New York 32

Listen to New York 32, a 59-year-old woman from Massapequa Park, Long Island, New York, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

Both as a courtesy and to comply with copyright law, please remember to credit IDEA for direct or indirect use of samples. IDEA is a free resource; please consider supporting us.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 59

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/04/1956

PLACE OF BIRTH: Massapequa Park (Long Island), New York

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Caucasian

OCCUPATION: theatrical wardrobe technician

EDUCATION: bachelor of arts

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject has never lived outside Long Island.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Her father was an English teacher who insisted on articulation, so pronunciation sometimes leans more toward General American, especially when the subject is reading aloud.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Barrie Kreinik

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 29/04/2015

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

Uh, I grew up in Massapequa Park, on Long Island, New York, all my life. My parents bought one of the first houses in that particular area when they got married; there was nobody else around them before it got built up. Uh, my father was an English teacher; my, mother’s grandp — my mother’s parents were German, and they spoke to us in German, and my father’s mother spoke seven different languages, so she had a little — thrown in a little bit of everything. Um, I have one sister. I have — my family’s all teachers and things like that, librarians and, uh, into the English language, so my father used to yell at us if we didn’t speak properly. When I first went back to college, I, I went to school after I got outta high school, for, uh, a year. I went to art school, in the city. Uh, but I decided everybody was better than me and it wasn’t my thing. So I worked for a while, and then I got married and had kids, and then I got divorced, and I went back to school, and they put me in work study; and work study says, “What can you do?” And I said I don’t know; I can’t do anything but sew, because my grandmother had taught me how to sew, because when she came over here she was a seamstress. Um, and they said, “Great, we’ll stick you in the costume shop!” And I went, OK. [laughs] I had no idea about any of that stuff; I didn’t work in theatre for the high school; I didn’t do anything like that at all; when I was in high school, theatre wasn’t my thing, and I got into it, and then I took a class in acting cause I thought, pssh, acting, I can be an actor… [laughs]. Yeah. Except that I’m a deer in the headlights and I get stage fright. So, I work behind the scenes now. Um, and through college I did — we hadda work on crews; if you took theatre classes, you hadda work as part of the crew, so I did a little props, I did a little costuming, and, uh, then when I went on to the four-year school, one of the girls that was in the theatre department — although I’m not a theatre major, by the way; my degree is in art and photography — uh, but one of the girls that was in the theatre department became the interpreter for the designer on the movie Age of Innocence, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day-Lewis a thousand-billion years ago. And, um, she called me up one day and said, “How would you like to work on a movie? And, um, y’know, do sewing and stuff.” And I was working at Staples, [clears throat] still divorced with two small children, making 5.75 an hour, and they were gonna offer me 15 dollars an hour to work on a movie. And I was like, [gasp] holy crap, I can make a whole year’s money in like this five months they were gonna pay me for doing this job. So I went to the movie, and that was the first one, and then after that I … the people that I worked with on that one called me for the second movie I did the year later. And that was, the beginning of … the journey. Um, I joined the union. I kind of went from movie to theatre because movies was a lot of work and I had kids at home and I couldn’t — I didn’t have anybody to watch them while I was away for so long. So I went to theatre, which was a little easier scheduling-wise. And, um, yeah, so I’ve been doing that for — this is 2015 — I’ve been in it for, 21 years, April 7th.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Barrie Kreinik

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 30/04/2015

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.

• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.

• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.

• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.