Oh, Shoot!

... Photoshoot, that is.

Adam C. Harrington

My son, Adam, is represented in his career as a voice actor by a major talent agency. The agency has a website that, for reasons that I might discuss later in this blog, appears to have been designed to drive visitors, clients, fans, or anybody else far, far away.

Adam @ work.

But they want photos of him now. Of course, they won't pony up for an actual photographer, so they get me instead. (This is a national, big-time agency, folks. You wouldn't know it.)

Part of the reason for wanting photos is that they want to market him for on-screen gigs. He has had a few of those before -- in-house training videos for large companies, mostly -- always as a "heavy," a bad guy.

Heavy heavy. Yes, those arms are real, inherited in part from Art Harrington.

So, last weekend, we got together for some amateur glam-snapping. Here are some out-snaps:

Looks like he's auditioning to fill a vacancy in U2, doesn't he?

Pony tail liberated. Adam says of this shot, "I liked this one at first, but the more I look at it the more I look like a serial killer trying not to look like a serial killer. 'Could you help me move this couch into my van? Mind going in first?'"

The photographer, setting up framing. The camera's remote control is in my right hand, just offscreen.

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Taken Over the Waterfall's Brink

Tracks of our 2006 Ireland journey -- please click to see larger and legibly.

It's real now.

Today we went down to our local bank branch and had a "foreign bank draft" made out in euros for our summer's stay in the Bothy.

We sent it off to Lady Rosse from the little post office here in Boulder Creek, Santa Cruz Mountains, rural USA, to Birr, County Offaly, rural Ireland.

Right now, that check is probably waiting to be put in the belly of an airplane. Our gleeful anticipations, defying our six-decades' ages, hover around it wherever it is.

We're gonna go, we really, actually, honestly, unbelievably, are gonna go again, really. We never thought we would, but here we go. It's half a year away, but now it would cost more to cancel the journey than it would to complete it. We have now paid for our travel, our boarding, our home's caretaking (God bless you, Adam, from here to purgatory and back again for that last one.) We have also reserved our car.

This trip will be very, very different from the last: I will spend far more time in the archives, for example, and we will sortie around Northern Ireland (especially Armagh), but our home will be, as it would inevitably be, Birr Castle Demesne. This time, unlike 2006, we know what to expect from the Demesne, and we have a history of others' experiences to bolster us, especially those whose creativity has been bolstered as well, as superbly exemplified by Margaret Ryall.

And we have, we hope, an old friend of four feet to greet us.

This blog's readership is so small that I can comfortably offer the following: if there is anywere on the island of Ireland that you want a photo from, please let me know right away, so I can fold that in to our itinerary. Mike and Ronnie Peterson, I think I remember that some of your roots are in County Clare -- Lahinch? That would be an easy half-day drive from Birr.

Bothy in the gloaming, August, 2006

Lift a Spoon of Vanilla Ice Cream with Me Today

The Black Freighter and his midlife bear, 2002.

Sometimes, April isn't the cruelest month. February can be.

It's been a year today, and still I will often reach for vanilla ice cream at the store before I remember with a sting that he's not here for it. We still, and probably always will, see him in a shadowed corner at the edge of vision, or on the other side of a window.


Oolie, shantih, shantih, shantih.

(With apologies to T. S. Eliot who, at least as Old Possum, would probably understand.)