{"id":2069,"date":"2007-01-31T10:18:57","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T18:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2007\/01\/on_being_a_homeless_decoy_maybe_method_acting_will_help.html"},"modified":"2007-01-31T10:18:57","modified_gmt":"2007-01-31T18:18:57","slug":"on_being_a_home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/01\/on_being_a_home.html","title":{"rendered":"On Being A Homeless Decoy: Maybe Method Acting Will Help"},"content":{"rendered":"

After several<\/a> years<\/a> of tinkering, participants in the city’s homeless decoy program develop some guidelines about how to sell the part<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culturalanthropological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}