Football Season is Here - Let's Bring Our Happy Voices

One thing most people don't know about me is that I have a happy voice. I didn't know either until just recently. Gee, the things you find out when you're long past your prime for a career in radio.

I was shopping at a local department store and stopped to ask an associate where I might find tea lights. After a short conversation I thanked her and headed toward the candle aisle. Along the way I passed an older woman who looked straight at me and said, "You have a happy voice. It makes me feel good to hear it."

Although I would have preferred, "You have such a small behind I can hardly see it," it was a compliment and I'm taking any I can get these days,

The thing about your voice is you never hear it like other people do. Which is probably a blessing, because some people have the most grating, irritating, voices that if they were able to hear themselves as others do, they might opt to have their vocal cords surgically removed. Like the woman I had the misfortune of sitting in front of recently at the Notre Dame/Michigan State football game for instance. Mysteriously, people who emit shall we say, "unhappy" voices seem to be drawn to football stadiums and concerts. And every single one of them has sat directly behind me at one time or another.

It was a beautiful and serene fall day, about a minute after kickoff, when a group of four - two men and two women - straggled into the stadium and sat down behind my husband and me. Suddenly the peacefull quell of the stadium was shattered with a gruff, honking, high-decibel slurring noise coming from behind -- "God it's hot in here!" it bleated directly into my right ear.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that many unhappy voices tend to be inebriated, which, oddly, doesn't make the voice sound any happier.

"I have to call my $@#!*& brother and give him *%*@#$ about the game," the female croak-honked to her friend with a voice that had an uncanny resemblance to Fran Drescher crossed with Popeye The Sailor Man. "Hey!*$%#, we're winning you %#$*&!!!!"she screeched into the phone and into my brain.

I have found that an inordinate number of unhappy voices possess limited vocabularies and cell phones. How they get other people to actually answer is one of life's biggest mysteries.

"You're kickin' my dog!" bellowed one unhappily harsh male voice into my left ear canal roughly every three seconds during the full quarters of a football game once, until he spilled his drink on someone then, fortunately, left early.

Another unhappy yapper at a recent Neil Diamond concert had apparently been saving up earthshattering issues to discuss with her SO until she was seated in her $75.00 seat approximately one foot in front of me and my 75.00 seat. Even the million dollar acoustics didn't have a prayer against her shrill cackling throughout the entirety of my beloved Diamond classic, "And the Grass Won't Pay Won't Pay No Mind," not to mention the seven or eight other preceding selections.

Finally, with a voice that I did not yet know was a happy one, I leaned over and rather unhappily hissed, "If you don't mind, I'd like to hear the music."

Somehow it always seems to come as a complete shock to a babbling idiot that you prefer to actually hear the live music you came to hear, or the sports announcer, or even a baby with colic or the sound of the dentist's drill during root canal therapy over the sound of his or her spluttering pie hole.

Since the fateful day I was forced to confront the rare beauty of my own lilting, soothing, infectiously happy voice, I have also grown more aware of those less fortunate than myself who stumble through life oblivious to the sound of their own melodically-challenged muzzle chops. To them I say -- you know that one sock that is always getting lost in the wash? I can think of a good use for the other one.