Why you Hate the Sound of your Own Voice

Greetings Victoria,

First, I want to tell you that I loved your apartment tour and, despite the multiple murders you seemed to have committed since you've been there, I'm glad you're having a good time back in Spain.

Now that Brighton Beach Memoirs has opened I'm back in the office. It's... not very eventful. Mostly I read some and then I write some and then I edit some and then I read some more. But every once in a while something I'm reading is actually pretty interesting. I decided to share one of those things with you today.

Our next show this season is Souvenir by Stephen Temperley. Basically it's about Florence Foster Jenkins who has gone down in history as the worst singer to ever be super famous and perform at Carnegie Hall.

This Chick.

She was so bad that it became a social event to go watch her perform and laugh hysterically into a handkerchief so she wouldn't find out how terrible she was. So one of the things I was researching was why our voices sound different inside of our heads than they do to those around us. 

For example, I might think my voice sounds like this:

When everyone else thinks it sounds like this:

And that can be a rude awakening when you hear a recording of your voice. As it turns out from my ample research, the difference is caused by the added vibration of your skull, which increases the depth and fullness because it is large and vibrates slowly. 

That's right, your skull has a sexy Morgan Freeman voice when your actual vocal chords talk like Truman Capote*. 

The moral of the story is: let your head do the talking, it'll work out better in the end. 

On another note, last wednesday, both of the girls who were supposed to play Laurie in Brighton Beach couldn't be there (one was sick and the other lived two hours away and couldn't get there in time to cover the show) so I got a terror-inducing call from the stage manager telling me that I had to go on twenty minutes before curtain. 

They managed to scare up a costume from storage and disguise a copy of the script and throw me out on stage. Supposedly the follow-spot op managed to get a picture, but I don't have it. I imagine it looked something like this, though. 

My eyes will haunt your dreams.

The horror-movie sequel to Brighton Beach is where the Jerome family discovers that Laurie isn't 12, she's actually a 23-year-old woman who intends to kill them in their sleep. It's call Biloxi Blues. Look it up. But don't watch it alone at night. 

And that's about all I got. 

Oh, except that I'm starting a new thing on this blog that everyone should be very excited about (but especially Karina and Hallie.) It should be arriving in the mail soonish, so keep an eye out and be sure to let us know when it gets there. Seriously it's going to be really cool. 

Onwards and upwards!

Emily

*Disclaimer: I have nothing against Truman Capote. In Cold Blood changed my life in high school. Without that book I would have totally discounted professional murderer from my career possibilities, and look where I am today.