Tales from that wild and wacky Ottoman Empire

2005-11-23 - 9:41 a.m.

Last night volunteering I got to read again. This time I was recording a text about Baghdad. Besides the rather entertaining pronunciations, the text was notable in its extreme level of violence. Tens of thousands of heads piled in the streets, heads on spikes (thought of Eddie Izzard), and people getting killed off by being rolled in a carpet and kicked to death. The descriptions were so bloody it was challenging to keep a straight face while the director was laughing and reacting on the other side of the glass.

Then, in the midst of all the violent passages, suddenly we got to the sexy bits. Extensive descriptions of the harems and behavior therein took the book in an entirely new direction. One guy even decided that, as the book put it, size really does matter, so he had his posse out searching far and wide for the fattest woman they could find. No ordinary fat chick would do. This had to be the extreme. Apparently they located an Armenian woman who fit the bill and dragged her off to the harem.

How come my textbooks didn't have these kinds of scenes of sex and violence? Well, except for the lesbian primate porn, of course.

My biggest challenge seemed to be speed. The director advised me that I was going pretty fast, even when I felt like I wasn't, so I had to make a real effort to pace myself. I know this is something I need to do generally anyway. When I spent some time in Florida I had numerous people giving me blank stares as they tried to keep up with my Yankee chatter. It definitely improved as the session went on.

I got my audition scripts back; they dug them and there are only minor tweaks to make. Now I can schedule my audition for whenever I'm ready. Probably once I get back from the Netherlands.

Counting down the time. 4 hours and 10 minutes until I am out of here!

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Pretend it's 10th grade. Leave me a note.

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