Once it was decided that we would try our hand at the character job, we now had to decide how we should dress. Since we met through a mutual love of Audrey Hepburn, and we had just dressed as her (in two different eras) for Halloween, my partner in crime and I decided to try that. We figured that if Elvis and Marilyn Monroe did alright, then surely Holly Golightly and Eliza Doolittle would do fairly well.
We showed up in the early afternoon, and as soon as we stepped off the elevator at H&H, a man asked for a picture with us. Taking it as a good sign, we posed with him and he tipped us. And we hadn’t even really started yet! So we sauntered down to the Boulevard and suddenly froze, overwhelmed. What did we do? How did this really work? There had been surprisingly little information about all this on the Internet, and we hadn’t thought to come up here in advance and talk to any characters. As we crept closer to the stars on the sidewalk, a guy dressed as Darth Vader in tights came up to us and pushed back his helmet.
“Are you two new here?” he asked. We nodded. “Okay, welcome to the Boulevard,” he said, and shook our hands, introducing himself. He very nicely went over the rules; what line in the sidewalk delineated public from private property, and how we were only supposed to pose and photograph on the public side, and how we must do something to show that we were “off” when crossing onto private property, either by removing a mask or some other piece of the costume so we wouldn’t be approached. Grateful, we thanked him, and he moved off to take a break.
Clinging to each other, we slowly crept up the Walk towards the Chinese Theatre. In front of the Kodak Theatre there was a Jack Sparrow loudly heckling the tourists, shouting, “I need your money!” As we walked past, he called out to us.
“Excuse me, ladies.” (more…)
