In her new book, Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Downmarket Dilettante, Ayun Halliday recalls a Sesame Street gig she scored early in her Chicago theater career. “Is it OK if I take a picture, Bert?” shouted a diaper-bag-toting mommy at the suburban department store. Practically blind inside her giant Muppet head, Halliday struggled to control her claustrophobia while screwing up the courage to clutch the squirming, shrieking infant through the thick yellow gloves that engulfed her hands. “As the horrifying possibility of the baby torquing itself loose in my grip seemed more and more likely, its mother fumbled with her Instamatic,” Halliday writes. When the mom snapped the photo, then frowned and asked whether the flash had worked, Halliday “davened frantically, praying that no one in the crowd would dare contradict Bert.”
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Halliday blames no one but herself for the trauma she endured inside a Muppet’s cranium. In the mid-80s, while studying theater at Northwestern, she cherished romantic notions of boho poverty. The only acting students who didn’t dream of garrets were in fraternities and sororities, she says. But she “was floating around in my gauzy hippie skirts and yak-hair sweaters, idolizing Janis Joplin and Zelda Fitzgerald.”
Then in the early 90s Halliday and her husband, fellow Neo-Futurist Greg Kotis, shipped off to the bright, frighteningly expensive lights of New York City. They struggled at first–especially after having the first of their two children. But in 2001 Kotis scored an unexpected success with Urinetown, the Tony-Award-winning musical he wrote with Mark Hollman, and the wolf was driven far enough from the door to let Halliday, who’d started a humorous zine about mommydom called the East Village Inky, stay home with the kids and write full-time.
Ayun Halliday
Where: Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark
