Once, back when I was in high school, there was a big hullabaloo on campus about some Karate-Kid-like Mickey Mouse Club movie being filmed nearby. They needed extras, a ton of them, and all of the popular ROTC guys took a day off and tried to get into the movie. I actually got to see one of them when the movie finally aired on the Disney Channel. He sat among a crowd in the bleachers, and his bold blue, gold, and white letterman jacket stood out like a beacon.

“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. “There’s Ernest Escalante! Oh, my God!” I was never so excited in my entire life.

My mom actually had a chance at being an extra on a serial drama once—a speaking extra, no less. They shot Silk Stalkings down in San Diego, and on one of her days off from work she decided to try to get in it as an extra. She came home that night and told us that they wanted her to come back and play a Filipina maid—one with a line to be spoken in Tagalog, even.

I was so excited that I started raining questions on her, but she quickly doused it and said she wasn’t going to do it. The pay was so low, she reasoned, that it wasn’t worth doing; she’d rather go to work the next day and get paid three times what the studio paid extras. Her reasoning made sense, but I was disappointed just the same. She would have been immortalized had she done it.

One of my choir classmates, however, didn’t seem to mind the low pay of an extra. She went to the Silk Stalkings set regularly for a while when she was in her acting phase.

My cousin Zee, on the other hand, was an extra on Ocean’s Eleven. You have to watch it on DVD, though, because she’s on it for about seven frames, and even then she’s a blur. Still… she’s immortalized! She also wrote me recently about being an extra for a new NBC show coming out in the fall, so she’s immortalized twice!

H.E. takes the “extra” special cake, though. He was once or twice an extra on Cagney & Lacey, and he had lines! So he is forever immortalized with a fake Bronx accent in some lady detective show. Something to show the grandkids if it ever comes out on DVD.

Me, I’ve never been an extra for a TV show or a movie. I’ve acted and directed in school plays, been on TV a few times, and all in all had every opportunity to stand around all day for low pay, waiting to be an extra. I just never got around to it.

I would totally have loved being an extra on Monsters, Inc., though. The only reason they couldn’t use me? I had one eye too many and three legs too few. Plus, my tourist visa to Monstropolis wasn’t long enough for me to stick around. My disappointment could not be contained.

How about you? Have you ever been an extra?

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