ABSTRACT
Doug Larson is a thirty-nine-year-old white man who occasionally gets work as anextra on a popular soap opera. After losing a secure managerial job with a trucking company, he took six months off to find direction in his life. Three years earlier, he came to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Divorced, with no children, he feels he can accommodate the instability of both his lines of work, temping and acting. He described one of the aspects that is most troubling to him:
Usually they think of temps as being morons for some reason. And they give you very little work to start out. I'd be done in a matter of minutes and they look at you like, "Why did you do that so quickly?" I didn't find any of the work difficult. It was quite numbing on the brain. It wasn't creative. It wasn't challenging. It was just mundane work.
