Sometimes when I am in a studio recording some
teaching materials, my mind starts to wander. Of course, part of me is
focussed on what I'm recording:
"Number 1
....... Boat ................ Boat ................ Number 2 ...... Coat
................ Coat .............." and so on. Thrilling stuff. Part
of me starts to think about all sorts of things, to play games with the
words, to tell a story using the phonics words I'm recording. (One day,
while on a boat, it got cold, so I put on my coat. Suddenly I noticed
that the boat could no longer float. A goat swam by and...You get the
idea.)
Sometimes I am quite crass when the
words are, well, unusual. Yesterday we came across "hip, whip, ship and
lip." Yes, well, a bored mind could do something with that...
And
then there was the very weird workbook, I won't go into details, but I
started to giggle at one point (as did the guy I was recording with) and
we couldn't stop. The engineer kept going back and cueing me, I'd
pause, pause, then burst into fits of giggles again. Now this is ok from
time to time, but if the engineer has cued you three times and you're
still giggling, it's not so cool.
But not to worry, I have a secret weapon: Dead rabbits. Yes, I think about that scene in the Glenn Close movie, Fatal Attraction,
[thanks, Neil!] where she is preparing rabbit soup with the pet
rabbits. This brings me down enough that I can start recording again.
The moment then passes, and all is well. The dead rabbits have served me
well for years.
But no, not yesterday. Why? Well, you see, I read Eve's hilarious blog about
the 'rabbit' her husband gave her. Yes, you know, the rabbit featured
in that dreadful show, 'Sex in the city'. The one with a motor. Yes, got
it now? Not only was her blog hilarious, but I asked her to give me a
product rating on the rabbit, which she did (privately, of course!)
So,
I'm trying to calm down from the giggles by thinking about 'dead
rabbits', which leads me to Eve's 'rabbit', which leads me to excusing
myself for a couple of minutes to stop giggling. (And then I asked the
engineer to cue me with a hand signal, not letting me hear what we had
just recorded--the original cause of the giggles!)
I'll have to come up with a new 'stop giggling' image. Cod liver oil, perhaps?
No comments:
Post a Comment