Model Citizen?

The people closest to me will know that, in addition to toiling in the blogosphere, I've been know to perform a good many impressions. My Scottish voice (Sean Connery) might be my favorite, but I have a few others I've worked on over the years. Most, I'm confident, are offensive - like the gay German or the 42-year-old Star Wars fan who lives with his mother.

I'm not sure to whom I owe this talent since neither of my parents can do an impression. My father does have one alternate voice he uses for every nationality when telling a story - it's a sort of Asian-with-a-speech-impediment hybrid. Often, when he does a vocal impression in the middle of a story, the listeners end up feeling sorry for the person he's depicting. "Oh, how sad," they think. "That poor man in the story is so brave. Can you imagine being a foreigner with a mental disability? I thought you said he was British?" Maybe I was adopted.

And so, from the Never Give up on Your Dreams department, I decided I should try to parlay this annoying party trick in to a dream career. My first step...email a talent agency. I sent one brief (and I'm sure pathetic) email to the Jon Casablancas talent agency and then instantly forgot about this goofy exercise. Two weeks later, I received a phone call from Maureen, the head agent at JC (that's how we, in the business, refer to Jon Casablancas). She convinced me that I was perfect for what they do and to meet with her two days later for a "sit down". Impressed by her rhetoric, I agreed. I would need to bring at least two photos of myself and my resume.

Not quite sure why a voice over professional would need head shots, I nevertheless went where any financially challenged person with a dream would go - the closest drug store. I developed two photos that didn't make me look like an ogre. The finished products were a sort of embarrassingly amateurish, black-and-white, 8 X 10 with fancy border that looked great at first sight. However, as I continued to admiringly look at them over the next few hours, I realized just how silly this would look to a tenured talent agent. How could I expect to compete against professional models with pictures of me playing basketball and posing with my son at his birthday party. As for my resume, I decided to bag that idea since the last performance I had was in playing brother number 8 or 9 in a summer production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (in 8th grade). Not exactly Sir Laurence Olivier. No ma'am, I was going in there as myself and if that wasn't good enough...they could kish my ash (Sean Connery, again).

To be continued...