Universal Tours

We had his and her jobs. She gave tours, liked it, so I auditioned for a job there.

I was the host for the cowboy stunt show and the live animal show at Universal Studios in Burbank. I'd open and close the stunt show, then walk over and do the animal show. Four shows each, everyday. I worked one season, about six months.
For the cowboy show I'd come out, welcome the crowd and bring out the cowboys. They'd fist fight, break bottles on each other's heads, shoot each other and fall off high places. At the end, I would introduce each stuntman and thank the audience for their approval and for being there, and direct them all to another show. Then, I had fifteen minutes to get over and start the animal show.

The animal show began with an animal doing a trick. I'd come out on stage, point to the animal, say how great the trick was, and introduce the trainer who picked it up from there and did the rest of the show.
They kept changing the animals and the tricks to keep the show fresh for the trainers and the animals. One time they had Willard the rat start the show, an animal from a movie. The trick was for Willard to come out on stage, climb a pole, get into a little sled on rollers and slide on a wire to the other side of the stage where I was. When the rat got to my side, he would climb down the poll and eat the cheese or whatever food they left there for him. Then I'd run out on the stage and say, "Let's hear it for Willard, and here is his trainer Bobby Sharp," or whoever the trainer was.

So about the second day with Willard, I walk over from the stunt show, stand off-stage ready to start the animal show. The audience is in place, every seat is taken as per usual. A backstage trainer lets Willard out of his cage and he comes out on stage, the audience sees him and gasps. Willard immediately climbs the poll, hops on the sled and starts quickly sliding on the wire to my side of the stage. He's about eighteen feet in the air. When he gets across, the sliding sled bangs into the pole at high speed, and the rat falls off the sled and drops straight down fifteen feet to the stage - splat. I'm watching from about three feet away, behind a curtain.

I look across the stage to the trainer and he's telling me to get out there, come on, come on.
So I step around Willard, go out and say, "Let's hear it for Willard." I point to Willard and say "He was suppose to do that...and here's his trainer Bobby Sharp."
By then another trainer was on my side of the stage putting the rat into a dust pan to carry him off. For the next show there'd be a monkey or a bird to open the act.

My adlib "he was supposed to do that" was about the dumbest thing I could have said, ever did say. Sound the gong - in fifty years in this multi-faceted talent work, that scraped the bottom of my ad lib barrel.
this little tale will be in an update of
Hollywood Ways by Jack Sender
Amazon kindle, or smashwords various ebook formats