Work Halliday

Ayun Halliday is wistful about the time she dressed up as Bert from Sesame Street in a department store, sweating profusely as bratty kids bounced on her lap and babies squirmed in her arms. You even get the feeling she's sentimental about it.

"I guess I'm nostalgic because that was a certain chapter in my life that's over," she says. "You know, I'm nostalgic for breast-feeding babies, too, though hopefully I won't go through that again, either."

Halliday's new Job Hopper (Seal Press, $14.95) is an essay collection full of experiences one wouldn't want to repeat, and most of us would prefer to never have had at all. However, Halliday embraces her miserable penny-ante jobs with the same lovelorn emotion that makes people think they'd actually like to hang out with their exes, even if the relationship ended terribly.

While plying her trade as one of the writers and performers for Chicago's improv group the Neo-Futurists, Halliday worked as a waitress in lousy restaurants and clubs, as a saleswoman in a hippie clothing store, as a nude model for a drawing class and—of course—as a temp.

"Temping made my nontemping life wonderful," Halliday, 40, says. She's talking from her New York home, where she lives with her two children and husband Greg Kotis, fellow Chicago expat and playwright. "When I was at the Neo-Futurarium or hanging out after a show, it was great. It's like how you only feel happy when you have a well of grief."

Like in her mothering memoir, The Big Rumpus, and her travel journal, No Touch Monkey, Halliday loves writing about her low points. She uses her wit like water in a stiff drink, cutting the bitterness of some truly terrible stories. There's the restaurant where the owner gave the head waiter position to a lover, who then broke in at night with a different partner, engaged in a little adult kitchen work, and passed out on the counter. Halliday was called in on her one day off to cover for the mess, while the cook scrubbed the counter with Clorox. She sketches an array of bad bosses, not the least of which is the club manager who implored her to ask men, "Have you guys ever had a screaming orgasm?"

And there are the mind-numbing reception jobs, where she would take three-hour lunches and spend time writing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind plays for the Neo-Futurists.

But the worst story, by far, is the day Halliday showed up at a West Side school to substitute teach. It took her nearly two hours to take attendance, and to pry a young pugilist named Gilberto off a classmate. Committed to getting something accomplished, she used her improv-based theater skills with the kids to play-act diagramming a sentence. Surprisingly, it didn't work.

"I thought, 'Hey, I'm this great entertainer, I'll just go in and be this really cool, fun teenager,'" she says. "I had big plans. I was going to be a pied piper. Really, I was just an idiot who didn't know what I was doing."

Finally, a browbeating gym teacher arrived and demanded the kids "get those butts in the seats," ending Halliday's experiment as a molder of young minds.

While there are a lot of horror stories and wait-until-you-hear-this moments, nostalgia allows her to be sympathetic to the plight of the down-market worker. As someone who was clearly working a job with no intention of making it a life's work, Halliday writes some fascinating passages about inadvertently coming up against race and class issues. And the book also has many charming moments, when she remembers her work friends who have fallen out of her life.

"It was more about recalling what I was like back then, who my friends were," she says. "I didn't have pictures of myself or my friends from those jobs, but I can completely remember what the boring lunchrooms looked like."

Halliday doesn't have to deal with drab lunchrooms and overbearing bosses now that she and husband Kotis have dumped their day jobs, thanks to the huge success of Kotis's play Urinetown. She continues to write, and Kotis is working on a few new projects, but she's taken on some massage-therapy work for a little extra money—and so she wouldn't feel like a hack while writing about day jobs.

Without another guaranteed hit play around the corner, though, Halliday's nostalgia could disappear, and financial reality might force her to don the Bert suit again.

"I'm starting to have that feeling of, 'It's time to lay another golden egg,'" she says. "Come on, let's squeeze another one out Greg."

Job Hopper is out now from Seal Press. Halliday will read from it at Quimby's Saturday 16 at 4pm. See listings for details.