I do accents, bulging eyes and giant hand gestures – but it’s time to up my thespian game
There are aspects of parenthood I could be better at. I’m forgetful (twice last week, I packed no nappies in his nursery bag) and selfish – I eat roughly 35% of the food I’m meant to feed him. But one thing I am ready for is story time. My voice-work is unparalleled, my back stories deep and weighted. I bulge my eyes and strain my neck as I inhabit a score of characters for my son’s delight. ‘The actor,’ wrote Lee Strasberg, ‘creates with his own flesh and blood all those things that the arts try to describe.’ It’s tragic he never got to see me do my version of Supertato, the masked vegetable superhero I consider my finest vocal realisation.
Though not a reader per se, my son has a passion for books that has come on in leaps and bounds. More accurately, it’s come on in sprinting crawls, his doughy little paw holding whichever book he wants us to read just one or two or eight more times. I’m biased, of course, but he likes some pretty advanced stuff, particularly really boring dramas that are only interesting because they features an unlikely protagonist: a dinosaur loses his hat, a fire engine does its taxes, a moth deletes its Facebook account – that kind of thing. But he really likes those thick, hard little books for babies, squat and square like carpet-swatch booklets.
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