“Little” Jimmy Dickens
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(Of course.)
When you hear a voice on the radio or the telephone, it’s natural to try and imagine what the person who has that voice would look like. When you eventually meet the person, it’s usually quite a shock to see that they look very different from what you expected. (Don’t believe me? Think about the first time you heard “Never Gonna Give You Up” and compare that to seeing Rick Astley in the video.)
When my wife and I were dating, she said I had a “Radio voice.” Fortunately she’s never accused me of having a “Radio face.”
Years later, when I had surgery on my cervical spine, they operated from the front, kind of pushing my voice box and everything else out of the way to get to the spine itself. This mushing of my larynx resulted in my voice becoming a bit raspy, but that has its own benefits.
I can do a better Don Corleone. “Michael, now that I’m older, I like my wine better. Well maybe not better, but I drink more of it.”
I also can do a better Burgess Meredith; not in his Batman days as the Penguin, but when he was the boxing coach working with Rocky Balboa. “You know what your problem is, Rock? You ain’t got no management!”
Today, a co-worker told me that my voice reminds him of “Little Jimmy Dickens.” Not being a country and western music fan (Sorry, Barb – I meant “country music”) I didn’t know how to respond, until he said, “Your voice sounds like it has a little fun in it.”
I can live with that.
sfnowak 