In the same way that everyone has seen a pigeon—but no one has ever seen a baby pigeon—everyone knows at least one Flame artist, but no one knows how they evolve.
Such is the fate of the overnight or second-string Flame artist. You never see us, because—as Talking Heads’ David Byrne once said—on this job, you get to "sleep all day and work all night," to the tune of at least 3 a.m. on a weekday.
My six-year-old nephew, who hails from a far-off place in the Midwest (where the only person who works my kind of hours is the checkout girl at Lunds 24-hour food store) loves to quote his father, the lawyer: "You work the ‘graveyard shift,’ right?" I immediately correct him—let’s not exaggerate. "The graveyard shift is from midnight until 6 a.m.; I work from 5 p.m. until 3 a.m."
This wreaks havoc with your social life—especially if you have been working professionally and paying your dues, and this is your second career.
I guess you could wonder why I would do it. I was an agency creative. I was earning the good money. I was respected. And I gave all of that up. Why? I guess I just wanted something more. What "something" was, I did not know.
But I finally found it. I found it in the Zen of painting the clothes of a Wizard of Oz Munchkin, frame by frame, in a Fedex commercial. I finally started to feel fulfilled in life.
The worst part of this profession is that, even though you are willing to give up every single last part of your life to a Flame job, in most cases you cannot even get one.
The average facility books out a Flame and a lead Flame artist by the hour. A second-string Flame artist does rig removal and cuts mattes through the twilight hours, to the tunes of anything he can get his hands on to listen to.
More bad parts are:
1. Running into your clients at the gym at four in the afternoon, when you are in your sweats, your hair flying every which way—and they do not realize that you just woke up. They are going home.
2. Trying to have a lot of friends on the day shift.
The good parts—and there are many:
1. You lose lots of weight when all you do is work, sleep and go to the gym. We are always arguing about who is drinking whose Ensure (vitamin supplement) from the refrigerator. The company supplies Pepsi, coffee, dinner, vitamins and flu shots. We have to pay for our own dietary supplements (i.e., Ensure—cappuccino flavored).
2. You can work alone, without distractions—very few clients want to work our hours.
3. You can sublet your apartment—Johnnie [Semerad], the owner of Quiet Man, has a cabinet that folds out into a single bed.
4. You can watch TV at work—we watch Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? while trying to become one ourselves on Flame.
You could do a lot worse.
