voice over sample

91099-urlauber-fat-suit-tourist-fat-suit.jpg okay, there are moments of life where I feel like a tourist on planet earth and i felt it when I recorded a voiceover audition in Spanish this week, the headphones, soundproof room, and mondo mic — it’s just not part of my normal routine. Neat. I love and am ALWAYS grateful for experiences that feel NEW. I took Spanish from age 12 to 21 (uh, in large part b/c I wanted one easy A), so I should be really better it than I am, but there you go.

It was like a team of 6 people who helped me with this — I consulted with a co-worker who’s a native speaker, my friend christine and Michelle for production, a voiceover actress who gave me tips on interpretations, my husband who directed it, plus the engineer in the actual studio.

The end result is, i think, fine. I don’t sound native, but whatevs, I did my part. My husband and i played it last night. Take a listen if you like. For some reason, the word “Nestle” comes out very sensually, which made us giggle. Although the copy is pretty well written, the product name, Juicy Juice de Nestle, is kind of stupid. It’s like if I called something fruity fruit or meaty meat. Like if your juice isn’t juicy…then it’s not juice, right? You feel me?

Click below to find the result of nine years of Spanish education.

tina-lee-juicy-juice-audition.mp3

charo

images12.jpg I don’t know that I love charo — love is a strong word for the woman who was known for “cuchi cuchi.” But you know, through the misty, near-sighted gaze of hindsight, I can, sure, admit some affection for her now. (Dude, how addled am I by nostalgia?)

My friend Alex J. saw her in concert in upstate like a year ago, and she’s still wearing the mini skirts and low-cuts, but the photo he showed of her made her look like she were a claymation doll…a little scary. And while it’s sad she’s on the “Surreal Life,” maybe she’s not sad about it. Alex says that the girl was very much like I’m taking my guitar and my voice, and getting my butt to the U.S. and become a star. And really, she did do that, didn’t she.

But maybe what I really love here is “Love Boat,” that fabulous 70s show that added words like “Englebert Humperdink,” as well as cuchi cuchi, to my consciousness.

after life

images11.jpg I love this movie. It came out in about the mid-1990s, when I met only about four other people who dug it as well. My friend Alex J. came with and fell asleep, so he is not among them.

After I read NY Times profile on the filmmaker — whose dad’s alzheimers led him to become obsessed with the idea of memories — I was intrigued (you know, b/c I’m obsessed with the nature of memories, since I keep losing them and for a host of other reasons.) The story is just about what happens after you die — the after life staff informs a room full of people that they have passed away, apologizes for their loss, and tells them they get to choose one memory to spend the rest of eternity in. People pick childhood moments, most frequently. There’s one guy whose life was so miserable that he couldn’t come up with one except for this time when he climbed underneath the back porch and got sucked into the darkness.

But aside from the memory schtick, the thing I really love about this film is its inherent theatricality. How do I explain this? Yikes. Well, in films, very often it seems to me that when you have a character who lives in the past, you literally show them in like a 1950s costume with period hair and costume and fuzzy lighting. Or if you have the past and the present interact, you might put some kind of funky lighting on the past guy. In theater, you just put two actors together, tell the audience what’s happening — and it just happens. It’s magical. (That’s right, I used the word magical.). Adn by magical, I mean, the use of mundane ordinary objects, people, and situations that suddenly transcend reality into a more profound existence.

In the flick, there’s a 20-year-old actor who plays an angel guide to a 60-year-old man. Once they get to talking, they realize they were in love with the same woman and that the younger guy is actually older than the old dude. (Yikes, did you follow?) Or the way they created the infinity memories, the after life staff literally served as a film crew — one man remembered riding on a train as a boy on a summer day. They got an old train car and rocked it back and forth, sprayed water on a boy on the train to create sweat, and filmed it. In that case, a regular film set became…an altering of consciousness.

Does any of what I’m saying translate? Not sure, but you can always rent it for yourself. I hope it’s as good as I remembered, but I don’t really know. I might find it super slow now…so maybe it’s better for me to stick with my memory of it.

crankston hughes

images10.jpgimages8.jpg My old co-worker Holly used to call me Crangston Hughes whenever I was cranky…which was like half the time at that job.

And not to outwear my welcome, but you know how when you’re on the subway, and the rush hour crowd is pushing you into the person in front of you, and that person turns around and calls you name? Running into that person is what it’s like to run into my boss, and that makes me oh-so-cranky.

And it also makes me want to move to Vermont and make cheese for living.

Okay, enough crankiness. I will blog next when I have something life-affirming and endearing to say.

a new school drill

images6.jpg Yikes, states are starting to mandate schools run monthly emergency drills or “shooter” drills, where the kids all hide in the classroom and the principal might pose as the shooter to make sure all the doors are locked. I can’t believe it’s come to this, but I guess Columbine wasn’t an isolated incident, given that lethal combo of mental illness/access to guns seems to happen more frequently nowadays.

It’s just a little sad…and creepy. I don’t have kids, but do you feel safe sending kids to school nowadays??? Am I not neurotic enough, world?

If you’re curious, here’s the NY Times article “In an Era of School Shootings, a New Drill “ by Tina Kelley in today’s paper.

save me, morrissey

images5.jpg Morrissey has a song called “We Hate It When Our Friends Are Successful,” which I’ve mentioned before, but I come back to the same theme in my life.

It may or may not happen for me, and I will keep plugging away and I will not be bummed out about it the whole time, but I’m sick of not being successful — I mean artistically. And by artistic success, I mean, like a book published or some major credit or something. I hear about friends and peers on TV or films, or with the name in print, etc., and mostly, I’m psyched for them, but in other moments, I just hate them. It’s not to say that successful people are happy, or that I’d be more happy as a success, but I’m willing to give it a try.

Also, FYI, I just watched the last “Lost” episode. I love the actor who plays Michael, but I feel like this show is toying with my emotions, you know? It wasn’t quite as satisfying or as well-structured as the Desmond episode, which I pitched to my husband as “I dare you not to cry.”

just another brooklyn theory

turkeys_nest.jpg Does Brooklyn exist solely for the purpose for people in their 30s to pretend they’re 19 and cool? I mean, of course, this doesn’t apply to ALL Brooklyn neighborhoods, I just mean the yuppie/hipster ones. It’s just that I went to a show tonight at Freddy’s, where a room full of 30 somethings rooted on bands wearing vests over trendy t-shirts, sunglasses at night, and electric guitars they held tight as they jumped up on each beat…and people, we really can’t pull that look off any more, you know?

Everything is going as we age. It’s like a fire sale — the memory, the brain functionality, the flexibility, the ability to eat doughnuts at midnight without paying the price — it’s all going so fast. Do you know I spent 20 minutes today telling my friend Christine my opinion on the work of the actress Patricia Clarkson? When Christine didn’t know who that actress was, I tried but I couldn’t for the life of me recall any of the actual titles of her films. I could picture her in my head — very pretty, white, early 50s, pale red hair. I had to give clues like “she was in movie where she was one of three leads — the other two were Bobby Carnevale and the midget.” Or “she was in the black and white movie about the news–Robert Downey, Jr.” Or “she was in a movie about gay people.”

It was only later that day that someone pointed out the name I kept saying to Christine was actually “Patricia Richardson,” a different actress who was on the Tim Allen sitcom (the name of which I can’t recall. It had to do with tools and Pamela Anderson got her start on it). Ay caramba.

my day

images-2.jpg Do you ever have days where youare so stressed you feel like Han Solo at the end of “Empire Strikes Back”? I’m having one of those days.

It started by being punched on the insanely packed rush hour subway this a.m. For me, the cut-off point on a subway ride is when you can’t fit your limbs in. When your legs and arms don’t fit in, that’s a sign there’s no more room. On this train ride, some dude with no where to go just started to rise in the air and with no place to put his feet, he started to fall, and as part of that effort, punched me. Some days are like a cartoon, and from that point, it only got more and more frantic.

If you don’t know the end of that movie in particular, he gets crypto-something–genetically frozen. Somebody knows the exact term out there.

To see what Bart Simpson looks like frozen, see below.

images4.jpg<

Gilligan’s Island

gilligans-c.jpg Is “Lost” today’s answer to “Gilligan’s Island”? I don’t know — it’s about a motley crew of characters stranded on an island with no way to get home, who have no choice but to cope with their differences to get along. Instead of “the Others,” Gilligan’s Island had the natives (vaguely Polynesian). And instead of desperate drive to get off, the cast of Gilligan’s Island kind of made the best of things, creating homes with a strong Tikki aesthetic. I don’t know if it’s as strongly correlated as “Sex and the City” and the “Golden Girls,” but it was something I was thinking. (And yeah, the whole native thing being quasi Asian would probably give me the willies today. I’m not as innocent as my friend’s two girls, with whom I watched “Peter Pan” recently, as they blissfully watched Peter’s adventures with the “how”-speaking, red Indians.)

I just remembered this a.m. the episode where Ginger and Mary-Ann try to make over a native, heavy set woman with makeup, and the native ends up eating the lipstick. It was such a striking, odd thing to do, I think about it years later. See, TV writers? You can make a difference!