By Michael Tyler
This essay was originally published on Michael’s blog I Don’t Know, and you can read the original version here.
I moved to New York City to pursue acting as a sheltered 25 year old from Colorado and immediately got a job selling tickets to a local comedy club on the streets of Times Square. I didn’t know it, but I was joining a unique tribe of hustling dreamers paying rent by chatting up tourists from all over the globe.
A new colleague described Times Square’s bright lights and mangy Cookie Monsters as a sort of corporate LSD trip. Of course, I didn’t know what LSD was at the time, but I did know I was going to be in one of the planet’s most interesting crossroads for a few jaunts around the sun.
In a couple of years, selling comedy tickets on commission turned into managing a Broadway sales street team. For a kid who dreamt of the spotlight, I thought of street sales as a pretty good survival job while I scrapped with the other hustlers for the crumbs of an acting career. However, it turned out those same hustlers weren’t really my competition — they were the community that kept me going when Broadway threw its punches.
Over time, I developed a love/hate relationship with Broadway. It was simultaneously my guiding light and torture chamber, rejecting me over and over both in the audition room and on the namesake avenue itself; while many visitors appreciated the expertise of a local theater enthusiast (yes, I considered myself as much New Yorker as Coloradan by then), most dismissed or sneered at us street folk, sometimes leading to verbal and even physical confrontation.
Though I’m glad to say I never had to bloody my knuckles, friends and colleagues did. On St Patrick’s Day 2014, a group of drunk out-of-towners started harassing one of the young women on our team. It was my day off, so I’ll never know what I would’ve done in that situation, but my friend Dan didn’t hesitate to stand up for her. Heated words turned into punches thrown and Dan found himself getting attacked by five — (or seven, according to Dan) of the drunken revelers.
