Leigha Horton :: Green room
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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!

The following story is a story that’s been a long, LONG time coming. I have kept mum on the whole thing until now just because it seemed like the proper thing to do; and I’m not much if I’m not proper.

Well, okay, the part after the semicolon is a lie.

Yes, yes, I do have some sense of decency, I just don’t always honor it. Moving on.

Last December I resigned from Lipservice Talent Guild. I know, I know, I made a huge hairy deal of it when I signed on over a year ago, but it turned out that Lipservice was perfect if I was extremely well-established, which I was not. My on-camera and voice-over career is still in its infancy, and I need someone, in addition to me, to advocate for me. By its very nature as a Guild with no frontline staff, Lipservice, as wonderful as it was, wasn’t able to do that. So I gave them notice in October, and then went on my way attempting to gather everything I needed to make a compelling case to Wehmann Talent Agency.

Among these things needed were a re-vamped commercial voice-over demo and a narrative demo – the commercial one I was using was poorly recorded (by me) and had weak reads that I frankly couldn’t stand listening to. So, I spent a few hours last week in the studio at Undertone Music, owned and operated by the incomparably crazy-slash-whipsmart-slash-talented Minister of Fancy Noises, one Mr. Tom Hambleton (and yes, Minister of Fancy Noises is actually on his business card). He gave me an incredible amount of his time and attention despite a fresh and looming film deadline; the end-product is nothing if not luscious. The part after the semicolon is all truth, baby. Call me a convert – the man’s a saint.

The reason it took three and a half months to get this done is not important now; the important thing is that IT IS FINALLY DONE! Yes, I said it, I mean it, and I can prove it. The new commercial demo is up in the audio player and in the download section of the home page, and the narrative demo will make an appearance in the next few weeks or so (it’s done, I just need to make a spot for it). Take a listen – tell me how bad you want some ice cream.

The three and a half month wait left me ready and raring to go, so I submitted all my materials to Wehmann yesterday. I heard back from them today and have a meeting next week. Hopefully my fingers won’t cramp from keeping them crossed until then.