My Voice as a Natural Resource

I look nothing like my voice and, at an early age, thought it would sail me through a lucrative career.

Despite my heralded college degree and broadcast days behind microphones, my career went a different way, like tugging the left control line of a steerable parachue for a soft landing in what appeared to be a more flowery pasture amid an expanded horizon, finding weeds in bloom and hoeing my small landing area into into a small garden with much more work than I’d supposed to undertake.

Yes, I’ve sung, and on recordings of a world champion barbershop chorus, one of only 5 basses able to project the pedal-D at the end of “Silent Night,” and other pane-rattlers from other works.

Hosting a classical music show, captured live and post-produced to add my ‘basso-pretendo’ (profundo) commentary in the studio, as if I’d been present with the sound engineers at the performance, was ego-stroking and poorly paying, as was a stint for NBC Radio News that barely kept the wolves away.

I guess I’ve used my pipes in different ways to my advantage, an asset in other modalities over the years.


Pipes: You either got ’em or you don’t but, sadly, I only use 'em to give good phone these days until I figure out how to apply this natural resource I seem to be wasting.