A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
I arranged with Mr. Lanh, the Relentless Crusader for English Education, to do some recording a few days ago for his radio teaching program and language tapes. The way it was put to me was that he had forgotten to highlight a couple of the lines I was supposed to read when I recorded a few weeks ago, so my voice was briefly needed to make the cassette complete. So when I arrived at the "studio" I wasn't surprised when he gave me a sheet that only had two out-of-context sentences of dialogue. It was a long way to come for two sentences, but I didn't have anything else to do that day.

After I quickly skimmed the sheet and declared myself ready, Mr. Lanh, in his typical sneaky way, handed me a book and asked if I had time to read a couple things in there. A "couple things" turned out to be two full pages of expository text ("how to learn vocabulary" and a primer on first aid) as well as the chapter headings and subheadings for the entire book. Now you can imagine me intoning "Reading and Listening . . . . Page 49."

Then the other shoe dropped. He handed me my final script, which proved to be basically the same script I did during my first session, one half of maybe 20 dialogues for the English 8 course. My protestation that I had already done these was met with this pronouncement: "This time you're on VIDEO!!"

Holy crap. Believe me, if the concept of video had ever been broached with me I definitely would have worn makeup to the taping, not to mention I wouldn't have worn that shirt with the indelible Pho stains across the chest.

They switched the room around so I was sitting alone at a table at one end of the room with an old timey microphone and makeshift studio lights blazing at me. A tiny video camera on a tripod was in the middle of the room and behind it was an overhead projector upon which Mr. Lanh and his assistant put transparencies of my script. It all went fine, really, though I shudder to think how they will splice these dialogues together. It's got to look and sound even weirder than the cassettes do. A male, 50ish, American friend here in Saigon says he's on Mr. Lanh's video saying "Hi, I'm Nam. I'm 15 years old," so you can only imagine what these students must think when they watch.

The good (and unexpected) news was that they paid me 250,000 dong for this recording session, which is about $16.50, two days food and transportation in my fairly frugal existence. I only got 150,000 last time -- did they give me a raise because I'm a TV star now?

© 2002 Katy Warren



posted by Katy at 6:58 PM