JOB JUNKY

Ridolfo started working when he was only 12 years old, manning the counter at his parents’ grocery store, the humble beginning to an extraordinarily long, diverse list of jobs. Before he broke into show business as an actor and an indie filmmaker, he had no choice but to support himself with a “lifetime of phantom jobs,” which amounted to 40 years of disposable positions. In this brief memoir, fewer than 100 pages long, he reflects on nearly 50 of the most eventful ones, each presented as a comic (and sometimes dramatic) anecdote. While he worked jobs in his eventual profession—actor, screenwriter, even an actors workshop instructor—he filled plenty of random roles: lumberyard worker, martial arts teacher, and night club manager, to name a small sampling. In one particularly entertaining vignette, he describes working as a translator for someone appearing in court who pretended he was unable to speak English (“Sorry. I don’ understand… issa not true”). From this wry tale emerges a thoughtful refection on the nature of transitory employment. Ridolfo was rarely fired—maybe half a dozen times—because he never presented himself as too good for a job (he’d adopted his mother’s “unspoken gracious undertone”). Also, he was buoyed by his own professional aspirations: “Then again, I was at an advantage because I believed that I was going to create something that I was pursuing so it was a lot easier for me to detach myself because I was driven by something else.” This is an admirably candid, astute remembrance, one that should captivate anyone stuck in the waiting room of a dead-end job, planning for something more.

May 2, 2025 - 05:16

Ridolfo started working when he was only 12 years old, manning the counter at his parents’ grocery store, the humble beginning to an extraordinarily long, diverse list of jobs. Before he broke into show business as an actor and an indie filmmaker, he had no choice but to support himself with a “lifetime of phantom jobs,” which amounted to 40 years of disposable positions. In this brief memoir, fewer than 100 pages long, he reflects on nearly 50 of the most eventful ones, each presented as a comic (and sometimes dramatic) anecdote. While he worked jobs in his eventual profession—actor, screenwriter, even an actors workshop instructor—he filled plenty of random roles: lumberyard worker, martial arts teacher, and night club manager, to name a small sampling. In one particularly entertaining vignette, he describes working as a translator for someone appearing in court who pretended he was unable to speak English (“Sorry. I don’ understand… issa not true”). From this wry tale emerges a thoughtful refection on the nature of transitory employment. Ridolfo was rarely fired—maybe half a dozen times—because he never presented himself as too good for a job (he’d adopted his mother’s “unspoken gracious undertone”). Also, he was buoyed by his own professional aspirations: “Then again, I was at an advantage because I believed that I was going to create something that I was pursuing so it was a lot easier for me to detach myself because I was driven by something else.” This is an admirably candid, astute remembrance, one that should captivate anyone stuck in the waiting room of a dead-end job, planning for something more.