It all started one Saturday evening in 1998 when I just had to get out of the apartment. This happened about every Saturday at about 8:00 when I'd realize that Friday and Saturday nights were nearly gone, the stores at the mall would soon be closing, and that I hadn't done a damn thing all weekend. I decided to go to the Queens Center Mall, at the intersection of Woodhaven and Queens Boulevards, right by the onramp to the Long Island Expressway. It was a great place to put a mall, but other than that, it was an awful place to go. It had awful traffic, parking, and a tiny little food court, but I was desperate for a bit of mall food.

It all started after I finally found a seat in the tiny little food court after I went to one of those "Buy Two Servings of Assorted Chinese-Style Foods and Some Fried Rice for Six Bucks" style restaurants. Those things are cropping up all over the country in spite of the best efforts of health departments everywhere. I sat down with my food and my chop sticks, and looked around for a little visual stimulation. I looked at the future of America's lower middle class and wondered what it would be like to be a member of a white minority. The concept sat well with my Something Or Other Chicken With Some Kind of Watery Stuff On It, which itself did not sit well with my rather depressed appetite.

It all started when I looked up at the wall and saw the flashing ads. It was a mall-based community message board done in little red lights that changed its message every ten seconds or so. I looked up just in time to have a message catch my eye. Watching through the cycle again revealed ads for a literacy campaign, child immunization, the beeper store on the second floor, Taco Bell, and "Want to be a Movie Star? Auditions for Kevin Costner's New Baseball Movie "For the Love of the Game" will be held at the Queens Center Mall" the next Sunday. At last, I had something to do that weekend and with my life. A movie about baseball and with Keven Costner would be the Holy Grail. It was going to be the veritable John Travolta Comeback for my long-dormant acting career.

I showed up for the audition the next day. They actually called it an audition. The lines of people stretched from the mall center all the way along a hallway and back to the elevators. When you live in New York, you get used to standing in lines. Nothing was going to keep me from auditioning for this part. The girl in front of me brought her resume and modelling portfolio in a folder. I had come with a pen with which to fill out the application. It turns out that neither of us needed either one, because the people herding the crowd with megaphones provided pencils and snapped off Polaroids.

I got up to the audition. There were several auditioners sitting at a table. They were all auditioning their own actors to save time. My audition went extremely well. The guy told me that the movie was to be shot at Yankee Stadium and asked if I could get there. He asked if I was available during the month of November. I said yes. He asked me for my audition forms, Polaroid, and W-2. I handed them over. He gave me an information pack and said I would be contacted. I wonder if the girl with the portfolio did as well as I had.

The information pack contained information a bunch of useful information. Shooting would take place from eight-thirty to eight-thirty. Pay would be seventy dollars. Parking would be provided, as would lunch. Time would be pro-rated in case of rain, with a minimum of a half-day of pay. Overtime kicked in after eight thirty. I would agree to allow them to use my likeness for no extra compensation. Working as an extra involved potential risks of boredom, injury, and death. I may have made that part up. We had to look like Yankees fans and dress like it was August. It was November.

I had to work during the first couple of weeks of shooting, so I wasn't able to take the first part that I was offered. But because I had worked over some weekends, I got a five-day weekend the third week of the month. That Tuesday night I was contacted again by the talent agency. They wanted me. I told them I could come for three days.

Immediately, I had to handle all aspects of my role. I had to start developing my character. I would be a Yankees Fan. That was a hard one to grasp. What do Yankees Fans do? Why do they do it? I had no idea. I had to develop a costume. I went back to Queens Center Mall and bought a Yankees hat. Upon placing it on my head, I had my character down pat. I would be a Yankees Fan that drank beer and watched baseball. I would carefully ignore the inconvenient fact that both baseball and Kevin Costner are two of the most boring things on the planet. I'd also wear jeans, a turtleneck and a sweatshirt.

I had to work on the self-promotion angle as well, in order to endear myself to the Hollywood elite. I didn't actually know any of the Hollywood elite, so instead I wrote a press-release that I sent out to my friends and relatives. I did not actually quit my job, and added a note to that effect to save my co-workers the stress.

My career at ESC has finally come to an end.  Paramount called today and informed my agent that I have been chosen from a pool of thousands to take a leading role in "For the love of the Game" with Kevin Costner and several other less significant New Yorkers.

I was very pleased by this news and the role, I said during an exclusive interview with myself. Shooting will take place from November 2-24 in New York City. I was quoted as saying, "I've played a lot of roles in my life, ranging from graduate student to airline crash victim to computer professional, all of which had high levels of ridiculousness. I have even been kissed onstage by Diane Babuts during the eighth grade play. While playing both a Yankees fan and alongside Kevin Costner will be my most difficult role ever, my experience at installing LaserVault systems has taught me how to keep a straight face under the silliest of circumstances."

"Kevin and Dave have a lot in common for this role," said Bill Diller, CEO of Paramount. "Kevin has been making terrible movies for years, and Dave has been making terrible career moves for years. Kevin Costner has already made one baseball movie, Field of Dreams, which Dave  said inspired him to very intense feelings of ambivalence, apathy and boredom.  Kevin loves baseball. Dave hates baseball. There's a real Ying-Yang effect here."

Given the predictable and dull nature of Kevin Costner's movies, Costner will play an aging baseball player who has to surmount unsurmountable odds to help the Yanks win the World Series before Rudy Giuliani and George Steinbrenner build a $1.2 billion dollar taxpayer-funded stadium in Manhattan, as if there's room or need for one. There will undoubtably be some love interest who never shows her boobs and a cute kid in a baseball hat, probably with leukemia that will be cured in one of the final scenes.

Dave, on the other hand, will play the stimulating and unexplored role of "Extra" in the "Stadium," being suported by a few other people. While pay was not discussed, consistent with industry standards, it is estimated that Dave will be paid $70 per twelve hour day, while Costner will receive in excess of twenty million dollars.

"I'm looking forward to this" I said as  I interviewed myself. "Finally, someone will take something I do seriously: a Kevin Costner movie." The irony was obviously lost on me.

On Wednesday, I overslept.

On Thursday, it was up at dawn, up the Van Wyck, across the Whitestone, up the Deegan, off at 149th Street, follow the signs to Yankee Stadium, miss the parking lot, do a U-Turn under the 4 El, and really piss off some Bronx Natives, all of whom are genetically bred to look pissed off anyway. I parked in the garage near the exit and followed everyone else toward the stadium.

Everyone seemed to be forming up in lines. Someone with a clipboard told me that I was supposed to get into the Yellow line. I was number 768, which was about ten up from the bottom of the list. There were also Red, Blue, and Purple lines as well. I was so excited that I decided to call my friend Bill on my cellphone to tell him about my part. Bill got all excited too, but not as excited as the Megaphone Person who said, "SIR, YOU ARE HOLDING UP THE LINE. WILL YOU PLEASE MOVE FORWARD?" I quickly said goodbye to Bill, who understood clearly that now that I was a movie star I had much better things to do than talk to him.

I was told to go inside the big circus tent that was serving as a holding pen and wait to be called. I had to fight through a large crowd that was exiting. I got inside the tent to learn that the Yellows, Reds, Blues, and Purples had all been called. I turned around to leave. I didn't even have time to grab a cup of coffee. The movie star life had exposed its true colors--yellow, red, blue, and purple--I was going to have to actually work for my fame. Without coffee.

We walked on the outer ring around Yankee Stadium. Nobody seemed to know where we were going. We finally ended up in right field. Emerging from the tunnel and into the stadium, I felt like a player. The entire sky was visible against a huge, curving wall of 57,000 seats. The infield looked like it was a mile away. It was beautiful. However, reality set in: we Yellows, Blues, and Purples were sitting in the cheapest seats, which was clearly not consistent with my character's motivation. The Reds, the smallest group of all of us, were led away to sit behind first base.

Nothing happened for a very long time as the Megaphone People tried to herd more people into the bleachers. I couldn't hear a thing that the Megaphone People were saying and neither could anyone around me. The crowd seemed to manage itself, as people watched the people in front of them. I wondered briefly how such a bunch of idiots could effectively move so many people around without ever having taken public speaking. I thought it was really unprofessional, and then gave up trying to hear. It turns out that they were telling people to remove their Yankees' 1998 World Series T-shirts. The film was set in 1997, and that particular World Series had not yet taken place.

I moved to the back row of the stadium, under the E of the Snapple sign behind second base. I was about as far away from home plate as a person could be. According to my notes, I was between sections 55 and 53, when the "Yankeees change pitchers." The sun had not come up over the wall of the stadium. It was fifty degrees, and I was sitting on metal. It was absolutely frigid. The people around me were either out of work, college students, or retirees. It didn't seem like the highest class of soceity. Still, progress has been made. Who would have imagined that someone would have been speaking Russian in the stadium when the Yankees won the World Series in 1977? As we sat there, the players were on the field were warming up. Some were actors, and some were real baseball players. Even from that great distance, it was obvious who was who.

Many of the shots that we were filming were closeups of Kevin Costner. There must have been dialogue going on, as we were told to pantomime our cheers. We would pantomime for thirty seconds, the director would call "CUT" and we would sit down for twenty minutes while they set up to repeat the same shot. It is very difficult to be fake enthusiasm for thirty straight seconds, although my ex-girlfriends may not agree with me on that one.

After a few repeats, I decided that my character didn't have a good cheer to pantomime, so I mouthed the words, "GIULIANI IS AN ASSHOLE". I told my neighbor that I felt that my pantomiming skills had gotten a lot better once I had come up with something to say. He told me that they would look for things like that and edit me out. His belief that the movie cameras would pick me out of a crowd of two thousand people to read my lips from 400 feet away was no more silly than my thought a clear picture of me as an extra would make it into the final cut of the film. I kept myself amused through the rest of the day thinking of a panel of lip readers watching a screening of the movie, inspecting thousands of tiny little dots that might be mouthing bad words.

There were a couple of kids two rows in front of us that wouldn't stand up or take off their jackets. A Megaphone Person came over and asked them to stand. They wouldn't. The Megaphone Person told them to leave and never come back. They wouldn't. The Megaphone Person called for security, who came up and told them to stand up. They still wouldn't. Finally, they just ran down the bleachers and out of the stadium. Although the Megaphone People were bosses and therefore generally not liked, the section clapped. Those two were making us look bad. It was amazing to see the pride that the section took in its job, as simple as it was. There was absolutely no tolerance for deviants. Isn't it generally held that the lowest classes of soceity are the most conservative?

Because I couldn't hear the Megaphone People, I didn't get the chance to volunteer for a special part. A guy near me volunteered, and he got to walk out of the tunnel and up the stairs with a beer. This would seem like a good way to break into the extra business, but it's not for everyone. We reshot the scene about ten times, and he had to walk the entire height of the tier of seats each time. They never let him drink the beer, either. I was happy to sit there and read Candide. It was the best of all possible worlds.

In fact, they never let us drink any beer at all. I don't know much about baseball, but two of the things that I know that you do at the games is drink beer and make noise. We couldn't do either, but had to act like baseball fans anyway. I am not sure if we pulled it off. They told us the director was going to use some stock footage that was shot during the 1998 World Series. I wondered why they didn't just save the trouble and use it for all of their shots. They were going to go from a packed stadium in the World Series games, to shots of two thousand people dispersed among the back half of the stadium. Each successful shot was ended with applause from the staff down close. We would clap too and say "that took long enough" and "at last" among ourselves. I was moved to Right Field under a sign pushing Major League Baseball between sections 39 and 41. I sat under the Budweiser logo. I was freezing and wishing desperately that I had long underwear. I sat on my gloves, as my butt was colder than my hands. We had to remove our jackets and gloves for the shots. At last the sun moved over our part of the bleachers. It was warmer, but not warm enough. Work went on for another couple of hours. Stand up. Pretend to cheer. Sit down. Stand up. Pretend to cheer. Sit down. I had a couple of the miniature Butterfingers that I'd brought and passed some around to some neighbors. Finally, the joyous word was heard from down on the field: Lunch.

I followed everyone back outside the stadium. We had to exit through the turnstyles. No one seemed to be rushing. As we passed by some trailers, an experienced extra pointed and said that they wished they were SAG too. The Screen Actors Guild extras got to eat in a separate area from the rest of us. Rumor had it that they ate lobster and steak. More important, they got their own area away from us. They were the elite of the extras, and I found myself envying them as well.

We had to go inside the tent, which was actually the first floor of the parking garage with canvas sides around it to try and keep the warmth in. There were lightbulbs strung up along the ceiling that did no good. As we walked into line, I realized that I was very nearly at the back. A large black woman behind me said, "This reminds me of pennitentiary." I agreed with her, which is what you do with large black women in the Bronx who are remembering pennitentiary and are behind you in a food line.

The food might have been good, and it was probably better than what most of the extras would have gotten at home, but by the time I got there, it was almost completely gone. I had remnant of chicken and salad. The salad was from the bottom of a large aluminum tin and was mostly the part of Italian dressing that sinks to the bottom. I ended up filling up on rolls and butter.

I went back where I had been, and found that the after lunch activity was very similar to the before lunch activity. I called the client with whom I'd have to work the next week. Unfortunately, he hadn't been told I was coming, and I was discovering a long list of incompatibilities that his computer system had with our product. I also wasn't allowed to say that the $25,000 imaging system he had just bought had never been installed anywhere before, or that I had only been trained on it for about ten minutes one Friday afternoon. Since I was such a great actor, I pulled it off and got someone from the home office to reschedule.

Because I couldn't hang up the phone and everyone I was talking to thought I was at work, I had to do a couple of shots with a cell phone on my ear. This drew pointed criticism from the Megaphone People. I tried calling Bill again, but all I got was his machine. He said later that all he could hear on it after I said hello was someone shouting through a megaphone to hang up.

There was a real lack of community in this section of the bleachers. Another group had some people leading songs between shots. I'm not sure that was a real improvement, but they looked like they were having fun. One of the guys in my section yelled out the obvious, "If you want me to act like a baseball fan, give me some beer." The Megaphone Person just shrugged. Another guy yelled at the Tigers' right fielder, "Hey Hart! You suck!" The actor spun around on his heel, smiled, and gave the whole section the finger with his glove hand. At least two guys had gotten into their characters.

It was getting dark and the stadium lights came on. I couldn't believe that shooting was going to continue. We moved again. This time I learned my lesson from lunch and fought to the front of the line. It paid off. I had to resist being moved by Megaphone People and others who wanted the seats, but there I was, just to the right of home plate in row two. The seat in front of me had a metal plate on it that said "Mr. Selig". It was reserved for the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

Because we were so close, we were able to hear the director. We were shooting the last play of the game. The Yankees were losing 1-0 and were one out away from a no-hitter. The Yankee at bat was to hit the ball and just barely be called out at first base. We were told to cheer as he hit it, cheer as he ran, boo as he was called out, then realize that Kevin Costner had just pitched a perfect game and cheer again wildly. The second camera was pointed right at me.

The first time through, the director said that we had done an awful job and wanted much more effort out of us. He got a lot more noise the next time, but the cheer-boo-cheer sounded ridiculous. One guy behind me said loudly, "If anyone here knew anything whatsoever about baseball, no one would be booing." I said to myself that if anyone there knew anything about directing, they wouldn't have two thousand people making such an unrealistic series of noises. I'm pretty sure that we were both talking about the same thing. We ran through the scene one more time and the director thanked and dismissed us.

The Megaphone People tried to shout instructions about the next day's work, but everyone had headed for the exits and I was with them. I was cold and hungry, and I didn't want to deal with the traffic jam. I got in the car, back on the Deegan, over the Whitestone, down the Van Wyck, and into a hot bath.

After the baseball hat, Butterfingers, tolls, and social security, I netted $24. We shot a total of four scenes. If I had worked for ten days, I could have gotten an official cast t-shirt. The next day, I allowed myself to be conned into picking my sister up at a swim meet and the next week I returned to work.

Seven months later, I had moved back to Syracuse and enrolled in school. I had seen The Postman and thought it was as good as any other Kevin Costner movie. I had been unable to talk any of my friends into watching Waterworld.

I was outside painting my mother's house ten months later when I got the phone call. They were reshooting some scenes and they wanted me back. I had to choose between helping my girlfriend move to Syracuse and my big chance at Extra Superstardom. I felt my pulse quicken at the thought, but instead made the choice to go and get Shelly.

I haven't regretted it so far. Like Travolta, I had made a stunning return to acting and set the world on fire with my unbelievable talent as Yankees Fan Yellow 768. Winning the Oscar for Best Extra in a Kevin Costner Movie was one of the most thrilling moments of my life. Unlike Travolta, I got out while I was still hot. Except I may have made that part up.

Copyright Dave Sipley
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