In search of Wendy

I don’t know how I lived before Wendy. She’s nurturing, she’s patient, she shows me the way. A lot of times I’ll do stupid things, ignore her advice completely and yet she never gets angry. Never even raises her voice. She just readjusts her thinking to accommodate me. Before you get too excited guys, Wendy is my GPS system. I’ve named her for “Wendy and the lost boys”, which seemed better than “Donna Dashboard” or “mother”.

My big question is just who is this woman? She’s the Lexus GPS voice. Maybe one of you know. I tried tracking it down on the internet but kept running into dead ends.

Do people recognize her voice when she’s in a supermarket or ordering at Shoney’s? How long did it take to record all of that? Jon Miller of ESPN records their baseball video game each year and it takes about three days to update from last year’s edition. By the third day he’s walking into walls.

The funniest day I ever had on the MASH set was when they assembled the cast to do promos for all the affiliates. The show had just gone into syndication and as a courtesy the cast agreed to do quick individual promos. Promos like this:

“Hi, this is Alan Alda. Thanks for watching MASH and now stay tuned for Cindy Zichiweivitz, Bob Bandamama and the rest of the Eyewitness News team on the big one in Biloxi, Channel 17. “

and then…

“Hi, this is Alan Alda. We have your prescription for comedy on MASH followed by Channel 39 Action Central News with Laura Papadacilous, Harold DeBois, Dirk D. Detmeyer sports, and Dr. Happy with the weather – voted the number one news team in Norfolk for the ninth year in a row.”

They had to record 200 of these. Can you imagine?!

By the 20th one they were tripping all over themselves, by the 100th it was a train wreck. Everyone was so punchy, they could not get through a promo without six takes, five of them laughing hysterically.

And, these promos were done at the end of a filming day.

I don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life.

So when I hear Wendy lovingly say “make a sharp right in one half mile” I imagine it was after four takes of:

“make a right … oh fuck, sharp right… God damn it, let’s do this fucking thing again. What is a fucking sharp right turn anyway? Like the putz driving is gonna know? He’s probably got his head so far up his ass he doesn’t even know what a right turn is. And he's driving a fucking Lexus. I have a goddamn Kia but this pissant drives a Lexus. It's a fucking joke! Okay, here we go, take five…”

Whoever Wendy is, I have got to meet her. But not during a session.