Public speaking – be prepared!

My two college language courses are a constant source of amusement, challenge, and beneficial stress for me. Today I was to give a 15-minute presentation in Spanish class (in Spanish, of course!) on a topic of my choice – anything of interest in recent headlines from a Spanish-speaking country. I chose to discuss censorship in Cuba, which has been in the news recently as Raúl Castro, filling in for his ailing brother Fidel, has invited discussion about the societal problems of the country. Despite this new openness, censorship is nevertheless an ongoing occurrence. I planned to give an overview of what has been in the news on this topic during the last month, and then to discuss the lyrics of a recently censored song, Mala Leche, by the group Moneda Dura. I would conclude by showing a video of the band performing this song.

Last semester I started preparing for the required oral Spanish presentation weeks in advance. Now I am much more relaxed and since today’s effort was solo, I didn’t have to worry about coordinating with other students. So, I started preparations this past weekend. Before long a perfectly swell PowerPoint presentation (strongly encouraged by our professora) was taking shape, and by last night all was in order.

The best-laid plans of course went immediately awry this morning, as the computer in the classroom was not allowing us to log on to the college network so I couldn’t access my PowerPoint slides. Several people got up to try to access the file; I gave them about 30 seconds and then walked away from the podium and gave as compelling a presentation as I could without any visual aids, and without notes. As a veteran of many many biology lectures and conference talks, I learned early in my career (and fortunately not the hard way!) to prepare for the worst, and I always make sure that whenever I have to speak publicly I can do it with nothing but my voice if the other equipment isn’t working. It’s excruciating to be a member of an audience where a speaker is having technical difficulties – nobody wants to see it and no speaker should ever stand helplessly by while a technician attempts to save the day. I think one of the benefits of being without slides is that the audience pays closer attention to the spoken words, since they aren’t distracted by pretty pictures or by trying to figure out what the graphs are about. Fortunately, we were able to get onto the internet in time to access the video, and I had already distributed copies of the words to the song. Thus, my hope is that if my fellow students remember this talk at all, they will remember interesting ideas about Cuba, rather than a hapless speaker who wasted 15 minutes of class time trying to get their slides onto the screen. I would admonish anyone preparing to give any kind of talk – technology is wonderful, but don’t depend on it, and you will never have to worry about what you’re going to find when you get to the podium.

Voice-over Networking in Real Life

Today was one of my Chamber of Commerce’s quarterly “Meet and Eat” breakfast events, which took place at my very favorite venue: the Garden House at Look Park. It was a frigid morning, so there was no lingering in the garden today, but the crackling blaze in the great stone fireplace offered considerable consolation.

As I recently noted in my earlier post about networking, these events are not the place for sales pitches – in fact, the only time for a sales pitch is when somebody is actually talking about hiring you for a job but they maybe aren’t 100% sure about their choice. My goal in attending these events is to broaden my circle of acquaintances, find something of interest to discuss, and just plant seeds (and what better place for that than a Garden House? Heh). Of course, I always welcome the bonus of meeting somebody who could eventually be a client, such as a producer or an ad agency employee, but when I walk into these events to a sea of unfamiliar faces, I’m usually just relieved to find a vacant seat and get into it. This morning I was seated between the marketing director of a retirement community, and the marketing director for a lumber company. Neither of them knew what voice-over was, and I was happy to enlighten them and then to learn about their jobs before our guest of honor took the podium.

The guest of honor was none other than our city’s mayor. I had never heard her speak before and I tell you, she is quite the comedienne - a seriously funny lady. I just googled her name and found two listings in Wikipedia – one for an English Actress and one for an American Politician (that’s her) who surprisingly has no obvious improv background. I’m now up-to-date on many city issues and feel a little better about what had sounded like an ill-advised plan to expand our landfill - but The Honorable kinda talked me into it.

So, I was thinking, what a pleasant morning, pity that I couldn’t make myself do a bit more glad-handing and meet a few more people, particularly media-type people, but when you go to a sit-down meal you’re primarily limited to the people with whom you’re sitting. At that point, the old glass fishbowl full of business cards was brought up to the podium and our MC read off the winners of the door prizes. I’m starting to think my friend Slav Vaskevich of Vaskevich Studios put some kind of magnetic substance on my business cards, because I was once again a winner. This time: two tickets to a wine-tasting event at the end of this month at….

drumroll please…

WGBY Public Television.

Somebody is definitely watching out for me these days.

German Voice-over at MCM Voices!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, continued through high school and college, and the last German course I took was when I was a university faculty member back in the not-even-gonna say when-ties! I audited a course at that time, since I was considering spending some time at the University of Vienna working with a colleague in developmental evolutionary biology and wanted to brush up (I ended up working at the National Science Foundation instead). Because I started relatively young, my accent is close to perfect. I could get along just fine if you dropped me off in a Spanish-speaking country, but my German still sounds better than my Spanish right now. Still, I expected to be offering Spanish voice-over in the near future, not German. Last month, a German narration job dropped into my lap.

Okay, I actually moved my lap so that the job would fall in the right place. My friend Liz de Nesnera, who does voice-over in English and French, has a client who was looking for native German voice talent. I told her that if her client was desperate she could let him know that my German was very good. Apparently, he was, because he hired me. Not only that, he made the same mistake a few weeks later, and it looks like I’ll be working with him on a regular basis. I am really quite thrilled. It was a little scary at first, but I’m here to tell you, it is very good for us to stretch our wings and get out of the place where we’re comfortable.

So, it is back to school again for me. I took a one-week course in medical Spanish during interterm at the local college, and now am in Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) AND “high intermediate” German. I’ve survived the first week unscathed and am in linguistic heaven.

A link to a snippet of that first German narration job is here.