On Being A Homeless Decoy: Maybe Method Acting Will Help

After several years of tinkering, participants in the city’s homeless decoy program develop some guidelines about how to sell the part:

The first rule of being a decoy homeless person: Don’t talk about being a decoy homeless person. Also, don’t read books the homeless wouldn’t read, and don’t haggle with real homeless people over their prime hangout spots.

Those were among the instructions officials gave almost 200 people getting paid about $75 each to pretend to be homeless for a few hours yesterday morning. The decoys were acting as statistical checks-and-balances in the fifth annual citywide census of how many homeless people live on the streets and in the subways.

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A professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Julien Teitler, said many of the decoys gain an appreciation for what it’s like to be homeless.

If some of the decoys were subjecting themselves to the winter cold for the goodness of their hearts, others were there purely for the cash.

One of them was a costume designer and theater student named Elizabeth Cassarino, who said unabashedly that she didn’t care about the homeless. She planned to use the $75 to buy food and cigarettes.

“I know what goes into being a character. So for this role, playing a homeless person, you have to have the right costume — baggie clothes, layers — you have look sad, you have to play like you’re homeless. You can’t have a smile on your face. You have to do emotional recall, think of a time when you were hungry,” Ms. Cassarino said before deployment. “These are all the things they taught me in school, and now I’m actually getting a chance to perform. You know, my audience is going to be the people waiting for a train at Broadway and Lafayette.”