Ask a celeb: Bruce McCulloch, Jonny Harris, Rick Mercer on summer jobs

Everybody’s got to start somewhere, as the adage goes — even if it means playing a spider or working in a fish factory, as some high-profile personalities have done.

The Canadian Press asked a variety of arts and entertainment figures about their most memorable summer jobs — good or bad.

Edmonton novelist Marina Endicott said she played a spider lady in a freak show at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto in the late 1970s.

“They were auditioning for mermaids, French Revolutionary girls and the spider lady,” she recalled. “I had long blond hair at the time and I thought, ‘Mermaid? Perfect!’”

A “very sketchy guy, a roadie” chose the cast by staring at them and picking them out, she said.

She was too tall to play a mermaid, which was a blessing in disguise when it turned out those in the role had to curl up inside an oil drum in the August heat.

“They nearly died because it’s metal and it was baking hot,” said Endicott. “So the French Revolution girls who ran a guillotine, they looked at what was happening with the mermaids and they staged a revolution and they went on strike. It was hilarious.”

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Actor Jonny Harris of “Murdoch Mysteries” and the new series “Still Standing” spent a summer taking inventory for companies with a scanner “that was hooked up to, like, a little calculator on your hip.”

“Real lady-killer piece of equipment,” he said. “I felt like Batman with that thing.”

He also washed cars at a dealership in St. John’s, N.L., where the employees joked that their Bachelor of Fine Arts stood for “the Bachelor of F-All.”

Harris struck gold when he got a gig at the Rising Tide Theatre festival in Trinity Bay, N.L., where he worked for five summers.

“That’s where my whole education on the history of the province came from, from working at that festival,” he said.

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CBC-TV personality Rick Mercer worked at his godfather’s hamburger joint called Hambuger Hell in St. John’s.

He peeled potatoes and “tried not to burn the place down” while his godfather talked politics, he said.

“He was a bit of a political eccentric and ran for the leadership of both the Liberals and the Conservatives and loved to talk politics. And he talked politics with me, despite the fact that I was like, 12 or 13.”

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Kids in the Hall comic Bruce McCulloch did “repetitive work” on the assembly line in a plastics warehouse at age 17 in Edmonton.

“But the best part about it is we could go and get drunk and then we would trade off (with) who would come and punch in the other guy,” he said.

“So you’d get a few hours off that you didn’t actually work.”

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TV screenwriter and showrunner Chris Haddock had a real stinker of a gig in Vancouver in the ’70s.

“I had a job in a fish-packing plant in which I was standing in a big feeder shovelling fish down the pipe so it’d be bagged,” he said.

“Now, when you’re standing in that all day, you tend to pick up a little smell. And you don’t realize you’re stinking.”

During one bus ride home, Haddock — who was in his early 20s at the time — starting getting looks from other passengers who were sniffing the air.

The bus driver made an unscheduled stop at a corner store to buy a can of air freshener.

“He jumps back on and says, ‘Sorry folks,’ and he goes to the back of the bus not knowing that the smell is emanating (from me) because it’s that kind of smell,” he said.

“That’s like skunk smell, it’s thick, it goes right through you. He went right to the back of the bus and started spraying.”