Do You Ever Act in Real Life?

When I was younger I liked to add humor to my life with dramatisation. Some people appreciated it, but some just didn’t get it and thought I was odd. If I had hung out with actors I would have fit right in. After encountering enough people with no sense of humor, I learned to be cautious.

But this morning it happened without warning.

I have a problem with library books. My library lets me renew them once online, but only once. If it’s a novel, I’m done with it in a few days. A biography usually takes me a lot longer to read. Currently I’m reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, and it’s taking me quite a while. I renewed it once, but I still have about 50 pages to go and as of this morning, the book was about 2 weeks overdue. So, I tend to accumulate library fines regularly. It bothers me. This morning after going to the bank I figured I couldn’t avoid the situation any longer, especially since there was an inter-library loan book waiting for me (the German translation of the same book: Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen). So I went to the library, went to the desk and started to explain my dilemma to the new librarian. I started stammering, and suddenly I put my face in my hands and blurted out “Will this confession be confidential?” The librarian assured me it would. After I finished telling her my story, she wordlessly turned to her computer and started clicking away. When she finished she said, “I’m renewing this for you, but only because I think you’re going to win an Academy Award someday.”

I’m pretty sure I abandoned caution because the librarian looked like she could have been Pat Fraley’s sister, with her Puck-ish grin and laugh lines that suggested a lifetime of humor. When I told this story to my sister, she laughed out loud and then told me a story of her own:

She was at Zabar’s Delicatessen waiting to get strudel, back in the days when the strudel counter was at the back of the store, off the beaten path. An elderly gentleman was in line behind her, and there was nobody at the counter to wait on them. They were commiserating about the long wait, and finally my sister said to him, “Maybe they’ll come if we get into a fight.” And she yelled “I was here first!” The gentleman obligingly yelled back “No, I was here first!!!” A Zabar’s employee rushed over to the strudel counter, my sister and her co-conspirator winked at each other, and before long they both had their strudel.

Life is a lot more fun when you take risks – even little ones.

Celebrity Voice-overs - Again....

My thanks to Tony Quinn for bringing this Washington Post article to my attention. It's interesting that the mainstream media is starting to comment on the lack of a tight correspondence between stars' fame and their talent in the voice-over booth - something voice actors have been musing about for some time. The writer, John Anderson, traces the hunger for celebs in animation back to the extraordinary work of Robin Williams in Aladdin and the success of Lion King, with its star-studded cast.

I came across another article recently that makes the same point, although it's nearly 4 years old already. It refers to laments by even high-profile TV voice actors like Tom Kenny that ''the guys who are top-of-the-line TV animation guys are Fish No. 47 in Finding Nemo.''

I've said it before - if directors want on-camera stars doing the voices in their animated features, they're going to have them. If they specifically want great acting in the voice-over booth - if that doesn't intersect with celebrity - I'm sure they know where to find that too. My not-very profound advice to voice actors who find the current state of animation casting disturbing (and I'm not referring to people like Tom Kenny, who does not need my advice ;): there is nothing to be gained by complaining. Stay in shape and keep working on your craft and be ready when opportunity comes. If the opportunities don't come soon enough, then make your own!

A new commercial demo for MCM Voices.

Last month I was so lucky to have the opportunity to work with Bob Bergen at a workshop on character voices. On the second day of the weekend, after he had worked with all of us extensively, Bob took the time to listen to several of our demos. When he listened to my commercial demo he said, “you are better than this demo”.

This is not what most of us would choose to hear, although admittedly it’s preferable to “you are not as good as your demo”… But I was glad to hear it nevertheless, as I respect Bob’s opinion and it resonated with what I had been feeling also. As soon as I got home I started thinking about what I would like to include in a new demo. I asked my friend, colleague, production wizard Peter O’Connell to help me, and this morning Peter sent me what I agreed was the final version.

Ironically, I started working with a new voice-over coach this week. Undoubtedly I will be making a new demo within the year, but my new coach agreed that the demo Peter and I just produced will serve me well in the meantime. And Bob likes it too! Phew!

Thank-you, Peter, for your great work on my behalf. You done good. Thanks also to the several people to whom Peter sent the demo for review, who took the time to listen and give their opinions. I truly appreciate it.

Here is the new demo if you’d like to take a listen.

Visiting My Past.

Sometimes I have trouble getting myself out of the house. By now I should have learned that invariably I have a good time when I go out. But last Thursday instead of packing my suitcase and heading to New York for my high school reunion, I answered emails, did voice-over auditions, and generally dragged my heels before finally hitting the road - at just the right time for Manhattan rush hour – and I got a less-than-ideal parking spot as well. But once I was in the city, back at the family apartment and surrounded by familiar books and furnishings and all on my own, it was very relaxing to be away from the studio for the first time in months. The next morning I took the alumni tour of “Little Dalton” (the building that houses the preschool through third grade) and “Big Dalton” (4th through 12th grades) and had a blast. I sometimes dream about my old school and thought it was time to update the dream template since I had not seen most of it since I graduated (actually, I didn’t graduate, I dropped out after 11th grade and then went to college a year later - but I'm still considered a member of my graduating class). Joining me on the tour was someone I had not seen since I left Dalton – she had been a good friend, but she had married a Frenchman and lived in France, Morocco and Jordan so there wasn’t much opportunity to get together and we lost touch. We had lunch together after the tour and talked a blue streak. That evening at our class dinner I renewed my acquaintance with people I’d seen 5 years ago at the last reunion, as well as some I had not seen at all in the decades since leaving school.

I was astonished to discover how deep those roots are. Whether it’s just the formative nature of the middle and high school years, or something about these particular people and my school (very progressive) or the tumultous epoch in which I grew up, but I found I now have even more in common with many of the people I went to school with than I did when I first knew them. After staying well beyond the time when our reunion dinner was supposed to end, four of us went out to a restaurant and sipped tea or wine and talked for another two hours. I will definitely be staying in closer touch with these people. And, it doesn’t hurt that some of them are filmmakers!

Close on the heels of this trip down Memory Lane I had another opportunity to see an old friend with whom I’d lost touch. And again I dragged my feet – it was a hot night and I had trouble getting myself out the door. But get out I did. The featured speaker at last night’s meeting of the Hampshire Bird Club had been a good friend when I was an undergraduate and he a graduate student at Princeton. Bruce Beehler has been studying the birds of New Guinea ever since I've known him; now his research is part of his job at Conservation International. A trip to New Guinea in 2005 yielded so many new species of plants and animals that it got considerable media attention, and the 60 Minutes crew persuaded Bruce to take them back with him in 2007. They produced a 12 minute segment that was well received in December 2007, and Jay Leno even spoofed it last week! The original segment can be seen below, with a shorter segment showing the courtship dance of the golden-fronted bowerbird.

Someone videotaped Bruce’s talk last night, and I spoke with the videographer, who plans to produce a piece about it for community access television and he invited me to narrate it. I love finding ways to blend my current career in voice-over with my previous one as a biologist, and this is definitely one of those ways.

The moral of this story: Always, always say yes to opportunities to get out of the studio and be among people. You’ll almost always have fun, and you never know where it might lead.