Lately I’ve been giving the freelance life a lot of thought. Partly because my bank balance has been looking rather unhealthy, rather underfed. And partly because my living room-office mate has been far, far out of cell phone range, leaving me with one very quiet apartment and one very noisy brain.
Freelancing has its downsides, certainly. There’s the obvious lack of a regular paycheque, benefits, and paid holidays. There’s the dearth of co-workers, water cooler gossip, and the hearty laughs you get when you toss out clever quotes from Office Space.
On the other hand, it has a lot going for it. First and foremost, you don’t have to dress up.
And when I say dress up, I’m not talking pencil skirts and buttoned blouses. I’m talking the kind of dress I had to don for many a job. I’m talking interpretive dress.
A while back, I mentioned this job, for which every Friday and Saturday night, while normal 22-year-olds were primping for the bar, I’d don a crow costume, then preen my foam wings and practice my squawk for the campground amphitheatre crowd.
The next season, at a provincial park in northern Alberta, I opted for a handmade sawyer beetle ensemble, complete with antennae twice the length of my body. Thus outfitted, I proceeded to serenade the campers with “Chew Chew Chew, Chew the Spruce” (which remains to this day the best song I’ve ever written).
But believe it or not, that wasn’t the worst of the costumes. A few years prior, I worked as an interpreter at a historic site on the U of A campus. There, in my authentic historic stockings, petticoats, and Pepto-Bismol-pink dress, I pretended I knew how to crochet and cook on the authentic historic stove while tourists watched, unconvinced, as I burned batch after batch of authentic historic oatmeal cookies.
I was also the site gardener. Which would have been a great gig had I not had to garden in… you guessed it… authentic historic dress. In the August heat, I’d head out in my straw bonnet to tackle the weeds, or worse, mow the lawn. The lawnmower was … need I say it? One of those rusty, rattly, rolling things.
So there I would be, all pink dress and petticoats, sweat soaking through my bonnet as I heaved the rattling lawnmower around, high heels sinking into the grass. Students in flip-flops would stop to gawk and wonder aloud why I didn’t just use a real lawnmower. My responses were unladylike, and not at all authentic historic.
So there you have it: reason number one for choosing the freelance life.
Jeans and t-shirts, baby. Jeans. And. T-shirts.
