🎬 Actor – The Extra

Truly the best job in show biz: wear a stolen paper mache alien head, shoot soda out of your nose, crash through a sugar-glass shop window, and chase the motorcyclist who knocked over your fruit cart.

The DUMBO underpass being used as the set for Gotham present day. The band’s stage was under the archway. Extras were housed somewhere to the left or very, very possibly behind us, or maybe that’s not right either. (Photo courtesy of Dumbo Business Improvement District.)

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Right after we moved to Brooklyn six years ago, I was walking with my family under the DUMBO overpass, and I oh-my-god-suddenly-realized that it was in the Lost Film Location, a location I could never remember other than “somewhere very dangerous in 1984 Brooklyn.” I was a crowd extra under a bridge in a music video. The band was unknown. The song was called Life on Earth. It was my first time on camera.

But, oh, the relief of solving a forty-year nagging mystery! This, my grown children, was the day I melted my fingerprints off waving a Bic lighter in the air for twenty-two hours.

I never tire of sharing this when walking beneath it with my family.

Me:

“It is like passing through a time portal.”

My Wife: