So H.o.p. was down at the studio today. Marty has been recording Heston, a Dominican-born, Philadelphia-raised R&B singer. Heston’s little girl was there. A sweet smooth song and there’s a section in it about grade school teasing. Heston wanted a little background of a boy teasing a girl and had tried adults but it didn’t work out. A couple of nights ago Justin suggested H.o.p. and Heston’s daughter try it out. And thus did H.o.p. enter the world of pro recording and acting, playing as if he was teasing Heston’s little girl.
Well, kind of.
H.o.p. knows how to use a mic but for this Marty set up the several mics in the room where they could just move around naturally instead of worrying about mics.
Marty told H.o.p. to bother her but H.o.p. refused to bother her. So Marty told H.o.p. to distract her but H.o.p. said he didn’t want to annoy her.
So H.o.p. instead came up with the idea of asking her to play, to eat pot stickers (they had dinner there), to play jump rope, “C’mon!” and she kept acting like she was annoyed, telling him to leave her alone.
“Leave me alone for the rest of your life, Heston!”
H.o.p. felt guilty about it though, being asked to tease her. They were having a great time dancing and and he wanted to make sure he hadn’t hurt her feelings. I didn’t know anything about this and H.o.p. came home telling me how he’d met a really nice girl and they’d danced and danced.
H.o.p. had a good time but once home was proud, embarrassed (he hid under the pillows while I listened) and complaining.
He says, “I didn’t want to act out the bad guy. I wanted to act out the guardian!”
“The guardian?” I say.
“I wanted to act out the knight in shining armor!”
Update: So at first, Marty listening to the song again, H.o.p. said, “Oh, great, I’m outta here!” and went into the bedroom. I called him back in and said to him, hey, Justin (an actor/composer who’s known H.o.p. since he was little) recommended you do this. You know what that means? “What?” says H.o.p. “That he had faith in you,” I tell him. And H.o.p. goes and rewinds the song to listen to himself several times and starts singing to it.