It was a scorching hot day; the kind of humid, stinking miasma that I’ve always hated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was Friday, July 10, 1987.\u00a0 I’d been out of work for four months.<\/p>\n
And by “out of work”, I mean “working, here and there.\u00a0 My fixed bills – rent, phone, car insurance, groceries – came to right around $300 a month.\u00a0 I’d usually tack on $50 or so more in job-hunting expenses, most of it in long-distance phone calls and postage for sending out audition tapes to radio stations.\u00a0 I’d worked through the list of every <\/em>talk station in the country in markets larger than about 100,000 people, called almost all of them, and by this point sent out probably 100 audition tapes.\u00a0<\/p>\n I supported myself – in no “style” whatsoever – by writing free-lance articles for various Saint Paul neighborhood newspapers which, while they didn’t have the stature of the Pioneer Press or the Strib, had a couple of crucial benefits:<\/p>\n And along the way, I pitched myself to the various “talent agents” around the cities, looking for voiceover work.\u00a0 As the saying went, I’m not a model, but I played one on the radio.<\/p>\n Today, I got a call.\u00a0 A woman at an agency in Golden Valley had an odd need.<\/p>\n “I see on your resume you do Commonwealth accent work.\u00a0 Can you do Canadian?”<\/p>\n Now, growing up in North Dakota you heard the odd Canadian voice.\u00a0 Indeed, I’d grown up around a lot of ’em – since we didn’t get Public Radio in Jamestown until I was into college, my mom kept the family radio pretty much welded to CBW in Winnipeg, the region’s CBC affiliate, and a station that sounded, then as now, like NPR with funny vowels.\u00a0<\/p>\n For a split second I thought – “In the whole Twin Cities voiceover market, you can’t find an actual Canadian?<\/em>”\u00a0<\/p>\n But I silenced that thought.\u00a0 “Sure”, I said, switching slyly into my most exaggerated Mountie brogue, “I’ll see aboot fitting the job into my shshedule”.<\/p>\n “OK, we need you at the studio now.\u00a0 Now now now”.<\/p>\n So I raced out to the jeep, drove across town to a studio in Edina, and spent the next four hours doing an industrial training video for a Canadian branch of\u00a0a Minnesota company.\u00a0 The four hours’ work, at the non-union\u00a0$75 an hour scale, paid just about a month’s worth of bills, even after my agent took her 10%.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I think I might have worn a red flannel lumberjack shirt to get into character, but I can’t confirm that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was a scorching hot day; the kind of humid, stinking miasma that I’ve always hated.\u00a0 It was Friday, July 10, 1987.\u00a0 I’d been out of work for four months. And by “out of work”, I mean “working, here and there.\u00a0 My fixed bills – rent, phone, car insurance, groceries – came to right around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n