Help wanted: Cliff divers. Must be 18-years or older and willing to swordfight as a pirate atop a waterfall, get fake-stabbed and plummet 30 feet to your “death,” only to resurrect from a pool five seconds later to an adoring army of little hands high-fiving and tipping you with arcade tokens.
are offered $12 an hour and at least a dollar more if they can juggle fire — or are willing to learn. Auditions are held at the restaurant’s indoor waterfall. Divers must demonstrate four different types of dives from the 13-foot level, including a backflip. Only the most experienced divers get to “walk the plank” from the 30-foot mark.
Floor manager Rita Fountain says the Lakewood landmark, famous for its bottomless sopapilla basket and kitschy, kid-friendly entertainment, has diving performers all year-long, but the end of summer is a particularly tough time to hire.
“We always do auditions around this time of the year,” Fountain said. “A lot of our divers are students elsewhere [during fall through spring], then come back in the summer.”University of Colorado neuroscience major Jake Voltarel is reducing his diving hours now that he’s returning for his last year in college. In summer, he worked five or six days a week. Despite the 45 minute commute from Boulder, he will still help out one to two nights a week.
“Getting paid to dive, hard to turn down doing what I love,” Voltarel said.
Voltarel was offered diving team scholarships by at least three universities, but picked CU. Voltarel said he loves one part of Casa Bonita that he believes being on a traditional diving team won’t grant him: immediate adulation by kids.
“One of the best parts is making the kids happy,” Voltarel said. “The kids give us [arcade] tokens even though it means nothing to us.”
While not everyone makes it as a diver, that doesn’t mean they can’t advance. Twenty-year-old entertainment director Justin Griego has been working at Casa Bonita for more than two years and started out as a puppeteer. That wasn’t what he originally auditioned for though.
“I technically wanted to be a diver, but choked during my audition,” Griego admitted. “[The manager] made me a puppeteer and then I was promoted to section leader.”
Now he’s the entertainment director. He may not be a diver, but Griego still gets to dress up as a pirate and push divers off of cliffs to their “watery graves.”
and is at the Lamar Station Plaza, 6715 W. Colfax Ave., Lakewood.
