Terror. Absolute terror. That’s the only way to describe it.
I was sitting at my desk, waiting in pained anticipation for the moment when my voice would come across the radio, and I was dreading it.
Nobody likes to hear the sound of their voice. You know, their “true” voice. Not the one we hear everyday in our own heads — the one that sounds like “us” to us. I’m talking about our REAL voice — the one everyone else hears. The one that makes us recoil and cringe in pain if it’s ever played to us on a recording. It always sounds so strange, so alien, so unusual and, well, like we should be wearing pocket protectors and saying things like, “the square roots of integers are always irrational, unless of course they’re perfect squares.”
Not to mention I’m nasally. Oh sure, you say, we all are, but I sound like I’ve got a bushel of cotton stuffed up the old nasal passageways. And it’s possible I do.
“What were they thinking putting me on the radio!” I cursed while chewing off my fingernails. “I sound like Donald Duck.”
But they did. WJCT, Jacksonville’s NPR station, actually agreed to run one of these columns once a month on their morning show, First Coast Connect. An amazing opportunity, for sure, and one that sounded all fine and dandy … until it sank in that me reading my columns on the radio in fact actually meant ME reading MY columns ON THE RADIOOOOO!!!!! Did I think they would give me a stand-in or a stunt double or something? How did I forget my cardinal rule of life? Never propose anything to anyone at anytime that might make you at any point wet your pants.
Luckily it would be recorded, and not live, but that was small consolation on the nerves, which were already vibrating like piano wires. Just the thought of going in front of that microphone — a big, scary microphone. One that would probably snicker and tell me I had curly nose hair. (The microphone would know! You have to get that close.)
Because I’m a bit melodramatic, I pictured this was how astronauts felt just as the rocket engines lit up and the G-forces pancaked them deep into their seats. “Remind me who thought this was a good idea?!?” they yell while testing adult-size diapers.
I tried to buoy my spirits and build my confidence. “Hey, this is no problem,” I told myself. “You’re just reading stuff you wrote into a little microphone. Besides, you make a complete ass of yourself talking to people every day. What’s a few thousand more?”
For my initial audition they seated me behind a mic the size of a city bus in an imposing room that I swear had a fire-breathing dragon hidden in the closet. I pulled up super close to the microphone — we’re talking an intimacy I haven’t experienced with my wife … or even the dentist — and I started reading a couple pieces I wrote. Except, all I could see was the mammoth, black microphone, which forced me to hold my pages off in some no-man’s land of failing peripheral vision. The words blurred and my double vision tripled.
I didn’t have the good sense to adjust myself or call time out, so I plowed on reading words that seemed to tango across the page as I started feeling seasick.
Yet, somehow I managed to pass muster and they let me do it. Maybe they mistook my bloodshot and teary eyes from all that strained reading for crying and felt sorry for me.
Either way, I was now glued to the radio — anxious, excited and ready to leap out the nearest window at the first sound of my voice. “Just don’t screw up,” I told myself, forgetting it was pre-recorded and that I was actually sitting right here with myself.
And you know, it wasn’t half bad. I got all the words out, which was a plus, and it made better than average sense, which is not something I always do. The radio never shot out sparks or smoke, and I even chuckled once or twice. “Good job,” I told myself. “Not bad at all for a rank amateur with horrible peripheral vision and a nasally voice that sounds like cotton’s shoved up to your eyeballs.”