The Wednesday before last I went over to The Wehmann Agency to meet with the agents for voice, on-camera, and live trade…their office was positively humming (very busy agency = higher potential for gigs = happy Horton) and after about half an hour I walked out of there with new representation. Yep, I’m in. I AM IN! WOO-HOO! There is still plenty of self-promotion that I need to do in the interest of drumming up some business, but it’s a relief to finally be in a respected agency’s ranks again. And the cool part is that my agent for voice said she doesn’t have another voice like mine in her cadre….again, higher potential for gigs; again, happy Horton. Meanwhile, I was called back into Undertone Music to voice incomprehensible conversations for Pixar-style animated coffee cups, the dots on top of “i”s, and bouncy balls. There were three people observing and engineering the session, and at one point I actually had them in tears from laughter - they tweaked pitches for a few of the spots, so I threw in seemingly appropriate references to Baby Jessica and making out with a jar of mayonnaise. For some reason those didn’t make it into the final product. Curious.

And now for the gritty of all this nitty: I’ve been putting off writing about any of the good news for many, many days because I’ve been far too busy panicking. It’s hard to write anything more than “GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” when one is consumed with panic. I am, and for two weeks have been, in a perpetual state of sheer terror over where my next paycheck is coming from. My show at The Children’s Theatre closes this Sunday afternoon, and I don’t have any confirmed work coming down the pipeline. Up until now I have been a responsible girl with my ducks (oh, how I love ducks) neatly in a row. Now the ducks are hither and yon. Nothing is more disarming than a paddling of wayward ducks.

I signed up with a temp agency this week and had a meeting/paperwork-marathon with them today – hopefully that will generate some temporary income – I’m also filing for unemployment on Monday. Seriously, unemployment. Me. What the hell? Oy. The whole concept makes me feel sick to my stomach – not having a solidified plan to make sure my basic needs are met makes me feel irresponsible, careless, and immature. Granted, I could easily return to the full-time corporate/desk-jobby world that I once ruled, but I am not ready to do that just yet. I want to take a low-stress, no-obligation job that I can leave at any time to take stage, voice-over, or commercial gigs. I’m determined to remain available to opportunities because I’ve short-changed myself via benefits-paralysis for years now. It’s time to do things my way. Hey, ducks! You come here. RIGHT NOW!