Welcome to Evany Thomas! I live and word in the Bay Area, can play a drinking straw like a penny whistle, and once walked around with a detonated appendix for 5 long, strange days. I'm also a sleeping pose expert.

And that's not all!

after school special

Saturday, mar. 15, 2008   |   0 comments
A lot of our money was spent buying beer from Stigo, the obligatory local burnout. (Teen lore had it that, at some mega rager back in the 70s, he'd taken enough acid to freak a gray whale, and had never entirely returned.) He'd come by the theater once a night to see if any of us were interested in purchasing a sixer or two (at 100% markup, of course). You'd know when he had arrived because he would announce his presence via loud barking. You'd hear the bark, run for the candy counter, and make a frantic butt-first dive over the red vines and junior mints. You'd glide, aided by years of butter-flavored spills and money sweat, just as Stigo made his barking lunge. If he caught you, you'd get licked. Literally. From your chinny chin chin to your hairline you'd be moist with loony spit. But, if your athletic skill or momentum carried you over the counter before he could get within tagging distance, you were safe because, by rules not questioned, he never followed. You were in no man's land.

working in a coal mine

Saturday, mar. 15, 2008   |   0 comments
ince time immemorial, every employee had to wear one of the three available uniforms.

There was one small, one medium, and one large.

If you arrived early for your shift, you had to wait for someone to change out of their uniform before you could get suited up. The large uniform was in great demand because you wore your regular clothes underneath. It didn't matter that we all looked like badly stuffed county fair animals, because it was of the utmost importance that those uniforms never, ever directly touched your skin; the poly-fabric was not only itchy and flammable, but terrifyingly filthy-dirty. Since they were always in use, there was rarely an opportunity to take the uniforms to the laundromat. And you'd be amazed at what a dirt-magnet butter flavoring is.

Basically, our uniforms screamed "auto mechanic."

The orange zip-up, darted top was a true fright, streaked with brown mystery sludge. Your slacks, which started out brown, were somehow even scarier, since you couldn't see the dirt. You just sensed the shmutzy odor cresting off them.

Insult to injury, lack of washing tends to rot fabric (yes! even polyester, under the correct circumstances, can move on to the next level), so everything was held together with safety pins.

It was off the charts.

Not every theater was run this way. Other Pacific theaters were spic and span, run by managers who were out to make a positive impact on the movie patron's life (making those theaters scary to work for different reasons). But our manager was such a wheeler-dealer man of the eighties, that he did whatever it took to avoid anything that didn't involve snorting coke, degrading women or avoiding phone calls from his mother.

Maintainance was never done, our inventories were always off, money missing, tickets unaccounted for. Thus, the district manager was always making surprise visits, trying to catch Paul-the-manager doing something fireable. The big, black, american mafiamobile would pull up in the red zone out front and whoever was working tickets would yell "Hal's here!" And we'd all jump into our act. One of us would go get the ice bucket and would hold it in front of our grime, someone else would keep their (relatively) clean back to the door and would make circular, dusting motions, and another would disappear into the dark dirt of the theater itself where they would remain until the all clear was sounded.

Once you got used to it, though, living in filth became liberating. So you reek of years worth of teen sweat. You squirt special sauce all down your front. Just let it sit there. For days. It just doesn't matter.

It was the most existentialism you could get in that particular piece of homogeneous prime real estate. And, for a sixteen-year-old who liked The Cure and hated everything else, it was pretty fuckin' good.



Amy, circa 1986

a sweeping sisyphus

Saturday, mar. 15, 2008   |   0 comments
Patrons just can't wait to get that handful of popcorn with the fat equivalent of a Big Mac to their mouth. They scamper up to the theater, desperate not to miss the previews, all the while dribbling and spitting popcorn bits. Soon you have a hansel and gretel trail leading from the concession stand to the theater. Regardless of the lax cleanliness standards that permeate the rest of the theater, this particular untidiness must be swept clean before the show lets out. Patrons will leave with a clean impression of the theater, whatever the cost.

Only fellow theater workers will know the pains of this task. Popcorn denies all existing laws of physics and, with every swipe of the worn-to-nub theater broom, it jumps in the opposite direction like a steroid-pumped flea. Some try to use that weird hand-powered vacuum to suck up refuse and spit it up one foot away. But I choose the worn broom. It takes hours, but you feel a religious rush after that last kernel is safely in your amusement park trash-holder.

Of course the trail reappears with the very next show. It, like life itself, is part of a never-ending cycle.

We all have a cross, some heavier, etc.

welcome to the jungle

Saturday, mar. 15, 2008   |   0 comments
During the years spanning 1986 to 1989, I was employed at a movie theater. I gobbled curtesy cups of popcorn and cherry cokes, wore brown and orange polyester pant suits, relied on the heat of the popcorn warmer to survive the San Francisco winter fog that rolled in the 4 inch crack through which we sold the $5 adult, $3 children and matinee tickets (Sorry, no senior discounts.), took a licking from local burnout Stigo, swept enormous amounts of popcorn off the stained, lava lamp carpet, pumped butter flavoring with style, computed the price of tickets, Jordan Almonds, and large buttered popcorns in my head, used the theater to house ragers that lasted until the next day's shift, dated several coworkers, and saw one hell of a lot of movies...all for an incredible $3.15 an hour!

R E S U M E for E V A N Y + T H O M A S

Saturday, mar. 15, 2008   |   3 comments
A PDF version of this résumé is also available. Please email me if you have any questions!


E X P E R I E N C E

Freelance/Contract Writer
9.96 to present
I have written for a wide variety of print and web publications. Clients include:

Associate Editor
McSweeney's Publishing
04 to 05
As an associate editor at McSweeney's, I generated copy for the Quarterly (Issue 17), the website, the catalog of available books, and the next Haggis on Whey book, Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid.

Managing Editor
Webmonkey
98 to 04
As managing editor of Webmonkey, the original online resource for web developers, I managed a team of editors, writers, and freelance contributors, made sure the friendly tone remained consistent throughout the 500+ pages of the site, and kept the million or so users that visited the site every month happy. I also wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Columnist
Microsoft Network
96 to 98
While under contract with Microsoft, I wrote weekly "state of the internet" commentary and churned out a daily Dear Abby-esque column under the nom d'advice "Doctor Net" for the site's "One Click Away" channel (here are a few samples).

Director of Content Development
SpiralWest
96 to 98
This small web design boutique catered to a wide variety of clients. My responsibilities as director of content development ranged from interface design to site-wide content creation, from information architecture to bare-bones HTML.

Copywriter
ReZ.n8 Productions
95 to 96
I was initially hired as the assistant to the art director of the CD-ROM game Zork: Nemesis. When the Zork project came to a close, I transitioned to a copywriter position and my life became a heady stream of brochures, business proposals, and web content.

E D U C A T I O N