Thursday, September 4, 2008
A Message From Beyond
Still on that deadline but here's something I had to put up here. As you all know, master voiceover guy Don LaFontaine passed away the other day. Don had been having a mess of medical troubles since about last November...a lot of ugly stuff involving growths on his lymph nodes and a collapsed lung and something really nasty called Subcutaneous Emphysema and that isn't even the half of it.
A few weeks ago, he wrote and had circulated a letter within the voiceover community. It described all his problems and his determination to lick them. It also included, down near the end, the following paragraph. I think Don would have wanted it to reach a larger audience...
But the real point of all this is the genesis of the condition. I was a smoker, on and off, for thirty years. I quit nearly twenty years ago, but that crap has a tendency to lie doggo in your system. It finally caught up with me, and as you've just read it ain't pretty. For those of you who are in the Voice Over business, and you think that smoking is adding some wonderful quality to your instrument WAKE UP! Quit! Today! Whoever you are if you smoke Stop! All you are adding is garbage to your vocal cords, and a nice deep layer of tar and poison on the linings of your lungs.
It's especially significant that Don LaFontaine said this because, and I am quite serious about this, there have been a number of actors who kept on smoking (or even STARTED) because of him. I've heard v.o. actors say they thought it would make them sound more like Don LaFontaine and might therefore get them more work. One of them was my pal Greg Burson, whose obit you read here recently. I don't know how much smoking contributed to Greg's death but it sure didn't help.
Posted at 11:56 AM
