But wait, Parker Posey in a sitcom? We were skeptical too. It turned out to be really great, though: the writing was clever, the performances were spot on– both hilarious and moving. Without Posey and Ambrose, it would have been impossible to pull the thing off. The only negative part of the experience was the awful warm-up comedian, who was sub-cruise ship level funny, and also would not shut up. Also, that blonde girl from “Freaks and Geeks” was in the audience and Chris Kattan was backstage hanging out with Parker Posey– weird.

I could tell there was something off, and through a few minutes of eavesdropping, gathered that I was standing not with ordinary extras, but with the winners of some radio contest in New Jersey that had granted them a plane ride out to L.A. and walk-on spots as wedding guests. They all seemed a little bored and confused, probably a little bit annoyed that they weren’t standing, as they might have imagined, on a glamorous sound stage, but rather on a patch of crumbling asphalt miles removed from anything fabulous. One scruffy man in his early 30s approached me, asking my role in “all this,” and wondered whether I thought “that hot chick with the hair over there” (the P.A. who was operating as their handler) was the same girl he had dated in high school (though she was clearly much younger than he). “She looks just like ‘er, but I don’t know how she would have made her way out here…” he told me.

I spent next six hours in a tent reading Manuel Puig, and eventually making small talk with the only extra aside from me who wasn’t being used in the scenes they were busy shooting. He was a terminally macho 22-year-old who wanted to know whether, from my experience working on “The Suite Life of Zach and Cody,” I could tell him if Ashley Tisdale was as hot in real life as she was on The Disney Channel. “Oh, I don’t know. I was never really that attracted to her,” I said, leaving it at that. He bragged about being an extra in the Playmate of the Year video for 2007 (Spoiler Alert: It’s Stephanie Larimore, in case you were dying to know… whoever that is). “So, were you like, in an orgy scene?” I asked. It turned out to be far less interesting– he had played one of Andy Warhol’s assistants in a flashback scene of some sort.

Finally they got to the last scenes of the day, and it was me and my straight buddy’s time to shine. We were playing white trash juvenile delinquents dropping cinder blocks off a freeway overpass, and then setting up an elaborate prank in which two of the deputies ended up splattered with paint (which also ended up getting all over my Marc Jacobs Vans– good thing it was movie paint!). I have to remember to work on my improv skills, even when I don’t have any lines of dialogue… I ended up kind of just standing there at a loss. Oh well, they got what they paid for.

It was an exhilarating, liberating moment when the time finally came to dance in a shapeless mass behind Becky (who was rollerskating in pink tights), the music blaring out of an iPod, and everyone bursting with joy. It felt being in a musical. Also, we were dancing on the same street where they filmed the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. It was like the inverse of “Thriller,” the daytime dream to that 80’s nightmare.