Dos voces

The reason for certain voices being chosen to do certain commercials is something one can suss out after a few listenings. Gene Hackman sounds like a lovable old uncle at Thanksgiving dinner who's taken you aside, put his arm around your shoulder, and is giving you some sincere career advice. That tone does nicely for an airline, a do-it-yourself chain, and an investment firm. Richard Thomas sounds so farm-family genuine, there's almost a catch in his throat--all the better to humanize the fatuous jerks waiting to plunk down top dollar for a stand-up radiator ornament. And that "Greek Wedding" fellow has a nephew-ish "Gee whiz!" vibe that makes the whole family stand up and say, "Yeah, let's go out to dinner tonight; it won't cost all that much!" He's a transitional figure, I think, to the current raft of more youthful (or at least youthful-sounding) voiceovers whose voices parallel their (I imagine) fashionable Tin-Tin/parakeet haircuts. But with them, my interest fades to black--entirely too much adenoidal "dude" intonation. And I don't much want to go to Dave & Busters and drink dishwater light beer, anyway.

But I've digressed. The above is all by way of prologue to a tout of my current two favorite voices: Keith Morrison's and Marco Bocanumenth's. Morrison is one of the crew of narrators who's introduced by a woman übernarrator (who walks slowly through an abandoned-warehouse set that shouts "crime!") to tell a true-crime story on MSNBC or Investigation Discovery. (Yes, I watch those things--avidly.) A skinny guy with a lot of white hair that makes him look like a '50s rockabilly singer who aged forty years overnight, his slightly scratchy, slightly rumbly, light baritone inflects just about every word with length, tone, and prefacing pause. Nobody else can say, "But how much of the truth was he really prepared to tell?" and make it sound like a passage from the Bible.

Marco Bocanumenth is the co-host of the Sunday-afternoon, Spanish-language, music-and-news program, "Panorama," on WJFF, a public radio station in the Catskills. (Because WJFF streams online at www.wjffradio.org, Bocanumenth's dulcet tones are as available to all of us as Morrison's are.) He's in his late 70s, lives a very modest life (a recent article in a local paper about senior housing had him complaining about spending $725 a month for a two-bedroom "dive" in Monticello), and makes spoken Spanish sound like music. I've often arranged my Sunday schedule to be either on the road or in the painting studio so I can catch his whole show. (The traditional Latin music is real good, too.) Bocanumenth's vocal cords are so wonderful that they've persuaded me to order the "total" version of Rosetta Stone's Spanish and vow to go to my grave passably speaking that idioma hermosa.