Last September, as you probably know, a bunch of us put on a big event in the theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. Its purpose? To honor the late 'n' lovely June Foray. Last Monday night, we had a little invitational dinner at the Smoke House restaurant in Burbank for some of those who contributed to that evening. I'll identify the attendees in the above photo, starting with the folks who are standing…
At far left is my associate/assistant John Plunkett who associates and assists with so much of what I do. Then as we move left-to-right, we find animation expert Jerry Beck. Then — oh, look! — there's TV expert and host of Stu's Show, Stu Shostak He's is in the hammerlock grip of voice actor Bob Bergen. Bob is, of course, the voice of Porky Pig and many other characters and he's one of the best teachers of cartoon voicing. Peeking over his shoulder is Marian Massaro, who was our main announcer at the event. You've heard Marian announcing some of the major awards shows on TV and countless commercials.
Then the fine-looking lady dressed like a zebra is chanteuse extraordinaire Shelly Goldstein, who has been oft-mentioned on this blog as a first-rate writer and performer and next to her is Joe Campana, a superb film editor who did some of the superb film editing for us. Then the guy in black is Neil Ross, voice of dozens of your fave cartoon characters and our other announcer that evening. Neil does most of the commercials and award show announcing that Marian doesn't do. And way over on the end is one of the greatest guys I know, Disney exec Howard Green. This is not to suggest anyone else in the photo is not a great guy or gal.
I'm the fellow who's seated and for some reason, I'm holding Howard Green's "to go" order. To my right and your left is the lovely Amber Payne. She's the Amber I've written about on this blog the last few months. Finally: To my left and your right is the lovely Jeanine Kasun, spouse of Stu Shostak and host of her own podcast, Baby Boomer Favorites with Jeanine Kasun.
Three other points or maybe more…
- If you've been thinking you might want to make a living as a voice actor or announcer, go visit Bob's, Marian's and Neil's websites and click on the links that play their demos. That's your competition.
- The Smoke House is a fine place to eat and it also has some interesting connections to the worlds of animation and comic books. I wrote about them in this article.
- But every time I write about it here, I get e-mails from folks scolding me for spelling its name wrong. Go look at their website, people. They spell it "Smoke House," "Smokehouse" and "SmokeHouse" there, sometimes varying it on the same page. If they can spell it any way they want, I can spell it any way I want.
- But however you spell it, it still has the best Garlic Cheese Bread in the world. In fact — and this is true — that's all that was in Howard's "to-go" order: Garlic Cheese Bread. This dinner was paid for with a $500 gift certificate we had and I was thinking maybe we should forget about the steaks and chicken and salads, and just get $500 worth of Garlic Cheese Bread.
And one more point: A lot of other folks helped out, including animation expert Tom Sito, who wasn't there because some lunkhead (the guy holding the Cheese Bread in the photo) accidentally gave him the wrong time to be there. We were and are grateful to all who pitched in to help. It is an additional tribute to June that so many folks volunteered to help, many of them saying, "I just want to be a part of it." Thanks to everyone who was.