The Guy Behind Pizza Rat*
We'll talk about rats in a second, but first we have to start with a human. A human named Eric Yearwood. About two and a half years ago, Eric embarked on the quintessential New York life change — he quit his job as a teacher in Florida and moved to the city to become an actor.
"But," says Eric, "it didn't go so well. I haven't made the kind of career I wanted for myself, I guess, and I'm kinda falling back on some plan B's."
Becoming an actor has been a tough racket for Eric. It was especially rough when he first moved to the city. "I had a fiance," he says, "and because I wasn't making a lot of money and it didn't seem like I was headed towards a stable lifestyle. We split up." He was pretty down and out mid-year, 2015.
To make ends meet, Eric got odd jobs building stages for fancy events and doing some graphic design work. Eric, though, wasn't living his best life.
Back when he was in college, Eric wanted to be a renaissance man. "But," says Eric, "then you get a little older and you realize, 'Hey I've just got this little pocket of stuff that I can do, and you just have to be content with that.'"
Eric was in the city following his dreams and going nowhere. And then magic entered his life in the form of an email.
It went something like this:
Hello, I'm a performance artist. I go by the name of Zardulu. I have something that you might fit — this role. I was wondering if you might be willing, for several hundred dollars, to participate.
Eric still has no idea how or why this person found him. In fact, Eric barely knows anything about them beyond they call themselves Zardulu. But Zardulu took Eric and made him part of something that became bigger than he could have ever imagined.
