Ever since I can remember, I have loved doing voice impressions and disguises.
Accents of all kinds came naturally to me as well. I never got into throwing my voice or ventriloquism even though I loved Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy. Ask anyone under 40 who they were, and you’ll get a blank stare.
My favorite impressions in the 50’s mainly were movie actors. I perfected Jimmy Stewart and James Cagney. My Cagney from several of his hit movies like White Heat and Mister Roberts had my family and friends rolling around on the floor.
The voices were good, but think about a little boy contorting his face to attempt to look like his characters.
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, with fake smoke in his face coming off an unlit cigarette, got roars. John Wayne’s tipsy walk in his movies was actually better than the voice mimic.
Everyone was amazed this little blond kid could do Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech declaring war on Japan. “Yesterday, December Seventh, 1941, a day of infamy.” Gave anyone from that era chills. Most kids today couldn’t tell you the difference between FDR and his cousin Teddy Roosevelt,
I did a great Winston Churchill. I never tried President Eisenhauer. He was too droll and boring, but along came JFK. I was a big hit in school, especially with the Irish nuns who thought I was a god.
I did impersonations of Elvis, speaking and singing. Andy Devine and his sidekick Froggy, Ricky Ricardo, and even Pat Boone.
When I look at those names today, I know that my act needs to be updated and refreshed, unless I want to appear in nursing homes and veteran hospitals.
Because I am in hiding in Switzerland, the only audience I have now is my wife, Gjuli. She tells me every impersonation I do is good to great. I’ve tried Denzel Washington, Joe Biden and his flubbing speeches, and Trump is easy, and I wear a foolish wig for special effect. Everyone does Robert DeNiro, but he sickens me with his politics, so I don’t do him very well.
My impressions of Leo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, and Jack Nicholson are all killer. Gjuli usually forgets their names, but she knows who I am.
I must admit that having no friends and family around lessens my motivation to do the voices and disguise myself as celebrities. I could do the best Adolf Hitler you’ve ever seen and not offend anyone because I no longer have an audience.
Now I look like an old man making a fool of himself, so I only practice in front of my bathroom mirror.
Trying to be someone else through masquerade and mimicking voices in retrospect is very telling. Maybe I wasn’t comfortable being me. Perhaps it was a way for me to cover my pain. Perhaps I was channeling celebrities so I could escape my own world.
Or more than likely, I just enjoyed the attention and was happiest when I made people laugh.
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*This blog is fiction
