Hey Reader,

Here is the technical breakdown of how I walk.

I shift my weight to my right foot. I lift my left, bending at the knee. I extend it forward. I lean into the space where my foot is going, and my left knee bends again to catch me. I transfer my weight to the left, and pick up my right.

All of that happens in about a second.

I'm told I learned it by leaning forward until I fell, and my feet ran to catch up. There were times I went down face first. I still do occasionally. But I walk now without thinking about any of it.

If I'd learned by working through each step consciously, I'd never have gotten there. The body already knows. The mind loves to insist on being involved.

Audio Description performance has the same problem. There's a technical approach to it. Timing, breath, pitch, where you put the weight in a sentence. Those get results, and they skip the actual experience. The technique comes in and the story goes out.

Kevin Thompson and I talked about this for years. He was blind from birth. When we went through what worked and what didn't in my performance, he never once asked me to be faster or slower or more precise. He was listening for something else. Whether the read carried the story to him, or handed him information.

Those are different experiences, and he felt the difference every time, from a track with no picture attached to it for him at all.

What he was hearing was context. What the music was doing. What had already passed between two people before the shot started. Whether the person reading had bothered to know any of that before opening their mouth.

I learned that slowly. Twenty years, mostly alone, mostly by getting it wrong in front of a director who had four hours left on the clock and needed the next cue. That's an expensive way to learn.

You can't get it from notes on a page either. I've written a book about this work and the book can't do it. The thing that moves someone is performing, hearing what actually happened, and going again the same night while it's still in your body. Then doing that eight weeks running, until the counting drops away and the story is what's left.

That's the whole reason I built an eight-week BoothCamp instead of a workshop. A workshop is a good afternoon. Eight weeks is enough time for something to change in how you work.

Kevin isn't here to see any of this. He's still the standard I check against.

Boothcamp runs again this fall. Eight weeks, eight people, starting the week of September 14. I'll send the details Friday, but for now:

​Boothcamp, fall 2026 ​

Roy

P.S. If someone came to mind while you were reading this, send it to them.