I was trained in classical violin, but I was around a lot of fiddlers at that time (the difference is a matter of style). All these Jewish klezmer tunes I’d never heard started coming out. Her grandfather also played the violin, and she was given his instrument as a young adult. This is a family where, if you get straight As, nobody notices!” Milton’s son, my uncle Mickey, went to Harvard at age 16 and graduated as Valedictorian at age 18. In 1937, my grandfather Milton was part of what was called ‘The Harvard Jew Crew,’ seven Jews that also included Joe Viertel, the father of Tom and Jack. My mother’s generation is all Harvard lawyers. “Our extended family went to Israel several times – in a pink Mercedes tour bus. Schneider’s other brother became a doctor (whew! something for a Jewish mother to cherish!). “He’d pick me up at Chippewa daycare and teach me songs he learned at the Jewish Center camp.” So she spent her early years on a Chippewa (or Ojibwe) reservation in Bimidji, Minnesota, with her parents and her “sociopathic adopted Vietnamese brother, Yo Binh Jacob Schneider. “My Dad taught at the Bug-O-Nay-Gee-Shig Native American high school. “Mom was an Indian Law Legal Aid attorney,” she continues. The location is ironic, since Schneider has voiced eight characters on the popular adult animated Comedy Central sitcom, “South Park.” She’s also played Liza on “Beakman’s World,” and has been seen or heard on Bravo’s “Arts & Minds,” “King of the Hill,” “Girlfriends” and in the films “What Women Want” and “Finding Nemo.” Her voice is used in a number of video games as well. “My Mom is your typical Jewish leftie lawyer,” says beautiful, whip-smart, humorous Eliza, as we sip specialty drinks in her favorite spot, Eclipse Chocolate in South Park.
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San Diegans will see how all those skills come together in “Freedom of Speech,” which is based in fact (on a series of wild American dialect-collecting road trips) and stems from hundreds of hours of verbatim transcripts of interviews with diverse people around the country. And I find that the various artistic pursuits tend to feed each other.” “But to me, music, voice, voices of the people, playwriting, dialect, language, violin – it all springs from the same well of fascination with sound. In this performance Eliza Jane Schneider embodies voices, accents and mannerisms of people of varying cultures, genders and ethnicities different from her own.“Sometimes, it feels like it was a mistake not to choose a single specialty,” says the “woman of a thousand voices,” who’s bringing her acclaimed solo show, “Freedom of Speech,” to Moxie Theatre (through 8/11). Please note: Freedom of Speech contains strong language and mature content that may not be appropriate for all audiences. The piece sets up a dialogue between the disconnected: urban and rural rich and poor New York and the South, all while taking the audience on Schneider’s wild ride from Arizona to Alabama to Alaska, stopping off in beauty parlors, swimming holes, bars, street corners, and churches, asking everyone she met, simply, “What’s going on?” Dubbed by the press as “Wildly funny and genuinely poignant” Freedom of Speech blends the immediacy of a documentary with the intimacy of Schneider’s hilarious personal narrative to capture a muffled underlying voice of America that we won’t hear anywhere else.
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Almost 30 years and thousands of interviews later, she invites us on her journey in Freedom of Speech. After having her wrist broken by a cop while protesting the first Gulf war, Schneider quit her “dream” job on television and set off across the country in search of … something she could not define. Eliza Jane Schnieder is a voice actor and dialect coach whose work has been featured on South Park, King of the Hill and numerous other animated shows and movies. She has taught and recorded dialects from all 50 states and around the English-speaking world.