The Voiceover Artist. Dave Reidy

      THE MONDAY AFTER my debut as a lector at St. Asella’s, I started pursuing the part of my Chicago dream that still stood a chance: the part that had nothing to do with Brittany.

      I plugged a gently used microphone into my computer and recorded the radio commercials I had been rehearsing for weeks: one for the Chicago Blackhawks, another for Arc Home Electronics, and a spot for the Ulysses S. Grant Museum in Galena, Illinois. Then I cut together a one-minute medley that demonstrated high-quality performance across my wide range of energies, tempos, volumes and tones. My deliveries extended from whispered to stentorian and from gentle to aggressive, but I did only one voice—my own—and played only one role: myself. The kind of voiceover work I wanted to do was the kind I’d always appreciated most, the kind Larry Sellers did: straight announcement, which relied upon the artist’s virtuosic vocal ability and won the listener’s attention with a subconscious appeal to her innate desire for perfection. In a commercial that called for straight announcement, the meaning of the words mattered less than how the words were said. And characters didn’t matter at all.

      If the voiceover agents want someone who creates characters, I thought, they’ll have to find Connor.

      Early Tuesday morning, I burned my demo onto seven CDs and scrawled my name and phone number on their non-writable sides in permanent marker. I stuffed the CDs into envelopes along with folded copies of my cover letter, the characters of which bore the white striations left behind by a nearly empty ink cartridge. With the envelopes in my otherwise empty messenger bag, I headed out on foot.

      The first agency I visited was Skyline Talent, the organization that had represented Larry Sellers for much of his long career. Sellers had grown up in Sampere, a small, Central Illinois township near my hometown of Leyton. Since coming to Chicago in the 1970s, he’d done national radio commercials and had been, for almost two decades, the voice of Jewel Food Stores. I’d studied Larry Sellers’ work since I was thirteen years old, and it was while listening to one of Larry’s performances that I selected the word I’d use to induce the seizures, spasms and fits that brought back my vocal muscles from atrophy. “Financing.” Because of the agency’s connection to Larry Sellers, and the inseparability, in my own mind, of the sound of his voice from the existence of mine, the four-block walk from my apartment to the offices of Skyline Talent was more pilgrimage than errand.

      I walked through the front door and left my demo in the hands of the receptionist. Then I turned around and walked out. I didn’t introduce myself or ask to speak to any agents—not at Skyline, not at any agency. I wasn’t interested in, or good at, making small talk. Besides, I saw no reason to put a face to my voice. My demo was my good side, and I wanted the agents to see it before they knew anything else about me.

      By noon on Tuesday, back at my apartment, all the momentum I’d felt while making and delivering my demo was gone. In its place was a gloomy understanding that simply seeing myself as a voiceover artist did not make me one. I hadn’t considered, until just then, the sheer number of things that had to happen before an agent would call with an offer to represent me. A receptionist would have to put my demo in the hands of an agent. That agent would have to decide the demo was worth listening to, with nothing more to go on than a cover letter. Any agent who did decide, against her better judgment, to give my demo a chance would have to find the time and attention to listen to it. And even if she found the time, there was no telling if she’d like my work. If having talent wasn’t enough to ensure Connor’s success, how could it guarantee my own? I began to see each of my morning deliveries as a missed opportunity. With a chance to do any of them again, I would have gladly initiated and endured small talk to increase, by even a fraction of a percentage, the likelihood that an agent would give my demo a fair listen.

      Whenever I find myself waiting, I look for a way to prepare for what I’m waiting for. That’s how I now understand all the hours I spent as a kid sitting on my bed with a radio in my lap, listening to commercials: I was preparing, even when I could not speak, to be a voiceover artist. I picked up my lector’s workbook and turned to the scripture readings I was scheduled to deliver this coming Sunday in my second outing as a lector at St. Asella’s. Maybe, I thought, it is preparation that will separate me, in a way that talent alone cannot, from other voiceover artists with a range and timbre like mine.

      So I dug into the text. Over more than ten recitations, I sought out the natural rhythm of each passage and gave voice to it. I practiced the multi-syllabic Hebrew and Canaanite names in the first reading until they sounded as natural on my lips as my mother’s name, and repeated the Greek names of the cities mentioned in the second reading until their pronunciations were as familiar to me as those of Leyton and Peoria. When I’d honed my delivery of each reading, I closed the workbook. Part of preparing effectively, it seemed to me, was knowing when you were doing more harm than good to your voice and performance. All told, my preparation for Sunday had eaten up only ninety minutes. It was still Tuesday, and only two in the afternoon.

      Connor still hadn’t called me back. The prospect of calling him again, conceding my need of him even as I waited helplessly for some share of success that might rival his, seemed doubly debasing. I held my phone, waiting another minute for it to come to life in my hand and for Connor’s name to appear on the pale blue screen. Then I opened the phone’s address book, arrowed down to my brother’s name, and selected it. Connor did not answer. I imagined him in active pursuit of his own dream, at work without waiting, his phone ringing silently in the small pocket of a backpack he’d thrown in the corner of a rehearsal space somewhere on Chicago’s North Side. I listened to his voice—my voice, but steeped in confidence—in the outgoing message and hung up.

      I lay down on the dusty upholstery of my couch, trying to persuade myself that an afternoon with good work already done and nothing left to do was a luxury I should enjoy. I could take a nap. I could read a book. I could get out and explore my new neighborhood. But what I did instead was think of Brittany. With equal parts imagining and recollection, I felt her breath on my neck as she rubbed herself against me, acting out the closeness we’d made with our voices and our attentiveness. Alone in my apartment, I acted out my present deprivation with a hand down the front of pants still buttoned, as if I might finish before I realized what I was doing.

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