ROSE

People are more fun than anybody.

—Dorothy Parker

The summer before I met Joe, I auditioned for roles almost every day but couldn’t find work. With two teenagers at home, I had to bring in an income, so I took a job as an extra—or, rather, as a background player.

Now, whether you give the BG a better name or not, they are still considered the lowest of the low on set. In the industry they are commonly referred to as “the meat.” Not only that, they are classified into different cuts of meat. Union extras are round steak and non-union are rump. Sirloin tip extras are relatives and friends of the cast and crew. They are treated with kid gloves.

One sweltering July day, the meat was stewing by six in the morning. The early call was for period makeup, hair and wardrobe. They put me in a vintage brown tweed suit and a wide-brimmed felt hat circa 1939. I’d been cast as a spinster who wears sensible, stifling tweed suits, but beneath those staid garments I wore underwear to die for.

I have a collection of amazing retro underwear, most of it purchased at Divine Decadence, and for this gig I wore a pair of 1930s buff-pink silk knickers, tap-shorts style, trimmed with cream lace. Jean Harlow would have loved them. And since Harlow never wore a bra in her motion pictures, neither am I for this flick.

The men were transformed into farmers, rednecks, shopkeepers and gentlemen-about-town. They all looked pretty charming in their suits and bomber jackets, but there, in the middle of a group of them, stood a very handsome young man dressed in overalls and a newsboy cap. I caught his eye and he smiled a killer smile.

If the young man only knew about my fabulous knickers, I thought. I stole a glance to find him also stealing a few, and he looked as if he did know my little secret. Like the proper lady of the Dirty Thirties that I was, I batted my lashes but sublimated my desire by turning my attention to the BG women who were being turned into church ladies and society mavens, all with gloves, hats and neat little handbags. Eventually, save for the fluorescent lighting and Styrofoam cups, the room looked like a Depression-era soup kitchen.

At 8:00 a.m., fifty or so BG players walked out of the holding area and onto the set of a small town square, where a shiny black Dodge was parked outside a theatre. The marquee read “Gone with the Wind. All Seats 15 Cents.” The BG were to form the lineup waiting to see the Civil War epic for the first time. In real life, I have seen GWTW eleven times.

In 1939, Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor to win an Academy Award. She and the other black actors in the movie were banned from its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia. Also that year, Billie Holliday sang “Strange Fruit,” that dangerous song about lynching in the South. Thinking on this, it made my skin crawl to see the redneck BG, but I was relieved when I spotted a group of them playing cards with a few black BG. And there, putting down three aces, was that dreamy shy guy, an absolute knockout in his pancake hat and denim overalls. Beads of sweat had formed on his dark skin. He licked his lips, then cast a glance my way.

At about 10:00 a.m. a craft-service woman brought baskets of food for the extras. My dreamboat bit into a huge hot dog, making me hungry in more ways than one. But breakfast had been small, so my desire for food trumped my desire for him. As it turned out, the dogs were for union extras only—round steak, like me—but I couldn’t stand the hungry eyes of an elderly man standing next me, so I gave my dog to him. He insisted that I eat it, but he was a pensioner without enough money to eat right. He had been made up to look like a prosperous old gentleman, but in reality he was nothing but rump.

“Eat it,” I said, and he did so with thanks. I caught Dreamboat watching. He smiled and walked away, then looked back, tilting his head to suggest I follow. How could I have resisted the invitation? This man was a prime cut. He disappeared behind the faux theatre front.

My hunger for food suddenly forgotten, I joined him in a makeshift prop room, where we instantly tore at each other’s period threads, scarcely a thought in our heads about the movie. Through it all, I was aware that if it really had been 1939, this man would have been strung up if we’d been caught. I couldn’t shake the thought, so I backed off and told him what I was thinking, hoping I might get beyond it. Moments later he took me beyond by dropping to his knees, hoisting up my schoolmarm skirt and eating me through my Harlow knickers.

Impatient, he tugged at the knickers till the buttons popped off. Bypassing silken nostalgia to get to silken cunt, he used his teeth like a velvet buzz saw on my clit.

If we’d been caught, we’d have been fired and banned forever from all sets, blacklisted from the BG and probably the FG, too. We couldn’t have cared less; such is the power of sex. I ached to explode in his mouth.

He lay on the bare floor and pulled me onto his face, and almost instantly I came in waves of cosmic glory. I felt as if I were ascending to heaven, all the while stifling my vocals with my sleeve.

Then he put me on the floor as I grappled with his overall straps, desperate to get at his hardness, but he had quicker means and was suddenly slamming his fantastic rod inside me. My pelvis rose to meet him and he broke, convulsing with orgasmic shivers.

I spent the rest of the shoot with a silly smile on my face, no longer wearing knickers under that sensible tweed.