At various times throughout the day I speak in falsetto. I’ve been doing it for well over a decade. How it began is hard to say. My mind returns to a moment 15 years ago, riding up an old 2-person chairlift on Mammoth’s less populated north side, Chair 14. I was with Logan, my most inspired ski pal at the time, a large ginger-headed, freckled lad with a linebacker's body. His shoulders were so wide I could barely fit on the chairlift with him. I had to lean forward when he leaned back and vice-versa. It was a perfect, sparkly powder morning with the sun just cracking through the clouds. Underneath the chairlift, the steepest line down the mountain, there was a snowboarder hauling ass through untracked pow, slashing turns, getting face shots, killing it, a spectacular run, and just as he jetted under our chair he turned between two trees and touched a snow-heavy pine branch with his mitten and let out a quiet little sound, like a squeak from a squeeze doll or a playful kitty mew. Logan and I looked at each other in amazement. Then, after a pause, we simultaneously made similar sounds. As soon as we got off the chair and skied that exact same line we found ourselves skiing in between trees, touching snowy branches and letting out little falsetto meows to signal a new peculiar giddiness, one that involved gentleness and absurdity. Our little disarming sound seemed the perfect compliment to the intensity of the situation, and evoked the right mindset, which was to not be overwhelmed by the killer moment, the deep snow, the steep mountains, the pressure of a super perfect powder day, but to be happy in it, mindful, playfully cautious, silly, to roll around in our baskets of yarn, hyper aware, on-point and so relaxed that we could squeak like pleased kitties and trust nearly everything around us. Softly meowing our way down the mountain was more satisfying than emitting a stock male bellow of joy. Maybe that’s what kung fu master Bruce Lee sounded like when he kicked and punched the crap out of his theatrical fight opponents, not a roaring lion but a softly yowling calico.
Around this time my wife Amy fell in love with a traumatized pup named Jasper who we renamed Hank. Hank is a 70 lb. German Shepherd mutt, with short, velvety tan fur and a white chest and tail tip and large brown eyes, like shiny polished chestnuts. He has naturally eye-lined eyes which makes him look like he wears make-up. He also looks like a pharaoh, which garnered him the nickname, Handsome Egyptian Gentleman. Hank was frightened of many things: wind, bags, brooms, closet doors, food (he was starving himself at the pound and had to be fostered nightly off-site just get some sustenance in him), human movement of any kind, raised voices, and men. All understandable fears. In order to become a more approachable pal or master or co-inhabitor of space with Hank I began speaking to him in a soft, high-pitched whisper-voice, which sounded like a strange old lady—or maybe a very nice, thoughtful old crone who gives up her living room couch in order to provide Hank with the largest dog bed in California. Hank seemed to appreciate my falsetto. Maybe with that vocal adjustment I seemed less like a dog harmer to him, more a benignly confusing food provider. Soon Hank developed his own falsetto in the form of a very high-pitched squeaky yawn. It was his method of relaxing himself, a deep gasp for oxygen. Dodger pitcher Orel Hersheiser used to do that, too, during the World Series, standing on the pitcher’s mound, rubbing the baseball, trying to relax and focus himself to throw a laser-accurate pitch, yawning.
I have a macho friend named Bill who feels competitive every moment he’s on skis. Whenever a random skier skis near Bill or past Bill it’s game on, a spontaneous race to the bottom. At the end of the day the race-episodes are retold in sweet exaggerated detail including descriptions of outfits, and highlights of radical maneuvers (“the guy was going 50 mph backwards”), close calls, and fantasy crashes (“I was 10 feet off the ground, traveling sideways for like the entire length of a football field.”). Macho Bill has a commanding presence and a light, naturally squeaky speaking voice that always seems on the verge of cracking or breaking. He sounds like an old door with corroded hinges. If Bill were in a choir, the group might be called the Rusty Sailors. Or maybe, Neglected Farming Equipment. He clears his throat and coughs a lot as if surprised by the unpredictable sounds coming out of his mouth. Whenever I go into falsetto around Bill he seems taken aback, which usually causes me to tread lightly. He can’t get a purchase on wholesale mockery, with he & me as featured fools, so he tenses up. He hardens rather than softens. The falsetto makes him feel, I think, that I’m making fun of his voice rather than just being a freak and needing to do it to escape the mundanity of it all. Bill does like to yodel though, and he does it beautifully, imperfectly, like a dying man in need of rescue. He seems attracted to the repetitive sounds. He’s a mountain man with a thick black beard. He has a long straight nose like a stick poking out of a pink leather-face with a shallow ridge at the tip. He has long eyelashes that never go unnoticed and a small scar by his cheekbone that he says was acquired in a knife fight (when he says this he waits a beat, then admits, from a car crash). If, when speaking in jest with him, I use my regular voice, or if I drop it down super deep, mocking masculinity from the register of a gloomy elder cleric, he’ll leap in and joyously participate, the two of us, baritoneing, commanding the landscape, pillaging, waving our arms around, reveling in potty humor and misguided clichés.
When I see this macho friend who often scares me with his erratic moods, if I say “Hello,” in a high voice like Sissy Spacek in Badlands, he says, “Hey,” wearily, in a regular voice and slowly asks, “how are you?” as if to check on my sanity. “O fine,” I reply in a falsetto based on a stoic wounded matron who is eager for a cup of tea, “thank you for asking.” And do I get this urgent cup of tea? Of course not. He’s not a mind reader.
When I’m skiing I often think of the song Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees, not because I need a prayer to help me stay alive—though of course I do, but because of the fantastically perfect falsettos shrilled by the Australian brothers and the indelible image the song evokes, John Travolta strutting down a New Jersey street with a gallon of paint, which occurs at the beginning of the movie, as the credits roll. I partly like this absurd mix of image and music because my mom liked Travolta so much, she was a big fan of his dancing. The Bee Gees’s light bulb breaking falsettos, the joyful comedy of the disco beat, and Travolta’s over the top swagger became the perfect little movie to keep in my head when skiing. The song enters my bloodstream like a vitamin blast and encourages me to believe in the beat, to swagger on my skis, to boost off little bumps and catch some puppy air. In fact, any time I hear someone who really knows how to sing ascend up the vocal register into notes that sound like bright speeding angels I am energized, enthralled.
Motown, the land of sweetest falsettos.
Cussing in falsetto immediately defuses the vulgarity of words, turns nastiness and anger into something ridiculous. Jonathan Winters, a comedic genius from the previous century, had a remarkable falsetto that he applied to his old lady characters, and all five Monty Python gentlemen had their own particular falsettos with which to inhabit their female alter egos.
In Some Like It Hot, a movie where two male jazz musicians, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, dress in drag and join an all girl band to avoid mobsters who’re searching for them with lethal intentions, falsettos are a matter of life and death. Lemmon’s Daphne-falsetto is all squeaks and scratches, while Tony Curtis’s Josephine, in her high collared garments, is a deeper more regal type of lady horn.
And what about Julia Child, Elenor Roosevelt, and the Queen of England? Of course, they are the high water mark. They are what we fellow falsetto-ers seek to accomplish.
Earlier this year I got an assignment from Powder Magazine to go to Telluride and write about Gay Ski Week. During one encounter with a gondola full of homosexuals I made an observation in falsetto, purely from habit, and the entire group fell silent, as if I had really done the wrong thing. Previously, all my falsettos had been in mockery of masculinity, or a way to enliven ordinary small talk. Suddenly, my mockery was offensive. Since no one really knew me in Telluride I seemed like an insensitive jerk, deriding gayness with a caricature faggy voice when actually trying to undermine uptight straight male patriarchal power structures (fellas, I swear!).
Several of my friends also veer into falsetto at opportune moments. Together we sound like a chorus of warbling pigeons. Communicating in falsetto provides a kind of protective shield around our conversation. A couple female friends of mine do it too, exaggerate their girl voices into fluffier falsettos, beautiful mockeries. One woman-friend boldly goes the other way, to a husky, witness protection program gravel-voice that is uniquely disturbing and evokes a paranoid animal-man with a hunchback.
I speak in falsetto once in a while when teaching writing classes, sometimes as an initial greeting or to segue from one subject to another. It often works to lighten the mood. The students reconsider my mental state. Some of them simply cannot believe that their college-level professor is being such a maniac, and yet no one ever asks what the voice is about, they just go with it and hope the voice stops soon. At an art opening I’ll say “hi” to friends and x-students in falsetto and they’ll quickly follow suit. I overheard one guy say to another, “We’ve got to work on our falsettos.”
I’ve never recruited fellow high voiced satirists. Well, not consciously, anyway.
