Random Memory from Bruce's Life 1

So I was just talking to someone about being an extra in a movie when I remembered the time that I pretended to play the clarinet in a poka band for some kind of commercial. I say "some kind of a commercial" because we never figured out exactly what it was for as we were given different answers each time. It was either a Sausage commercial, a Beer commercial, or a promotional advertisement for an Oktoberfest in Denver. Maybe all three. Anyways, I was in sixth grade at the time and my dad had a poka band that played every year at Snowbird's Oktoberfest. He was contracted to put together a similar band to be part of this commercial. He got all the other players together but couldn't find a clarinet player to do it. He therefore asked me to go with him and pretend like I was playing with the band. The music was already prerecorded so it didn't matter that much. (now that I think about it, why didn't they just hire all extras to hold the instruments and pretend like they were playing them?). The commercial was filmed in Midway, Utah which is famous for its Swiss theme as the people who founded the town were immigrants from Switzerland. The building it was filmed in was the community center and looked like a German beer hall. This went really well with the Oktobefest theme of the commercial. In the commercial, the camera showed a bunch of people sitting at a table drinking beer in old fashioned Bavarian beer drinking garb, and than went through a curtain into a German dance hall where there were people dancing around a man yelling in German. There were about fifty people standing around them cheering them on while drinking beer. The band was standing on a stage near the back of the room. The whole commercial itself only lasted about thirty seconds but we were there for about eight hours (child labor laws in the state of Utah prevent children from working more than 8 hours a day on weekends so they had to stop filming our part even though there was more work to be done). One of the things that fascinated me the most about the whole experience was that the crew did all the work and the director just sat around. I now understand that this is how the business works. The director had supposedly done some episodes of "Touched by an Angel", but you would have never have guessed by looking at him. He was shaggy and wore tattered clothes therefore making him look semi-homeless. He also seemed way out of it and really pissed off at everything. I also now understand that that is probably just what comes with being a director who probably isn't very passionate about what he is doing (I'd be pissed too if I had to make a crappy beer commercial after "Touched by an Angel"). The band was some how more important than the rest of the actors and extras, so when lunch time came around we got to eat with the crew at one of those catering trucks instead of whatever everyone else had to do. There were lots of other kids there as extras and so I think that the beer may have been non-alcoholic...I'm not sure though. I remeber that one of the kids came up to me during one of the breaks and asked me it I could play "All Star" by Smashmouth on the clarinet. When we had finished and went outside of the building, we were surprised that the sun had gone down because it seemed like the afternoon inside. They had taken those big stadium light and pressed them up against the windows to make it seem like the middle of the day inside. I got payed $200 for the whole day, which is pretty good for a twelve year old. I've tried looking for a copy of the commercial all over the internet, but without success.