What's my name?

I do accents...all the time. I love them. I'm always trying to see if people can guess where I'm from by the way I speak. My natural voice has no accent to it...it should have a southern twang, but it does not. No real explanation, except that when I was young I told my mom I wanted to be a D.J. She said I couldn't do it with my southern accent, that D.J.'s went to class to learn how to speak without an accent. I didn't know what she meant, and then I heard it. I also went to Pennsylvania and had everyone go "aww...you're from _______ aren't you?"

I also noticed that the general concensus is that southern accent=dumb. It's not true, but it sticks in the American cultural noggin.

But when I lost my accent, I learned how to do others. I've gotten to the point to where I will pick up people's accents when I'm drinking. After 5 days in Boston, I got to where I was doing it without realizing it. We went to a bar and I took a minute longer to go in and then was jabbing with the bartender about all the tourists in our bar. He agreed and then asked:
"What neighborhood you from?"
"Dallas."
"Where's that"
"In Texas"

He got pissed and then laughed his head off.

There's a trick to accents. You have to find a phrase that takes you there. Make it as stupidly generic as possible, but find something that brings back the accent naturally...just makes you have to say it that way.

For instance, the famous "pahk de cah in de gahrahg" (park the car in the garage) for Boston will get it going in a wicked fashion. California, a simple "hey dude, the surf is beautiful" makes it just flow. It's little details that are different. I once noticed that when English people tried to speak with an American southern accent, they sounded Australian.

That's right, Aussie's are just hick Brits.

So I found a way to subtly change the sound of my voice and go from England to Australia to Texas to the deep south to Jersey, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and California. I also do some funny French, Spanish, and Indian voices.

That's where the name comes from. When I do my Indian (Western Asia version) voice, I always think of Apoo in the Simpsons. I couldn't just do Apoo, so I had my own convienence store guy work at 7-Eleven. Abdula Ikibarra just popped out of me one day as the person's name. When someone asked if it was a real name, I said "loosely translated, it's the numbers 'seven' and 'eleven'."

We were drunk and it was funny as hell, so I kept it.

The worst case scenario was when I worked for a company who had a VP who was a Brit. He came to a dinner/reception and we were all downing drinks. At some point, he's talking to me and my british accent just popped right out.

I don't know if he caught it or not, he never indicated...but in my head I went "holy shit!!"

Next up...something else.