The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

But I also explored other enlightening forms of employment in my early twenties: I was an ice cream and coffee barista working for $ 9.50 an hour (plus tips); an unlicensed massage therapist working out of my college dorm room (no happy endings, $ 35 per hour); a naming and branding consultant for dot-com companies ($ 2,000 per list of domain-cleared names); a playwright and director (usually unpaid: in fact, I usually lost my own money, buying props); a waitress in a German beer garden (about 75 deutsche marks a night, with tips); a vendor of clothes recycled from thrift shops and resold to my college campus center (I could make $ 50 a day); an assistant in a picture-framing shop ($ 14 per hour); an actress in experimental films (paid in joy, wine, and pizza); a nude drawing/ painting model for art schools ($ 12 to $ 18 per hour); an organizer and hostess of donation-only underground salons (paid enough money to cover the liquor and event space); a clothes-check girl for illegal sex-fetish loft parties ($ 100 per party), and, through that job, a sewing assistant for a bespoke leather-handcuff manufacturer ($ 20 per hour); a stripper (about $ 50 per hour, but it really depended on the night); and— briefly— a dominatrix ($ 350 per hour— but there were, obviously, very necessary clothing and accessory expenses).