AN ACTOR’S LIFE FOR ME

Hello! We are back from the Dominican Republic, after a week with the winners of the Darren and Mo On the Beach contest. It was fun! The resort was great! The people were lovely! Sure, we had to work, but the one-hour time change worked in our favour. We got to start at 6 instead of 5, the commute took all of five minutes, AND we had a live studio audience. I don‘t need to tell you there are harder ways to make a living.

Speaking of which, I never planned to be a radio announcer. I knew I was going to do SOMEthing performative. Actually, I was quite determined to be an actor. Blame my parents: they put me in drama school at an early age to combat my almost pathological shyness. An only child for my first 6 years, I would hide in the bathroom whenever anyone came over. But give me a poem to recite, a song to sing, or a character to inhabit, and I turned into a scenery-eating monster. At first, I played a variety of pixies, elves and fairies, until the day of my big breakthrough, when I was cast as the lead in a stage production of Heidi. Around the same time, I was cast in a CBC television drama, where I played the troubled child of divorcing parents (TYPE CASTING!!!!!). Television and commercial work followed, including a stint on a deeply uncool CBC kids’ show called Tween Set. The apex of my movie career came when I was cast in a National Film Board piece called “Beware My Beauty Fair”. Yes, I was TOO the Beauty, for your information, and I was very wary. It was about a bunch of drama school kids who run amok in an old theatre trying to find a creepy old caretaker who stole a doll. I remember it well because I had to kiss the boy who played the Beast, and it was icky:

My life as a movie star came to a crashing halt shortly after that, when I went to boarding school. The headmistress, a harridan who detested me on sight, prevented me from doing anything theatrical because she thought I was overly dramatic to begin with. And that, as they say, was that. I gave up any thought of acting, although I did tiptoe around it. I studied journalism, then film studies, then media arts and comedy. Radio began as a summer job, and then flourished into a career. Imagine my delight while watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards the other night, when they explained that SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union in the States, includes radio personalities. Hey guess what, Mother Johnson? I turned out to be an actor after all. Hi Diddle Dee Dee.

Read more Mo to Go HERE!

Have a comment? A suggestion? Just want to chat? You can email Mo here.

Listen to Darren & Mo weekday mornings from 5 to 9 on CHFI.