Daniel Greene

Tag: stories

Stories I tell about experiences I’ve had

  • The “what would you do if you found cash” scenario just happened to me

    I just saw two $20 bills on the floor in the airport in a long walkway between two terminals. No one behind me or ahead of me except a pilot who saw them too. I wasn’t going to just leave them there! I could actually use the money right now, so just in case it was meant to be manna from heaven I pocketed the bills. To be fair, though, I went to the nearest paging assistance location to report the money to lost-and-found. Then the pilot walked up with a guy and said, “This is the guy who dropped the money.” So I said, “Okay! Here you go.” Glad it worked well for all concerned. I feel sort of icky about picking up the bills, but if I had left them there, someone less honest than I might have taken them and not reported it. I guess I did the right thing.

    What would you do?

    P.S. In a weird turn of reciprocity, I left my laptop on the plane, which I’ve never done before, and was able to claim it the same day. No damage, no identify theft, all good. Thank goodness for honesty!

  • The Laughing Singer



    The Laughing Singer
    Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

    I sang a cappella in the chapel (redundant, I know)! 😀 I’m laughing because I had just posed like an opera singer with my mouth open and my hands out and then cracked up because I embarrassed myself. There’s an interesting story behind this. A woman in our tour group asked me if I wanted her to take my photo with the chapel behind me because I had just sung in it. How did that come to be? Well, it all began when I saw our tourguide in the restaurant where we all stopped for lunch. He was sitting by himself at a table and I walked up and said, “Ah… tutto sole?” (meaning, “Aw… all alone?” in Italian). He asked me how I knew Italian, and I told him from musical terminology and opera. He asked if I were a singer, and I said yes. Then he told me we were going to be going into a chapel that was designed to be acoustically perfect, and he asked if I would be willing to sing a line or two so everyone could hear. I said sure. I was thinking I would sing the first few lines of “Que Gelida Manina” until we got to the church and I realized that a song from La Boheme would not be appropriate. I racked my brain for something spiritual to sing, and I recalled a short solo I had sung in my senior year at the School of Creative & Performing Arts: the “Benedictus” phrase from Hans Schubert’s “Mass in G.” For those of you who don’t know it, the phrase is “Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini” which is Latin for “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” I sang it and everyone was pleased. Several people came up to me to thank me personally. I was just glad that the pleasure I had in singing was not selfish, but was considered a gift to others, which is ideal. So, this was a perfectly spontaneous photo to commemorate a wonderfully fortuitous occasion.

    (Taken by a fellow tourist in the courtyard by the side of the Cathedral of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, with the chapel in the background.)

  • Meeting Toni Tennille

    I met Toni Tenille when I was working at J.W. Robinson in Beverly Hills. She was very gracious. I told her about how “Love Will Keep Us Together” was the first album I ever spent my allowance on (ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” was the first single). I told her about how, when I was 9, I was riding in the car with my paternal grandparents, sitting on the front bench seat between Granny and Grandpa, with my hand on grandpa’s leg. I was singing, “The Way That I Want to Touch You” without even thinking about it when my grandmother suddenly asked, “Danny! What is that song you’re singing? That’s an awfully strange lyric for a boy to be singing!” And imagine how my grandfather felt with my hand on his leg while I sang it! Well, Toni laughed and said, “Ah, kids!” (politely skipping over the embarrasing issues that could be read into that story) and told me that she was really proud of that song because she wrote it.

    I never realized it until just now, writing this, but I have had the supreme delight of meeting the artists who made the first music I ever bought! How many people can say that? Thank you, ABBA and Toni Tenille! 😀

  • My Experience in the Performing Arts

    The performing artist side of me

    Background

    I was born into a family that appreciated the arts, and I got an early start at singing. My first role was Jerome in South Pacific at Camp Saskatchewan in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York when I was eight years old. When my family moved from New York to San Diego when I was ten, I was fortunate that the San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts opened its doors only months later. I attended SCPA from sixth grade through high school graduation. From there, I went to UCLA to study Theatre Arts. I learned a lot about theater but wasn’t ready for college, I guess, so I worked in LA for a while before moving back to San Diego. Then I realized I wanted to learn ASL, so I went to Mesa College, lived with a deaf man, and in a couple of years I became an interpreter.

    ASL interpreting has been my day job since 1990, but I have continued to involve myself in the performing arts. I have performed in straight plays, musicals, operettas, and even opera. I have trained in voice acting (a.k.a. voiceover) and on-camera acting and have some voiceover and student film credits to my name, including one voiceover/camera commercial. I have studied singing under several singing teachers including Dianna Ruggiero, Stephen Crawford, and Dan Hooper. My most recent performing arts experience was singing in the opera chorus of Aïda with the Phoenix Opera in February 2009.

    When not performing on stage, I use my YouTube channels azsingersigner and danieljamesgreene as an outlet for singing and a do a lot of photography that I share on Flickr.

    Voiceover

    In 2003, I began an earnest study of voice acting with The Commercial Clinic in San Diego, CA. I have a Commercial, Corporate, and Audiobook voiceover demo. If you would like to hear it, please contact me.

    I first explored voiceover work when I played the title character in The Invisible Man radio drama at the San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts when I was 11.

    Some of the voiceover jobs I have done include:

    • On-camera/voiceover 60-second promo spot for a Makeover Madness show on Community View
    • Gambler in a radio ad for Golden Acorn Casino
    • Ring Announcer in a soundtrack for a multi-media performance art piece called Chela
    • Reader of short stories, poems, and pronunciation drills for the companion CD to a textbook called Monthly Integrated Method ESL for a Mexican company called Advanced Methods Company
    • A radio ad to promote a play I was in with The Alternative Theatre Company on Energy Arizona FM

    One of my voiceover mentors, Penny Abshire, wrote a lovely testimonial of my work. Thanks, Penny!

  • Singing with ABBA

    I sang in a children’s chorus with ABBA when they performed a concert at the San Diego Sports Arena in 1978. It was the Year of the Child, and they were getting children’s choruses to come up and sing “I Believe in Angels” with them in every concert they performed on their world tour. I met Björn, Benny, Frida, and Agnetha and had them sign the yellow T-shirt I wore. I got a used guitar string signed (on the square paper package) by one of the guitarists. Frida and Agnetha sang operatically during the warm-up / sound-check and I was amazed. Being at their concert was thrilling, although way too loud. Singing on stage with them was one of the greatest joys of my life. My mother said I was beaming the whole time. Years later, when I outgrew the t-shirt, I considered making a pillow of it but ended up throwing it out. Same with the guitar string. Imagine my surprise when I saw the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Guy Pierce’s character shows off a vial he wears around his neck containing the little “gift” Agnetha left him in the toilet! I thought, “Wow! This guy carries her poop around with him and I threw out the t-shirt she (and Frida and Benny and Björn) autographed?” Well, I do feel some regret for throwing out their autographed souvenirs, but who needs artifacts when no one can take away from you the thrill of actually meeting them and sharing the stage with them? I would much rather meet an artist, talk with them, laugh with them, perform with them, or shake their hand, than have an autograph or—gasp!—physical specimen of theirs to remember them by.