The story broke of former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens working at Trader Joe’s, despite the fact that Mr. Owens himself was more than happy to move on, the story spread as people suddenly discovered that actors have to pay the bills like everyone else. The actress Tamara Braun summed it up on her Instagram:
What I also know is that being an actor, musician, writer, dancer, photographer or artist/creative of ANY kind is REALLY HARD. Most have other types of jobs while pursuing their craft. Unless you come from family money it is practically impossible not to. I have had MANY jobs to pay the bills while pursuing my career.
It really is strange that Geoffrey Owens’s story spread so widely because tabloids and rumor mills have been pointing out that actors take other jobs for years. Twenty years ago there were stories that Lee Majors was working in a school cafeteria to survive (actually he was helping out at his daughter’s school). Despite appearing on Seaquest DSV and still being recognized as Lana Lang from the Superboy series of the early 90’s, actress Stacy Haiduk admitted to driving for Uber. Alan Ruck explained the situation in an interview:
So here I am, working at a Sears warehouse, and because Ferris Bueller had been out already, people were clocking me and going, “Do you know you look like this guy in this movie?” And I was, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not me. It’s not me. I’m not that guy.” Because I didn’t want to get into it. I thought that they’d probably go, “You were in the movies and then you wound up here? We should just beat you for being stupid!”
There is a larger issue here that leads into the unspoken bias as to which jobs are considered acceptable and which ones are not. The entertainment industry is a billion dollar business, but the Arts, in general, are not considered an acceptable career (until artists have a proven return on investment). If a former actor ended up working as a banker or a lawyer, or some other high paying professional class career, there would not be any shaming, but because the retail and service industries are generally “unskilled” (another shaming term) they are vocations considered to be a step down from a previous level of success. It is even worse for artists who have not yet broken in because despite years of training and honing of talents, most artistic disciplines are not considered “marketable skills.” So in order to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, artists of all types take whatever jobs we can find to pay the bills.
An unfortunate necessity, and a cold hard reality, but there is a deeper issue that has been overlooked. A lot of people, in their eagerness to defend Owens and other artists, have come out and spoken about the “honor” of work, and we should all be grateful that we have it. While it is generally a good trait to be grateful for what blessings we have in our lives, especially compared to so many other people around the world, I have never considered work to be honorable or something we should be grateful for. It is a brutal process whereby we must cede a third of our lives to a disinterested Other under threat of starvation.
The professional classes need to learn that for many people, but most especially for artists, we do not seek personal realization or validation from our job. That is what our creative work is for. Artists have chosen to adopt a life on the margins, knowing that we may never be successful at doing what we love, yet we do it anyway. The real question is this: These are the people who create the art and tell the stories that give meaning to so many, or at the very least offer a bit of an escape from the relentless marketization of our lives; why are they forced to those margins in the first place? It recalls the words of author David Graeber who once said: “Where is the next John Lennon? Probably packing boxes in a supermarket somewhere.”