I’ve always been fascinated by different accents and dialects. As a kid, I didn’t go out much, so I would spend my time learning how to mimic people. Once I learned how to tape things off the TV, I would oftentimes tape things so that I could mimic them back—standup sets on HBO that I should not have been watching at that age because they were way too R-rated for my eight-year-old brain. I would memorize them and then go and perform them for show-and-tell, and my teachers would call my parents and say that I was doing very inappropriate standup sets. I was a super shy, shy kid, so that was kind of my way of expressing myself—to mimic what I saw on TV. I was a bit of a weird kid, but luckily my parents encouraged it.

[On the question "Is bird imitation valid in jazz?"] I don’t know if it's valid in jazz, [...] but I enjoy it. It somehow comes in as part of the development of what I'm doing. Sometimes I can't do it.
At home [in California] I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds.

I greatly admire first-class mimics’ super-sensitive powers of observation, the extraordinary accuracy with which they observe vocal production, inflexions, rhythms of speech, facial expressions and body language, all those tiny, unique traits which they can then reproduce so precisely. But I also can’t help wondering whether they are, unconsciously, observing others closely in the hope they can find something there that they can “borrow” and incorporate into their own personality structure, to strengthen their sense of self. Perhaps it’s an extreme form of the desire most people display early in their lives to find role models. Of course, once impersonators have developed this ability, they are rewarded by the delight they produce in an audience, whether they are at a party with friends, or earning a living on television, so they have no reason to stop, even though its original purpose has never really been accomplished.

I was a bird imitating the birds. And so it was their kind of imaginary world that I was raised in, and it was part delicious and part confusing.

One great part of the joculator's profession was the teaching of bears, apes, horses, dogs, and other animals, to imitate the actions of men, to tumble, to dance, and to perform a variety of tricks, contrary to their nature; and sometimes he learned himself to counterfeit the gestures and articulations of the brutes.

I was about 14 when I realised I didn't have the same personality type as the people I grew up with. I wanted to be a really amazing artist – I wasn't like, humble, you know? I don't really have a logical comprehension of other people, I don't understand how other people are. I knew I was never going to be normal: white picket fence, get married, have three babies. I just wanted to nurture animals and have a miniature pig and miniature horse and a little cow and a couple of puppy dogs. That was way more interesting.

I've been imitated so well I've heard people copy my mistakes.

When I was a small child I longed one day to become so famous that I did not have to hide how odd I was—how unlike other people. Few people really held my attention. It was birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and eternally whetted my curiosity.

But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.

One of my passions is to meet people and then imitate them. I love doing that.

Riding the crest, I diversified, exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will... By mastering this skill I set myself on a par with those court jesters of old who could wow the monarch and all his retinue with a simultaneous leap, whistle and fart. Unable to extend my neo-Homeric story-telling activities from the playground to the classroom, I could nevertheless continue to hog the limelight by interpolating a gaseous running commentary while the teacher addressed himself to the blackboard.

I feel so fortunate to have gotten into the whole voiceover world; it’s been my bread and butter. They’re the nicest people on the planet—there are no huge, raging egos in that world, for whatever reason. And I was able to work all through my pregnancies, practically up to the time my water broke. It’s just been a joy. I had these voices in my head from growing up with immigrant parents and listening to them talk. Then just goofing around and playing around with different things, finding out what you could do with your voice. When people ask me for advice I always say, just have a lot of different tools in your bag and come up with a lot of different characters and really know them inside and out.

I like being able to play make believe as my job. I think I played make-believe growing up a little too long—probably to an inappropriate age. I played make-believe until I was, like, 13 and probably should have been doing something else. But other than that, it’s fun to be able to have to learn about different people. My favorite thing is you have to learn how to work with people that you probably would never try [to]. Some people just aren’t supposed to be in a room together, and you have to be in a room with a group of people who might not all get along and you have to figure out how to come together for one thing. That collaboration is special, and people don’t get to exercise that. I think that’s why people become stubborn, and I think that’s why people become uninspired to change. In this job you have to.

I’m just trying to go out there every single day and do my best to bring people animals and adventure. Whenever we can promote conservation and educate people about something that they didn’t know much about before, it means we’re doing our job the right way. And I’m just trying to mold my life moving forward to be as much of a microphone for the voice of animals as I possibly can be.