The Wetsuit Story

I was working on a Domino's commercial, and the night before they e-mailed me the call sheet with the names and phone numbers of the crew. There was a note at the bottom. It said "Note: There will be a 7 foot alligator on set tomorrow. All untrained crew are to remain at least 15 feet away from the alligator at all times."

This was probably the third job I had worked with these people, and I was trying really hard not to ask too many questions, especially since I knew so little about the tools, techniques, and behaviors necessary for the job, and hoped that if I just jumped in to things people would think I knew what I was doing. So I didn't ask questions when the first thing to do at work was to sink black tarps to the bottom of a swimming pool, and then to fill the pool with branches and dirt and lily pads so that it looked like a swamp.

The morning passed with no sign of the alligator and with little incident. Except shortly before lunch, my boss walked up to me holding a wetsuit. He held it up to me. "You look like about a large, right?" he said.

Since I was so new to this job the other people in the art department had decided it was really funny to give me fake requests and see how I dealt with them, especially when told to do things that don't need to be done, or find things that don't exist (apparently "sandwich clamps" mean your hands, and there is no such thing as a "left handed smoke-shifter.") So I was a little skeptical about the wetsuit.

Until about an hour later, when my boss looked at his watch and then said, "Okay, put on the wetsuit."
"Seriously?" I said.
"Yeah," he said.
"I don't have a bathing suit or anything."
"Darren has a bathing suit you can borrow."
"Can Darren just put on the wetsuit instead?" I didn't actually say that, because I was trying not to ask too many questions.

Instead I borrowed Darren's bathing suit and walked down the block to the mobile home bathrooms to change into it. As I came out, a minivan drove past me and parked in front of the house we were shooting in. As I got closer I saw that it said "Cinema Critters" on the side.

I'd imagined something along the lines of a metal trailer attached to a truck, like something out of Jurassic Park, or at least something like the kind of trailer that horses and sheep are driven around in. Instead, the alligator showed up in the back of a minivan with its mouth duct-taped shut.

I went back to the pool to double check that this wetsuit thing wasn't a joke. I was wearing the bathing suit under my jeans, and if it all turned out to be a joke, I could just manage with those for the rest of the day, but once the wetsuit went on there'd be no taking it off.
"What are you waiting for," my boss said. "Get to it."

Being from the land-locked midwest I've only had the opportunity to put on a wetsuit once before in my life, and that was under strict SCUBA instructor supervision. So in my haste to get the thing on, like putting on a wetsuit next to a swampy pool with a 7 foot alligator waiting in the back of a nearby minivan was just part of the job, I put the wetsuit on backwards (it zips up the front, just like a coat, was my thinking.) So I turned to my boss and said "Now what," and he started laughing, and then took a picture on his iphone, and then told me it was on backwards, then pointed it out to the rest of the art department. So I hastily took it off and put it back on with the zipper in the back, and stood to the side and tried to look inconspicuous, the only guy in a wetsuit near a pool surrounded by people wearing normal clothes.

Until some other crew member walked by me and said, "You know you've got that thing on inside out?"
"You're kidding," I said. "Really?"
"Yeah," he said. "I know. I used to be a SCUBA instructor."
"I used to be SCUBA Certified," I said, peeling off the wetsuit as fast as possible.
"Well a lot's changed since then," he said.
Then Darren walked by as I was putting the wetsuit on the right way, and told me that the bathing suit was also on backwards.

What it turned out they needed me to do was go into the pool and adjust the leaves and branches slightly, and later, if the alligator ended up going in the pool, I might have to readjust the branches that it moved away while sliding in. Apparently nobody knew for sure if the alligator would go in the pool.

Meanwhile, I still had to do my job as part of the art department, which meant sprinkling leaves all around the concrete side of the pool, and then hosing those leaves away when the director changed his mind and decided he didn't like them. Someone handed me the hose to coil up. "Leave it turned on," he said, "in case we need to spray the side of the pool again." So I left the water on and coiled the hose up and dropped it on the ground, not taking into account the nozzle on the end, which clicked on as soon as the hose hit the concrete, and sprayed water directly at the camera. "WHOA!" the camera department yelled, and I turned the water off, and they started trying to dry off the camera. Somehow nobody in the art department saw that, and I'm hoping none of them read this, because I know I probably would have fired me for that.

After that I just stood to the side, having decided that in my frazzled, wet-suited state, anything I touched would get messed up. I had been in the water already to move some leaves around, and was getting cold wearing a now wet wetsuit. My shoes and coat I had set aside by the pool, and I was just about to go get them when the 1st Assistant Director called "Alligator's coming through!" and 4 guys from Cinema Critters carried the alligator through the garage and into the back yard, setting it down next to the pool, directly between me and my shoes. "Everybody stand back, we're untaping her mouth," they said, and then did.

I wish for the sake of the story I could say that I somehow ended up having to be in the water at the same time as the alligator, but that climax wasn't to be. Instead, the alligator just sat still until the handlers prodded it with some poles, at which point it would slowly walk forward while the camera filmed it, and when it got within 15 feet of the director, the handlers would jump on it and drag it back to a safe distance, where it would sit until they prodded it again. At one point they tried to make it go in the water, but the alligator continued walking forwards and one of the handlers said "No way she's going in there!"

Eventually she left, and there was little point in my ever having put on the wetsuit, except that at the end of the shoot I had to get in the pool to fish out the tarps we had dropped in at the beginning of the day.

I got to keep the wetsuit. I've been debating things I can do with it, besides practicing putting it on. The best idea I've come up with is to take a shower while wearing it, and zip a bar of soap inside the wetsuit, and let the water permeate until the soap is all gone. I like to think this will give me a deeper clean.