Community.

I have always found many parallels between the physical things I do, such as karate and ballroom dancing. Both are graceful and include choreography and require intense focus and stamina. More surprising perhaps is that so many of the principles of karate are related to what I do every day. Trying to adopt the “karate-do”, a way of life exemplified by the principles of martial arts, has helped me immeasurably, not the least of which is in a reduction of stress. So many things that used to bother me simply don’t anymore, as I gradually learn to lose the tendency to judge other people or to worry about what might happen with a voice-over audition. I worry less about what other people are doing in their own karate training and their lives and focus on what I can do to improve my own karate, my own voice-over career, my own life. This results not so much in self-centeredness but in a centering of self. And with this comes enhanced ability to reach out to other people and to help them along their way if I can see a way to do it unobtrusively.

This is all greatly on my mind in the week following a remarkable gathering in our nation’s capital, the celebration of the 45th anniversary of Ueshiro Shorin-ryu Karate in the USA. Over 100 people representing 11 karate schools were in attendance, including 15 people from my own school.

I belong to many communities, formal and informal: of family members, of people in my neighborhood, of parents of school-aged kids, of voice-over professionals, of practitioners of Ueshiro Shorin-ryu karate, of the members of my local karate dojo. I’ve been training with these karate people for 6 ½ years now and have gotten to know some of them very well. We see each other on the deck several times a week, gathering for picnics and for outdoor training, and have stuck together through upheavals at our dojo and the formation and dissolution of personal relationships. Traveling 8 hours by car to celebrate with them for two days and support those who were testing for a new rank, and then the (alas, 12 hour) ride home made me focus as never before on how intense is the experience of being human. These communities are incredibly important and sustaining. This particular one, for me, serves the purpose of supporting mental, spiritual and physical health. I especially encourage anyone who spends their days sitting in front of a computer, even though they may belong to vibrant communities of online friends and professionals, not to neglect their own communities of real people. Cultivate them. Cherish them. Allow them to sustain you.

MCM and friends – photo courtesy Sensei Boris Grossman

When an audition just isn’t enough.

In the business of voice over, you have to “put it out there” every day, auditioning for potential clients and for people who sit on the far side of an agent. Often, you never hear anything back – not even a thank-you. You learn pretty quickly not to invest anything in the auditions other than giving it your best shot – after the recording leaves your outbox, you put it out of your mind as well.

Sometimes, though, an audition sticks with you. Maybe you stretched your range and found you liked the result, or the copy just grabbed you – and you think you’d really like to find a way to keep it in your life a little while longer. That happened to me this weekend. I received an audition request from an agent that included a part for a cowboy and a part for an "announcer". The cowboy was supposed to be male, and they said they would consider a female announcer if she had the right sound. Well sir, I just felt like being a cowgirl, and I really liked being a cowgirl. Since I was pretty sure I would never hear another word about this audition, I decided to see if I could get somebody else interested in having fun with it too, and sent it to my friend and colleague Ben Wilson, a terrifically talented voice artist with fantastic production skills.

You can listen to the result here. Ben, thank-you so much for humoring me and for contributing your amazing voice and production talents to this piece.

Oh, and there are even some desert birds in it!!

Bird gives clue to location of Springfield.

At the very end of the new Simpsons Movie, a single bird song is audible. That bird is the Bobolink Dolichonyx oryzivorus, a member of the blackbird family that has sometimes been called skunkbird because of its contrasting light and dark plumage. The bird is a long-distance migrant, traveling from its wintering grounds in southern South America all the way to the northern United States and southern Canada where it breeds. If the Simpsons Movie is set during the breeding season rather than spring or fall, it’s possible that we can narrow down the number of possible Springfields by over fifty percent.

Click here to hear an exclusive MCM Voices news report about this important clue to the location of America’s favorite family.

Bobolink – photo courtesy USFWS

Breeding distribution of the Bobolink