![]() The museum’s curators cultivated a sense of scarcity that was in keeping with how it felt to be a twenty-one-year-old working person at the time. Michael Jackson died that summer, so they moved his wax figure to the hero spot outside the gelato stand, and the Incredible Hulk loomed over the lobby, but other than that, you had to pay to play. Management kept the lobby pretty sparse as far as the actual product went. They wore newsboy caps and always seemed to be inviting each other to see LCD Soundsystem for free in Central Park. I was the only one who wanted to be an editor, which set me apart from my coworkers mainly for my comparative lack of charisma. ![]() Everyone who worked there was striving to do something else-usually acting. Snickers Bar was the most popular flavor. I wore an all-black outfit and scooped gelato for tourists who seemed to come exclusively from Indonesia or New Jersey. The job was easy, if physically exhausting. There was no longer any shame in applying to work at McDonald’s or McKinsey among my friends who had, as recently as the previous summer, disavowed anything that didn’t come with an intellectual or moral gold star. The Great Recession gripped New York so tightly that all talk of “selling out” had been put on indefinite hold. I spent the daytime during the summer of 2009 at an unpaid internship at a literary magazine, and I spent the nighttime, paid, behind the counter of the gelato stand at the Times Square location of Madame Tussauds wax museum.
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