Me At The Mike

Me At The Mike


Here’s me (see above) with a really formidable microphone hovering in front of my face. The snapshot was taken last week while I was recording the text from my 2004 adaptation of the late Jeanne Shaffer’s fable, The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Lending his technical expertise to this endeavor was my pal Jason Brown (below), a multi-talented audio whiz and entrepreneur who with his wife (and my friend from college days) Nicky Heron Brown produces audio books from their home studio in south Berkshire County. Their finished products are marketed through Jason’s BMA Audio web site.


		At left: *The BMA CD of Berkshire Stories, a selection of writings about nature by Morgan Bulkeley, Sr.* *Poke around in the BMA online store and you’ll also find recorded works by Henry James (The Siege of London), Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth), and others.*
I don’t mean to give anyone the impression that any commercially released audio book of *Swimmer* is being contemplated. The book as printed contains pictures galore, but the text is so brief it could probably be read aloud in its entirety while waiting in line at the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru lane at Route 2 and Eagle Street. No, what I’m toying with is a (very) limited-animation version of the allegory using Adobe Flash. The notion of creating such a version of Swimmer has long appealed to me despite the fact that I have virtually no spare time to work on it. In other words, it’s a presently unfunded bit of digital hobbyism that may never see completion or reach an audience. But even so, Jason is generously helping me create a preliminary soundtrack for it. Thanks to him, I may be able to move my experiment along a step or two further when time does permit. (Maybe I can get a grant or something.) Writing about my projected reworking of this fable makes me want to say a few words, albeit belatedly, about the passing of Doc Shaffer last April, which I failed to note at the time because, well, I don’t find it easy to whip up comments about such losses on short notice. It seems best, though, to reserve those relections for a separate blog entry, which I hopefully will find time to compose later this week.