The night...

I wasn't sure if this would still work or not but I told myself at 745 this morning as I lay down in bed after the overnight shift, "You will sleep until your alarm goes off."  I took me until now, walking back from the laundromat, to realize that I actually did manage to sleep solid up until my alarm went off at 2pm.  Not too shabby. 

Now, I'm about to get to work on a few voice auditions.  After Saturday's mixer, I'm wanting to attack this thing with a whole new vigor and intensity.  You may remember that I had the New York Voiceover Mixer to go to along with my concert last Saturday night.  The mixer unfortunately didn't manage to meet my expectations of at least meeting a few casting agents and production people.  No, I mostly met other voice actors at varying stages of their careers but this alone was valuable and made the night worth it, even though I couldn't stay the whole time. 

When I arrived there was a relatively short line snaking down the sidewalk and I only had to wait a few minutes to get inside, long enough to wonder if I'd see my coaches there whose names were on the guest list, to wonder if I'd be alone most of the night or if it would be easy to meet total strangers and to witness to younger people in front of me get booted from the line because they were underage.  Yes, there was a cash bar.  And at $12 for a glass of wine, I was partially glad I wasn't staying all night.

Once inside we waited on a long line to get name tags and to submit our business cards for the raffle, which took almost 15 minutes.  The crowd was packed pretty tightly too but it wasn't long before I had a drink in my hand and was inching my way through the crowd, scanning for familiar faces.  I was only really sure I'd see two.  I managed to make my way across the room to the other bar where I took up a spot leaning against it.  Thankfully, I didn't have too much time to think of how to approach anyone in the room because people began introducing themselves almost immediately.  I met a handful of people from New York, one from Philly, one from DC and exchanged business cards with everyone.  The conversation took a similar route with each person, always starting with "do you do voiceover? what kind of stuff? how long have you been in it?" and progressing to various questions about how they've come to find success with various avenues and whether they have agents, etc. 

Around the time raffle drawings started I started nervously check the time.  Luckily, it wasn't too long before they did the drawing for the one item I was most interested in: The Harlan Hogan Signature microphone.  I did not win.  So, I said farewell to the last of my new friends and skipped back to work to grab my equipment and rush back to Astoria for the concert.

The Waltz-Astoria is a little cafe in the unlikeliest of places on a quiet stretch of Ditmars Blvd around 23rd Street.  They serve sandwiches wine and beer and program all kinds of music from singer songwriter stuff to classical like our concert and even host an open mic that Lacy and I have performed at recently.  Pedro Gonzalez, the Emcee and part owner of the venue also curates a lot of the talent and is hosting a singer songwriter competition pretty soon.  I got to meet and chat with his wife, Song, who is a piano player as well during Natti Vogel's set after Tania's.   Overall it's a great venue...much better than the Metropolitan Room this summer.  But I hardly need to say that as I may have already expressed our dissatisfaction with their hospitality and their sound system.  Pedro has a very nice Bose tower to plug up to that sounded amazing with the electronics.  Well, hear and see for yourself:



Yes, we also had a much more reliable videographer this time around.  My friend Chad Heird from work at NY1 offered, since he lives so close by and was free that evening, to come by and shoot our performance. 


The performance, I feel, went very well and I was mostly satisfied with it.  There was a spot of technical difficulty which yields a great anecdote about non-technical people and technical people.  While I was prematurely freaking out about why their was no sound coming out of my audio interface (I had barely gotten through checking all the typical things you check when troubleshooting something like this...maybe it was the pressure of time constraints since Tania showed up a little late and there was a limited amount of time for us to perform), Tania, who would be the first to say she's not technically inclined at all, comes over
and says, "Tim, calm down, think.  How did it work at my place the other night?"  Of course, even though she probably had no idea how to fix the problem, she knew exactly what to say.  The issue?  When I rehearse, I set the output of the program to be the laptop speakers and always have to remember that when I go to perform it I need to actually go into Preferences in Mainstage and tell it to use my audio interface as the output.  That's why it was working at rehearsal and wouldn't work at the venue.  Duh!  Problem solved and we tested it and got underway with the concert, the rest of which should be posted on youtube very soon. 

For now, I have to pickup my laundry and start recording my voice!