~ Bertelson Bulletin ~

This is a photo of me on my way to becoming famous – Snort!

I went to a production studio to do a taping of my voice as a narrator for a local production of “The Secret Garden”

When they called me (via a lady at church who had seen me on stage singing and acting and knew I was English) I didn't really know much about what it was… a movie, a live drama, a TV show, a dance recital… I was just excited for another opportunity!!

SO…. when I told my Mum, she asked me all the sort of questions a good Mum asks and said a little worried (hey I'm still her baby girl even at 43!)  ” Darling, you have to be careful, it might be some AWFUL porn movie or something”

ROTFLOL – it's not THAT kind of 'secret garden' …. anyway all is fine, it's an innocent local dance recital but they are going to have a 10 minute movie preceeding the dancing part, which is the bit I do the narration over music score as well as snippets here and there throughout the story (in-between the dances I am sure.)

I had my script a couple of day early, told them I could do a variety of different English dialect accents, which would they like –  naturally it was the really fruity posh one!!!

Anyway it was a blast – only took an hour (they allotted 2) because I was brilliant at it 😉 – only needed 2 takes on average, some in only 1 take, a couple in 3 takes. 

I was assigned 6 girls, my daughter Kenzie being one of them. (there were 48 kids on the trip as there are 24 in each 3rd grade class.)

They all thought I was cool cos I 'talk funny' – One girl even said, “Are people taller in England cos you're even taller than my Dad” – LOL – but since I was in 'authoritative mature parental mode' I resisted the wisecrack of, “No sweetie, your Dad is a bit on the short side”

I took oodles of photos, but weeded out just the best ones. The guides we had were really good and taught us a lot about what we were seeing. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, in the low 70's, sunny but a little nip (for us now, I know you notherners are rolling around on the floor laughing!)

One snafu, Nicole, one of my assigned girl (adorable too) started to get an earache after lunch, it progressed to painful with her in tears really fast 😦 I felt so bad for her, there was nothing I could do to alleviate the pain.  I did call the school to ask them to get in touch with her parents (she only remembered her home phone number and no-one answered) to pre-warn them about the earache. Her Mum called back on my cell phone to talk to me and to her daughter (made her feel better but cry more 😦 my heart was breaking)

When it was time to leave, Mr Bus Driver (a parent too) tried to start the bus – no go – he said the battery must be dead – Oh boy – off went 2 Mums to find a burley ranger type guy to see if we could 'jump' the bus, Mr Bus driver got off the bus to 'go and see if he could FIND where the battery was' – and *I* go up sat in the drivers seat and studied all the dials, buttons, switches and stuff.  Basic troubleshooting mode.

One more story…..

I could have spent the entire day at the Otter section . Ozzie and Harriet were adorable!! 

My Mum will really relate to this since she and I saw a similar scenario in England, what 30 yrs ago??? 

Ozzie was frantically trying to build the best nest for Harriet inside a hololosed out three (RIGHT by the fence so we could see, it was cool)…. He'd jump out of the water, run into the grassy area, grab a mouthful of leaves and grass which looked SO cute sticking out of his mouth, I took many photos but they just move too durn fast so not worth showing! Then he would run along the fence and disappear into the bottom of the tree. Much scuffling and gras flying went on, and he'd emerge to go get another mouthful.

Then Harriet would get out of the pool and saunter over to the tree to have a look-see at how her beloved and 'enthusiatic as a puppy' mate was doing on building her the nest of her dreams…

She was quite ruthless and out flew chunks of grass and twigs and leaves from inside the tree as if she was saying, “This will NEVER do like this, this is LAST years look, is he EVER going to get it right? Men, I tell you gotta love em even if they are fairly useless”

I was narrating this all to my 6 girls as it was going on (we'd split up into our groups after lunch to wander around as we please, HA not surprise that I took mine girls back to the Otters!!) and they were all giggling hysterically asking, “How do you KNOW this, can you talk Otter too?”  I decided to let them think I was “Super-Mum” and didn't elaborate on the fact that a very learned lady in England who had 2 otters as pets for years had told us all about this while we watched it unfolding with her 2 otters when we visited her house…