gominokouhai | I wanna be a paht uhvit

Welp, 2011 is two weeks old now, and thus far I am significantly less than impressed. I'm putting you on notice, 2011. You've got fifty more weeks to pull your socks up or else... or else.

That said, this morning was rather fun. I attended an accent workshop at the Lyceum Theatre, based on their current production of A View From The Bridge. I saw A View From The Bridge once, many years ago, while I was still in school. I was far too naive to pick up on any of the subtext and recall very little except people shouting I took the sheets offa my bed for you over and over again. Fifteen years on, having actually had opportunity to look at a couple of pages of the script, what strikes me is Miller's stunning ability to use voice to draw his characters. In paragraph two on page one, Alfieri says that he's an Italian-American immigrant, Brooklynite, came from Sicily aged 25 and educated at law school. By the time he tells you all that, you already know, just based on the way he uses language. It leaps off the page at you.

Miller is a fucking genius. I'd give both nuts to write like that. And he married Marilyn Monroe, too. Bastard.

Accents: the first thing you do with an accent is work out where it comes from in the mouth. The Scots accent is quite far back in the throat. Mississippi-type ah do declay-uh voices are very high up in the roof of the mouth; Liverpudlian likewise. The Brooklyn accent is so far forward that it's dripping off the front of your bottom lip like leaden drool. I nearly dislocated my jaw getting it right.

(I neeyuhly dislowcaded my jawuh is a fun phrase to say in Brooklynese. Saying it just now, I nearly dislocated it again. I've invented physical onomatopoeia and, with it, an excellent name for a rock band.)

I was doing fine until about halfway through the session, when the bloody dire Daleks Take Manhattan jumped into my head and wouldn't leave. The whiny nasal showgirl woman kept repeating Laslow on a loop in my mind. To compensate I dropped the pitch of my voice, so my own version of Brooklynese sounds like a more thuggish version of Mistuh Diagoras.

Two hours work, and now I can say cawffee correctly. And I have an urge to watch Goodfellas tonight.