Do you remember Mr. McFeely’s speedily delivered video messages to Mr. Rogers? I remember them all being set in industrial factories somewhere in the bowels of New York City. Everything was painted in different shades of grey and the only things visible through the square grid windows were spans of concrete and the occasional train—as of today, that’s where I work. Remember the obviously irritable, vaguely ethnic man with a weighty dialect who takes time out of his busy schedule to give Mr. Rogers detailed instructions as to his industrious routine? That man spent a better part of the day showing me how to perform minor tasks in the frame shop of a local custom upholstery company. Only, I remember him being a lot more polite towards Mr. Rogers (may he rest in peace).
I’ll make an attempt at brevity as I recap the events of the last several months that have led me to this new and incredibly exciting chapter of my New York adventure. Seven months ago I packed two suitcases, one oversized backpack, and my best friend and hopped aboard a plane to my future. As fate would have it I was sent right back to Oklahoma in order to perform in Summer of ’42, the Musical under the direction of the incomparable Greg White. A month and a half later I was back on a plane looking down as the Big Apple’s incomparable cityscape rose to welcome me home.
In the next few weeks I made a few decisions, the biggest being the resolution not to pursue a career in music theatre (at least at this moment in time). If you want to know the reasons behind this revelation, I’ll cover that in a later posting—however (as we are attempting to achieve some form of brevity) we must continue on. With the glamorous musical-theatre-as-career no longer pulling focus on the stage of my occupational aspirations, I realized something standing quietly stage center (forgive me the cheesy visual metaphor). Upholstery. It’s been hiding there my whole life—I can remember acquiring an old leather wingback chair when I was in middle school and tearing it down to its frame and doing my best to repurpose it. I was so proud of that ugly, Frankenstein’s monster of a chair. In junior high my brother was working hard at restoring a VW Karmann Ghia to working order, and although I was hardly interested in helping him drop an engine, I was ecstatic to carpet the floor and the dash and sew a new ceiling cover.
From my apartment in New York I googled “upholstery class NYC” and found the only course offered. I paid $500 for a four-session course at the furniture shop of the self-proclaimed “upholsterer to the stars.” At the end of the fourth class I had a simply upholstered box and an intense desire to learn more complex ways of covering furniture, but I was also left without any idea of how to obtain such knowledge. I had asked the celebrated teacher of the class how one would “break in” to a career in upholstery, and he basically told me there was no hope. He said that any shop that had the funds to take on a helper would doubtless just pick up an immigrant and pay them next to nothing to do any grunt work necessary. He said he himself has had such a helper for three years and that this helper only knows how do the most rudimentary tasks. This saves him and the other upholsterers time as they work hard and fast to make enough revenue to make ends meet—nobody has any time to train anybody else, and frankly, their little immigrant worker doesn’t care to learn how to do anything more than those easy tasks he has already mastered. If he did learn how to tuft a couch it would just mean more work for him with no guarantee of a raise in pay. Needless to say, I was in a pretty confounded way after this discussion. I would have been more than happy to work for nothing if I was also learning how to do what I love, but, after researching on the internet for several weeks it became very apparent that there are very few opportunities to learn the craft. I had found several comments from current upholsterers in the states who said they gave up searching for suitable training and just taught themselves the trade from books and youtube videos. I was just about ready to fly back home to Oklahoma, fake a resume and start tooling on customer’s couches when I found a job listing on craigslist.
The ad read “clean shop/learn trade” and sounded too good to be true. Despite all the typos and lack of proper names or contact information indicating that this was a scam, I sent in my resume and a short email describing my interest in upholstery. Every day for two and a half weeks my dream of one day making my way in the world making comfy, beautiful furniture grew dimmer and dimmer and I was just about to take drastic measures (involving the kidnapping of a very renowned Italian furniture maker) I woke up to a reply email from craigslist. It was a very short notification that the shop owner would be holding open interviews for the next two days and that the first qualified applicant with a valid drivers license would be hired. I shot out of bed, called to get my shift at the restaurant covered, checked online to make sure the place actually existed (though I probably would have gone even if I hadn’t found a website), got dressed, and ran out the door following directions to the industrial cave of Long Island City.
I found the factory building, climbed to the second floor, and hauled open the sliding iron fire door marked “upholstery.” There were chairs in various levels of construction and three people working on a few of the items—but none of them looked up from their work. After a really long awkward period one of them finally noticed me, but didn’t say anything to me. After finishing what he was doing he walked calmly through a door and a few moments later a man came out and took me back into the office. There I met with the owner of the company and had to explain (as I have had to explain to the rest of the incredulous staff) why I would want to work here doing hard, menial labor when I have a college degree and a well paying job in Times Square. The owner at least understood my motivations and told me that I could clean the shop in fifteen or twenty minutes and then come to him for other tasks around the shop. He also told me that his company was growing and that if I had a good head on my shoulders and good hands that he would make sure I learned how to use them to upholster furniture. He also said that after a while I’ll have enough training to work for a larger corporation if I was interested in working for someplace more structured, or if I wanted to go somewhere and start my own thing. I could have cried, but I did my best to act cool, calm and collected.
I’m a few days behind in finishing this post, so I have now been working here for three days and it’s going well… I think. I’ve never worked this hard in my life; I’ve never been challenged like this before, and I’m terrified that I’m going to screw up a $1,200 chair because I’m being thrown in the deep end and my boss is sitting in a lounge chair at the side of the pool with no obvious intention of coming to my rescue. I couldn’t ask for more… but maybe I shouldn’t have asked for so much in the first place? More on that later.
Next time I’ll try to be more brief.
