Odd Jobs: Off The Career Map In The Nation's Smallest State
[Rhode Island Monthly Magazine, January 2002]
The specter of employment first appeared with my high-school career guidance counselor. He calmly explained to the class how we could expect – sooner than any of us were prepared – a free-standing, self-sufficient, post-mom-and-dad life with a – gasp! – job.
That was the good news. The bad news came when he read off a startlingly short litany of shockingly boring job titles – beginning with Abrasive-blasting Equipment Operator and ending with Zinc-plate Grainer – presented as a first approximation of all the jobs in the known universe.
We knew the whole thing was a crock. The panorama of employment just had to be a zillion times wider than that. After all, any informal vocational survey of kid lit and teen culture was jam-packed with nifty gigs like Lion-tamer, Grinch, X-Man, Ghostbuster, Croc-hunter, Extreme Snowboarder and Rock Star.
Which explained why upon graduation none of us stampeded – right away, anyway – to be Zinc-plate Grainers. High hopes die hard. No, we protested; there must be more jobs, dear career counselor, under heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
For most of us, necessity eventually intervened and we made our occupational compromises. Work is, after all, supposed to be, um, work. But there was one guy – an awkward, shy, unremarkable kid with jug-ears and big feet named Vaino (rhymed with “wino”) – who refused to roll over. On the class’ five year reunion, there were rumors Vaino was working on a vineyard in Argentina, some kind of bottle corking expert. By the tenth, the story was that he was importing exotic insects from Borneo for Hollywood horror films. By the twentieth, he had been sighted teaching “team-building seminars” in Alaska, which turned out to be a fancy way of saying he was hopping around on glaciers in cool adventure gear with a bunch of corporate fat-cats. Though the details were always a little sketchy, one thing was clear: Vaino never came to reunions. He was probably having too much fun.
But it got me to thinking: There must be Vainos in every class – intrepid, uncompromising independents who flatly reject the standard occupational canon to discover or create jobs so weird and wacky my old career counselor would burst into flames at their very mention.
So I set out to find them. Within State boundaries, anyway.
For a month I badgered friends, relatives and complete strangers to tell me about the most interesting jobs they’d ever heard of. It quickly emerged that merely interesting jobs seem to cluster around a number of recurring themes: the Arts; animals; food; glamour; design; danger; antiquities; high technology; novelty; rescue; luxury; eccentricity. But the really fantastic ones – the jobs with a high “Vaino factor” – were combinations of two or more of those themes.
This insight led me to a number of near-Vainos. An abridged list: There was the guy who chased birds off the tarmac at T.F. Green Airport (danger, animals); Providence’s gondolieri (leisure, glamour, antiquity); The “Oxen Drover” – a one-man, two oxen logging anachronism (antiquity, animals, danger); The Raptor Rehabilitator, installing mating pairs of falcons high atop Providence skyscrapers (danger, rescue, animals, novelty); The Topiarist at Portsmouth’s Green Animals Garden (eccentricity, antiquity, design. Oh, and I suppose animals).
But in the end, none of these jobs satisfied my emerging standard for a “True Vaino.” Either they weren’t full-time positions – volunteer work, partially compensated hobbies, or odd but minor aspects of much more prosaic occupations – or they were already so noteworthy and celebrated they had lost their power to surprise. (Oh, with one exception, actually: the Oxen Drover, who had passed away before I could get to him, darn it.) The Vaino-esque career must be not only eye-poppingly interesting but also a little obscure, uncelebrated, half in shadow – in short, the kind of job exotica that becomes a legend at high school reunions.
Still, Rhode Island seems to have way more than its share of Vainos. Perhaps it’s because Rhode Island has more artists and designers per capita than nearly anywhere. Perhaps it’s the over-concentration of higher education with its exotic research interests, or Newport’s moneyed leisure class demanding constant recreational innovation and service to vanity. Heck, maybe it’s the stern gaze of the Independent Man from atop the capitol dome, making Rhode Islanders uncomfortable whenever somebody else tells them what a job should be.
I don’t know; all I know is that when I ran across Rhode Island School of Design’s resident “Art Nurse”, I’d found my first real Vaino: a position embracing both Fine Arts and rescue themes.
Most people wouldn’t normally associate the two, but apparently first-year students at Rhode Island School of Design do. When a serious art student faces a blank canvas or a fresh lump of clay and finds no inspiration forthcoming, they consider themselves in dire straights.
Enter Michael Townsend, “Art Nurse.” Townsend runs a creativity counseling hotline for RISD undergraduates. When a student’s creative process stalls, he comes to the rescue with a jump-start of inspiration. When performance anxiety holds the Muse hostage, he negotiates a release. Needless to say, every RISD Freshman has his number.
Townsend arrived at his post through eclectic twists and turns: A Bachelor’s in printmaking from RISD segued somewhat counter-intuitively into a career in modern dance. Years later, he earned a national reputation founding a band of public-art guerrillas who roved from city to city creating quick, perishable public murals out of artist’s tape (a low-adhesive, crepe-paper based blue tape that tears and molds with ease). This ad-hoc, collaborative work quickened his intense, nimble style of last-minute brainstorming and creative block-busting.
Tape art was springboard back to RISD, where he taught a class in public art. But word went through the student grapevine Townsend had a serious talent as an artistic mentor and one-man creativity catalyst. Sensing a unique opportunity, Townsend pitched the idea to RISD he become a full-time, “non-departmental rogue instructor,” aka Art Nurse.
As you might expect, life as an Art Nurse is never dull. Recently, Townsend’s “bat-phone” – as he calls it, in a nod to action-hero lore – rang with a call from a student explaining she was having trouble walking on water. But this was no Freshman freak-out; her art project, as it turned out, involved suspending herself from helium balloons to reduce her weight just to the point she might delicately walk across a pool of water without lifting off. Townsend quickly determined that a small hot air balloon would be a better option, and connected the student with a shop in Vermont offering ballooning components – making him perhaps the first college professor in history who can say – without a trace of hyperbole – that his students walk on water.
I found my next Vaino – or Vainos, in this case, except they happened to be women – working in an unlikely métier of food, danger, and animal themes.
Just as the fine arts generate a number of delightfully off-beat jobs like Townsend’s, the culinary arts spawn opportunities for fabulously atypical work. The Personal Chef is a good example, preparing often quirky fare for executives, celebrities or anyone with the means and appetite.
But Christine Carlson and Ilana Cobban cook for a unique kind of celebrity – some of whom have four-inch fangs and ravenous appetites for raw meat. No, we’re not talking about Tinseltown producers or Big Apple financiers; Carlson and Cobban cook for the animals at Roger Williams Zoo.
Where Elvis Presley’s personal chef executed a now-infamous menu of grilled Peanut Butter Sandwiches and Breaded Chicken Livers, Carlson and Cobban’s meal planning runs more to cricket salads (for Madagascar’s hedge-hog like Tenrec), “bloodcicles” (light summer fare for the Snow Leopard), peanut-butter-and-banana hot dogs and five-gallon blocks of papaya sorbet (Elephants, dispatched with legendary speed). Moon Bears like bananas and grapes, but hate peppers. Polar bears hate bananas and oranges, but like apples and pears. Pythons? Well, a defrosted rat tartare is just fine. The finickiest animal in the zoo is the tree-kangaroo; for some reason, she doesn’t like to eat in chunks. Vegetables must be julienned into sticks, or they won’t go down.
Christine and Ilana work the Park’s animal commissary, a facility dedicated solely to the preparation of wild animal cuisine. At first glance it doesn’t look all that different from any other kitchen operation – stainless steel countertops, industrial refrigerators, pantries. It isn’t until you look inside the refrigerators – and see Tupperware containers with cryptic labels like “Black Lemur” – that you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore. Then you notice the innocent-looking plastic garbage cans emitting a noise like the Mormon Tabernacle Cricket Choir. (Who knew crickets came in sizes “pinhead,” “medium,” and “adult”?) The pantry is stocked with such delicacies as Pigeon Pellets, Marmoset Chow (regular and diet), Old World Primate Chow and – you guessed it – New World Primate Chow. I’m not making this up.
And while the zoo larder contains many pre-packaged items aimed at particular species, some diners are conspicuously under-served. Exotic cockroaches must eat, too – though no major vendor has moved into the niche (entrepreneur alert!). So the animal chefs improvise with “rodent blocks,” high-fiber “primate sticks” and crushed grapes. Oh, and they make their own bat-nectar from scratch: papaya, dried milk, sugar, wheat germ, baby cereal – maybe a cookbook is in order.
A trip through the freezer is not for the squeamish – feeding reptiles isn’t a pretty business, sort of a mixed-rodent-and-mealworm sashimi operation. But the bird salads – prepared fresh daily – looked good enough for humans: expertly shredded piles of colorful carrot, green pepper, and apple, garnished with grapes, nuts, and raisins.
Both women seem to be reaping the main benefit of the True Vaino: They enjoy their jobs thoroughly. “I get to know the animals, I like learning about them,” Christine says. Ilana agrees: “Take Carmen the Sloth. I know her. I know what she eats. Who else can say that?” And all her customers, she reports, are unfailingly happy to see her. “You become the favorite aunt to all the animals in the zoo,” she beams.
Throughout my search, one of the strongest clues I might be on the trail of another Vaino was usually right there in the job title. The really promising ones – Art Nurse, Zoo Chef – seemed to be collisions of two words you wouldn’t ordinarily see together in the same paragraph. Which would make Wanda Miglus’ job the best yet; she’s a Textile Animator. Somewhere between the weaver’s art and the Cartoon Network, Miglus has stumbled upon a kind of fabric vivomancy, making cloth come to life with moving pictures.
Don’t worry; most people can’t even begin to imagine what this might look like or how it works. The short story is that once upon a time Miglus, while working on an MFA in Textiles at RISD (Why is it that the search for Vainos keeps leading back to RISD?) made a mistake: While attempting a class assignment on a Jacquard Loom – a specialized weaving machine which automates the production of complex, intricately woven fabric – something went wrong. Instead of the intended overlapping of complex woven shapes, the resulting fabric weirdly showed a completely different pattern depending on the angle of view.
What Miglus had inadvertently invented was the textile equivalent of the “blinking Jesus” religious novelty – those little plastic plaques with pictures that moved when tilted and rocked – known as “lenticular images”.
It takes a certain kind of person to see opportunity in accident. While some might have seen an annoying art school setback, for Miglus it bloomed into a non-traditional career par excellence. She established her own one-woman textile design studio; she secured a patent; with help from Providence’s Center for Women and Enterprise, she learned enough about business plans to create her own.
And though she’s still the struggling inventor/artist, occasionally taking work in product development or as a textile designer for the automotive industry (okay, so she loses a few Vaino points. But still...) she’s managed to generate enough enthusiasm for her “found invention” to win support from arts organizations and technology incubators – most notably Michigan’s Alden B. Dow Creativity Center – to continue development.
Much of her work focuses on the graphic content – the stories – her fabrics tell. One portrays an enigmatic symbology of parental relationships. Another involves a repeating, dual-thematic shift between a tent and a clothesline, recapitulating elements her mother’s experience in a Middle Eastern refugee camp. Blinking Jesus, this ain’t.
Not all Vaino-type jobs are so lighthearted and abstract. Some of them stand eye-to-eye with tragedy – in Kurt Jarhling’s case, literally.
The eye is the most social of organs. Eye contact is the most important currency of personal exchange. Loss of an eye – and one’s sight – is only the beginning of tragedy; it brings a corollary misfortune of losing the most important locus of personal contact. Alienation piles upon injury.
Whether by accident or disease, when such misfortune comes to Rhode Islanders, they go to Kurt Jarhling in Providence. As a Board-certified Ocularist, he’s simultaneously a sculptor, painter, physiologist, psychologist and – if the eyes are the window to the soul – something of a soul-doctor. Patients say you can’t believe his eyes.
Fifty years ago, you might have called him a glass eye maker. Now days, it’s a much more sophisticated affair with advanced techniques and high-tech materials. But much of Jarhling’s practice involves the hand-painting of his creations – each one is a unique work of art. He flawlessly reproduces the colors and textures of a living eye, layering iris fibers and blood vessels one stroke at a time. He sculpts his eyes to exploit whatever residual muscle action remains, striving for as much natural movement as possible.
Working with children is a special challenge, Jahrling says. They’re often scared, the trauma of their injuries being particularly hard on their soft psyches.
Even with so many different skills and sensitivities in play, Jarhling reduces his craft to the essential: “It’s simple,” he says. “I’m capturing nature.”
The last stop on my road to Vaino-ville was the thoroughly unanticipated profession of – get this – “Living Statue Designer,” a high-concept vocation somewhere in the never-never-land between interior decoration and performance art. A woman named Amanda Palmer creates sculptural fantasy characters out of costume, makeup, props, and human beings who are willing to pose motionless – perhaps making a few dreamy, choreographed gestures – for hours at a time. Often Amanda works overtime as her own medium, performing her living sculpture installations herself.
Some of her work is “busking” – performing in public areas and passing the hat. At other times, Amanda works with clients to design and create human objets d’art for galas and commercial events. But make no mistake – this is no hobby or eccentric side-line; this is Amanda’s day job, with enough oomph to allow her to sing nights in a rock band and still make the rent.
Amanda is widely known by Rhode Islanders as the wraith-like “Eight Foot Bride” who appears – standing eerily behind a funeral urn – at Providence’s Waterfire. She also installs herself as the “Metro” fem-bot fantasy at the Metropolis nightclub, and as “Princess Roulette, Statue of Chance” at Hasbro Children’s hospital. Originally inspired by living statues she saw in Europe, Amanda has created a palette of living statues to perform as repertoire or to use as departure points in bespoke works for customers with particular requirements.
But she seems to have a particular fondness for the Eight Foot Bride. Once, after a Winter off (apparently it’s hard to stand motionless for hours in the snow without freezing solid), Amanda found herself pining for her ethereal, forlorn creation. “I really missed her,” she says. “When I perform the Bride, it creates a safe space to stare at people and allow people to make eye contact in an acceptable way.” She sees the Bride creating a context for healthy social release: “I can engage with introverts, open them up. I may be the only person they’re going to make eye contact with all day.”
Yep, she’s True Vaino, and all I can say is, thank god for people like Amanda (and thank Rhode Island for being a place they can thrive). By pushing the concept of “job” into strange territory they create new models for all of us to explore and express ourselves through work.
Not to mention widening the space between Abrasive-blasting Equipment Operator and Zinc-plate Grainer. Career guidance counselors, take note.