward 50, I’m fine being on the sidelines, with some caveats.

Similar to Susie Myerson in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, “I don’t mind being alone. I just do not want to be insignificant.”