Sunday, March 23, 2008

Ugly Easter Bunny



Sorry for the crumby photo quality. It's O-Dark-Thirty here in the basement.....in the burbs........Easter Morning.......HAPPY EASTER!!!......I'm in the studio and the scanner is upstairs. If I go use the scanner I risk waking up PapaMark.



This is not really a photo of an ugly Easter Bunny. This was my job during college. Rufus the Rat. Busch Gardens. (Jackie asked for a photo.)



It was a great job. My crew worked springs, summers and falls. Our shift was probably 7 or 8 hours, but we worked a half hour on and a half hour off.



Summers in Virginia can be hot. 90 - 100 plus degrees mostly. Now Mickey Mouse probably had some fancy air conditioning down there in Florida, but the off brand characters at parks such as Busch Gardens, did not. So, 100 degrees......fur coat and work boots..... nasty. And the costume you took off at 3, someone else put right back on at 3:30. EWWWWWWW....... Here's a photo of my "crew" in the break area. If you look behind the vamping, sweaty girls, you'll see our costumes hanging up with blowers in them. Believe me, all those blowers did was blow the sweaty air out of the costume and around our trailer.




That's me on your left.


If you can put aside the heebeegeebees from the sweat thing, it was a lot of fun. Since we "performed" for only a half hour every hour, we had a lot of time to hang out together. It was a great job for a college kid, and I still keep in touch with some of my old character friends. I'd do it again in a heart beat.


Well........at 50 I don't really know that I could deal with wearing 9 months worth of accumulated sweat from not only me, but my coworkers as well. EW.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh wow, priceless. That is an amazing tale. Tail? Ha. Wow!

MB Shaw said...

Very fun photo! The things we used to do, huh?
Thanks for stopping by my blog and for linking up Artsmiths.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing that photo. It's priceless, and what you sacrificed in the name of making children smile - that's priceless too! Just think, now they probably spray gallons of febreze on those things. And I know from experience (three boys) that febreze + sweat is no better than sweat alone!

Blink said...

Who knew? Love the photos! You were brave then and you are brave now.