I wrote my blog, but the dog ate it.

Yes,  yes, I know. MIA. Big time. It was, you know... life. Intruding. Extruding. Imploding. Not one thing, but an aggregate of STUFF conspired to knock me off my regular posting. Mea Culpa. 


I know there's really no excuse, but that won't stop me from listing them:

TOP 10 REASONS WHY I WASN'T POSTING


10. An interminable spring break, with trips hither and yon (New York, Ventura County), equipped with naught but an iPad, which makes for trickier posting. Saw a lot of old friends, my sister, a great play and a few dolphins, but got very little writing done. I need routine, damn it!


9. A miserable tax season, with ever-mounting piles of paper threatening to overwhelm me, à la Brazil:

8. Easter *

     *(Not an excuse—I prepared nothing for Easter this year. We were in a beach house in Ventura and the most I did was buy a Trader Joe's Easter bunny and Trader Joe's jelly beans [both clearly marked with "Trader Joe's"] and leave them next to Ben's bed. I thought we were DONE with the Easter Bunny! When Santa Claus topples, doesn't the Bunny naturally follow? Apparently not: when Ben woke up, he looked at the paltry booty and said "Do you think the Easter Bunny left something at our house, too?" Really, Ben? Really?

8. Work! Last week I had 4 voiceover sessions in 5 days. Plus a couple of on-camera auditions. A rare but welcome concentration of gigs. I did two highly-anticipated computer games (a violent one and a fantasy one; can't say more— non-disclosure forms abound) plus a Kung Fu Panda TV episode. Did you see the one where I play Monkey AND his brother? 

Kung Fu Panda: "Monkey in the Middle" S1
Get More: Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness Episodes,Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness,Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness Games

7. Going back home for my parents' birthdays and my father's back surgery.

6. Recovering from time spent back at home. 

5. Game of Thrones season 2!

4. My Apple Overlords tell me I must move to the Cloud, so I do so. It's just a few simple clicks, right?

3. Install OSX Lion to get on iCloud, buy new Microsoft Word  & Filemaker Pro to replace  ones that no longer work with new operating system, back up all my files, download and install Sugarsync* to sync documents over my devices, get a new iPhoto in order to use Photostream, figure out why everything is running so damned slow... cry just a little.

     *Sugarsync is like dropbox, but you don't have to put your stuff in a special folder to share them over your computers. It's pretty cool. If you try it, drop my name—I can get more storage!

2. I've just started a course on Buddhist precepts, in which you must write two essays a week, baring your very soul (more on that next time).

1. Who am I kidding? Draw Something, anyone?* ** ***

     *I had a whole junkie cycle with that game—infatuation, obsession, and eventually, rehab. Please don't ask me to play. Really. 

     **Still playing W.E.L.D.E.R, which is like Text twist, Scramble, Scrabble, and Tetris combined. 

     *** Hey, give me some credit. I haven't downloaded Angry Birds in Space!*

          *yet.

Onward and upward. Welcome back!

A New Panda in Town

For those of you who think that I spend my days playing Angry Birds and baking cobblers... well, you're mostly right. But wait! I have proof of legitimate and gainful employment: tomorrow, Monday 19th, Nickelodeon rolls out a sneak preview of a series that will start in November—KUNG FU PANDA: LEGENDS OF AWESOMENESS. 

It is, in my biased but usually-jaundiced view, pretty awesome. The animation looks great, the writing is whip-smart, and it's got the movie's combination of hi-larity and heart. I play Monkey, one of the Furious Five. (I need to have a little altar dedicated to Jackie Chan, the movie's Monkey, to thank him properly for being responsible for my livelihood. I got my start in voiceovers sounding like him in "The Jackie Chan Adventures," a show which gave me a crash course in voice acting, gave me cred and landed me the crackerjack agents I have today.) 

Tune in if you can. I think it's on at 8 PM, but check your local listings. The Nickelodeon website will give you all the info you need, plus some clips. The episode is a good one for me; it's a nice spotlight to the relationship between Po the Panda and Monkey. 

I am not, of course, acting alongside Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, Seth Rogen, David Cross & Jack Black, but if you closed your eyes during a recording session, you might think otherwise. These actors are phenomenal, and not just at sounding like celebrities. Kari Wahlgren. Fred Tatasciore. Amir Talai. Mick Wingert. Max Koch. Their names might not be familiar, but in the voiceover world, they are titans, or on the way to becoming one.  We mostly record as a group, and though I'm occasionally awed and intimidated by their quick-morphing, borderline-schizophrenic verbal shape-shifting, I love hanging out with them. They're like family, a family in which Scatman Crothers sings duets with Christopher Walken, and Tony Soprano stops by for profanity and cannoli.
(WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CLIP IS NSFW- BUT PRETTY DAMNED FUNNY):

Of course, I could be setting myself up for a big, hubristical ostrich egg on my face... recasting voices is notoriously easy in the animation world. I was on a series where the main celebrity villain was recast during a season and recorded with different actors, but they ended up reverting back to the celebrity... and he never knew he'd been dumped and then rehired. You should never count your voices until they've aired. But, unless you tune in Monday and hear Daniel Dae-Kim's voice coming out of Monkey's body, you'll get to hear me at work.  It's a total joy.