Hollyweird Boulevard!

So there we were, in Hollywood working for free accommodation and living it up while continuing with Sup's eye treatment and we started to wonder if there was anything we could do to subsidise the rest of our stay to prevent the cost of living & medical bills eating in to our funds...

Every day we would pass by Grauman's Chinese Theatre and see the hustlers dressed up as film characters having pictures taken with the tourists on Hollywood Boulevard. We assumed that they were hired by someone but then Zorro himself came and stayed in our hostel and after a while myself and our friend Carina got talking to him and discovered to the contrary. As long as you had a decent costume and followed the unwritten rules of the street, it was fair game. We got so excited and started planning immediately, half expecting to not go through with it, and we had a fantastic day window shopping in Hollywood, trying on wigs and planning characters like Betty Boop, Jessica Rabbit and Playboy Bunnies. That night I told Sup our hilarious plan, and while I expected him to think I was crazy, instead he was delighted and set about planning his own character – we were in business!

A lot of research and strategic planning later and our ideas were sorted – Carina was to be Alice in Wonderland (although she later changed to Supergirl and enjoyed far more success), Sup was to be the brooding X-Men superhero Wolverine, and myself – the cheeky Disney favourite Tinkerbell!

Our costumes cost about $200 each to put together, approximately £150. Sup ordered the best Wolverine costume on the market with amazing realistic claws and paid for express delivery. It was definitely worth the money as he had people coming up to him all the time concerned about whether the claws were made from real metal and were dangerous! I looked all over and decided that the best Tinkerbell outfit would have to be made to order. In true Hollywood style I approached the owner of an exotic dancer shop and had him make me the most dazzling green sparkling fairy dress, complete with Tinkerbell zigzag hem, The wings, wig and wand were from an upmarket Hollywood fancy dress shop and I cut a fringe into the wig to look more like Disney's naughty little pixie. The shoes were more Blue Peter unfortunately – little slippers from a TK Maxx type shop with sponges glued on as pompoms!!

The first day on the job was overwhelming and exciting. I went out on my own as I was ready but Sup's costume was due the next day. I came back with tips spilling out of my purse. It was a great start! When Sup joined me, for a while we stayed out of each other's way, assuming that we were in direct competition for each other's 'targets', although we later learned that we earned far much more working together, with families coming to us for their sons to have photos with Wolverine and daughters with Tinkerbell. We were a rock solid, if a little unconventional, team!

The month we worked on Hollywood Boulevard was a surreal whirlwind of madness and I will forever look back on it as one of the most amazing times of my life. From 9am to 5pm we were hustling on the Walk of Fame, then we would dash back to our flat, count our tips, change in a micro second and run to the hostel to work our shifts there – Sup would do 6-12 most

days working as the host and I would do housekeeping til 10, then make dinner. Three times a week we ate the hostel BBQ so our diet was pretty poor, but our morning bananas without fail kept our guts from completely rotting from fast food overload. We often rewarded ourselves during a busy day at our favourite shopping place Fresh & Easy with our best ice cream ever - toffee crème Haagen Dazs, and we were there every day buying water on our breaks and sampling the free tasters of food.

It's hard to explain what an incredible experience it was to have children shouting our names across the street and to watch them scream and jump in the air when we turned and waved. Sup had grown men, some with gang tattoos, walk past and high five him telling him he's their hero, and several women ran excitedly over to me, one whispering in my ear she had a tattoo of me on her butt.....!! Of course there were some rude people, but far less than I expected, and I even got a proposition from a guy who said he had a room at the Roosevelt and we could 'make some things happen'...Hmmm, tempting but no! Unbelievable! The answer I gave him – 'sorry, I'm with Wolverine' was almost as absurd as the words that came out of his arrogant mouth!

There was a certain learning curve with the job and after a while we learned that 'snipers' were our enemies – people who sneakily snapped photos of us without paying tips. We spent a lot of the day avoiding people who would craftily walk near us so that their partner or friend could take a photo when we weren't looking. There were also tour operators who hated our guts, quite possibly because we had more business than they did, and were incredibly rude to us. The biggest joke of all was a certain arachnid comic book character working the boulevard who referred to us all as 'f*@#ing beggars', although what he was doing that was so different from us was beyond me! It was later we discovered that certain characters had alcohol or substance misuse problems, and some were even homeless, and we started to see a very different side to the Boulevard.

We talked to many of the other characters, and had some great laughs with cheeky Guatemalan Nacho Libre, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Sponge Bob, the Joker, Minnie Mouse (who was a guy!), Shrek, Goofy, the Predator, Freddie Kruegar, Mario and Luigi, Catwoman, Wonderwoman, Arial, Cinderella, Bugs Bunny, Michael Jackson (there were about 5 of them),

Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Superman and Elvis. The guy dressed as Bumblebee from Transformers reportedly spent $2000 on the impressive costume and it was totally worth it. Every weekend half way through the day he would suddenly appear, a tall guy in a giant machine suit, making a big entrance by striding down the road alongside all the cars, and all the other characters would scuttle away to another place as crowds of people gathered to take photos with him.

Sup's favourites were Mexican Scooby Doo, a lovely sweet guy, Bruce Lee – a film student and martial arts expert, and Mr Incredible from Turkey, who taught us some valuable tricks of the trade.

Rumours about all the characters spread around like we were in the school playground and it was actually fascinating to learn about the lives of these people – some who had been doing the job for over a decade. There were some aspiring actors, some students, a composer, up and coming movie producers, and then there were some people at a very low point in their lives, often aggressive, confrontational and unpredictable, scary men you wouldn't willingly let your children anywhere near, dressed in a full disguise so that parents were delighted to have their kids hug them for a photo.

There were times that I had never been colder in my life and times when Sup was so hot he could hardly bear it. The job could make you feel on top of the world one minute, and then a bad day could make you feel like you'd hit rock bottom. It was an emotional rollercoaster for many different reasons, but it was the chance of a lifetime, it saved us financially and on a more personal level, it fulfilled my 10 year old self's dream of being famous, if only for a little while. Being adored every day was magical and the sense of achievement we both got from the experience was priceless. A true Hollywood story!

written by

SupandNic on May 25, 2010 from Los Angeles, United States

from the travel blog: Sup and Nic's World Tour!

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I loved sharing this with you guys!!!!!!!! I really really miss youuuuu!!!!!

written by Carina Supergirl on July 29, 2010

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