Buckle up and get your reading glasses–this is a long one.
Recently someone insinuated that, since I spent my life in academia, I didn’t know anything about working real jobs. (It was phrased in terms of never wearing steel-toed shoes.) So I thought I’d compile a list of all my work experiences in and out of academia.
My earliest jobs included busboy, gas station attendant (“check your oil and wash your windows, sir? “), shoe salesman, and telephone solicitor. In that last position, I earned a bonus one evening for selling the most circus tickets of anyone that day. My wage as a busboy was $1.00 an hour plus a share of the waitresses’ tips (that they were willing to share). As a shoe salesman, I made $1.90 an hour plus commission. Fortunately, our manager liked to have a rock station on in the store, so at least I could listen to “Radar Love” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” while working.
As for the gas station attendant job, my friend the late Ted Byorick suggested it, and I was hired and quit after 3 hours. That really wasn’t my thing.
A year and a day after graduating from high school, I got my landmark job: janitor of the Historical Society of York County. In addition to just cleaning restrooms and mopping and dusting everywhere in the two-story building, I also participated in hanging and lighting art exhibits. Early on, I also helped with the construction of a self-contained conservation lab so the curator could work in a dust-free environment. The construction work on that would come in handy later on.
I say landmark job because I would stay in it for over a year, and then part-time. One fateful snowy day convinced me I needed to go to college, and so from 1977, two years after graduation from high school, I entered academia. While I would never look back, I certainly would look askance at various points along the way.
At one point during my first college experience, I again did building, as a theatre work study doing set construction. After transferring to Temple University, I had another work study job in the library filing cards in the catalogue system. Luckily, it was in the era of grants for financial aid, and soon I could stop doing that and devote full-time to my studies.
While at my first college, I worked at the campus radio station as a Speech Comm major, and took the test for my third-class FCC license with broadcast endorsement. After getting this, I applied for a job at a local AM radio station. There I would run taped programs such as the Sunday night oldies show, live Baltimore Orioles baseball games inserting certain commercials at the right spot, and being a live DJ, playing records and taking requests. At one point I even helped train a new DJ.
In between colleges, I also worked as a stage manager for a New Year’s show, wrote copy for advertising brochures, and became a multimedia consultant for a friend working at a York, PA-based software company.
I also put in two summers as a camp counselor/drama specialist at an arts camp in New Jersey. We put on two shows in those eight weeks, sometimes a full musical (and none of that “Junior” crap). For Pippin, I ran lights for the single performance, using a “magic sheet.” (From the web: “a quick-reference document that provides a simplified overview of the lighting rig, including channel numbers, fixture locations, colors, and focus information”—a list appropriately named for that show, since they had “magic to do just for you and miracle plays to play”). And when I say I ran lights, I mean I designed each lighting cue in advance of cross-fading to that next scene.
During my master’s program at Ohio State, I spent the first year as a “teaching assistant’ working in the scene shop. I was pleased that, in the second year, I got to be a real teaching assistant for the Intro to Theatre course (that had hundreds of students each quarter). This pattern repeated at Berkeley, when I worked for the first year in the scene shop, and then got to be a TA for the Stagecraft class.
When I was not eligible for this work (taking a semester off from registering to start writing my dissertation), I became a temp worker for Kelly Services. Yes, I was a Kelly Girl. I spent one day at GE Supply xeroxing documents for an upcoming lawsuit. I then got hired back for several weeks to do data entry. This wasn’t a lot of fun, although I did have the distinction of working in Emeryville, California, where Pixar was just getting started.
Somewhere in there I was hired to be the House Manager of the Julia Morgan Theatre in Berkeley, CA. My duties consisted of “Assisting box office staff, assigning tasks to volunteer ushers, maintaining building security, and occasionally operating sound and lighting consoles for various productions.” That was an incredible opportunity; I saw many cool shows, and later I would sometimes use ideas I had seen on that stage. Example: the a capella singing group The Bobs worked with a dance company named ISO. The performance began behind a paper screen; the backlit singers began vocalizing, and then used knives to cut through the paper to reveal themselves to the audience. I used this same image in a production of 4:48 Psychosis.
One summer, I served as the Box Office Manager of Shakespeare Santa Cruz. According to my CV, I “managed the operation of all aspects of the box office. This included: supervision of the assistant supervisor and student box office clerks; the use of a computer system for tracking ticket sales; the preparation of daily reconciliations, deposits, and sales reports; interaction with the public in person and on the phone.” This experience helped me greatly when I had to set up ticket sales in my academic jobs.
In 1991, I had my first teaching position, as Adjunct Instructor of Theatre at Penn State’s Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre campuses. At WB I taught students both in the classroom and “via fiber optics,” according to my assignment sheet, linked to a location in Towanda, PA. When COVID hit in 2020, I was already well-versed in distance teaching. The teaching and directing of shows kept me busy enough so I didn’t need additional employment.
After a move to West Virginia, I became Adjunct Assistant Professor of Speech and Drama at the University of Charleston. On my way to becoming Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor and the Co-ordinator of Mass Communication Program, I temped at West Virginia State College (teaching a short summer class of Humanities 101) and Marshall University (teaching one semester of THEA 440 Theatre History Beginning to 1660 to theatre majors—the only time I would ever teach Theatre majors—and THEA 441 Theatre History Since 1660 to Military Program students at a National Guard Armory and over a distance learning video system to three sites. Once again, I was well-prepared for online teaching).
After a lengthy job search, in which I applied for both Mass Comm (how foolish of me!) and Theatre (following the dream) positions, I arrived at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Having spent seven years at each of my other two teaching position, I finally found a place to retire from and, after 17 years of teaching and directing, I retired with the title of Emeritus Associate Professor of Theatre Arts.
Of course, I haven’t stopped, and in retirement created my own theatre company, a goal I’ve had since I graduated with my BA. So, one might say, the work continues.
MUSOFYR 