Since I figured you folks needed a break from yet another blog post detailing the myriad reasons I don't have the talent to write, the courage to write, or the experience to write, I thought I'd talk about my trip a week ago to Green Bay to see a speech pathologist (hey, it ain't a trip to Lambeau Field, but I at least got a chance to get out of the apartment).

No, no. I'm not going to replace 500 words of whining about my writing or lack of same with 500 words of whining about my voice.

Well...maybe a little whining, but for the most part this is good news. It might not seem like it at first, but...well, just read on:

There is something you have to understand first. My voice is really idiosyncratic. It's not exactly bad, but it isn't exactly consistent either. If I'm sitting in the right position I can come across as convincingly female. But if I happen to be lying down, the voice my home health aides hear when I greet them in the morning is vaguely reminiscent of Harvey Fierstein with a cold.

On second thought, it's not even that feminine.

Well, maybe Lucille Ball after her 57,273rd pack of cigarettes. Otherwise...forget it.

And would someone explain to me why, when my friends or my health-care workers visit, my voice automatically drops half an octave--especially around other women? It doesn't do that when I talk to myself (which I prefer to think of as "thinking out loud", thank you very much).

Well, no speech pathologist could help with that little problem, I'm sure. (No, not the talking to myself, the other thing.) If nothing else, I wanted to make sure the method I'd accidentally hit upon for a convincing female voice two years ago wasn't doing me more harm than good.

The speech pathologist was a fairly young fellow (aren't they all at my age?) and after I gave him a bit of background, he was a bit surprised that I'd been working with a spectrogram, not realizing that a person can download a fairly decent spectrogram software online. (It does take a bit of work to figure out, though).

He had me say "aaaaaah" for as long as I could, which ended up a mite higher than he wanted (in the 250s Hz range). Then I cringed when my sustained note disintegrated into a raspy, Jack Klugman-ish croak for the last second or two. Trying a second time, I now hit the low end, about 178 Hz. (I just can't win, you know?)

Then we came to the infamous "rainbow passage" which, unbeknown to him, I already knew by heart: "When the sunlight hits raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is composed of a long high arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon...." And so on.

Heck, I ought to know it. I've only read it and recorded it at home about 2000 times. A month.

There, to my surprise, my pitch was a bit lower on average, somewhere in the 180s. Not bad, but a little lower than I would have liked. At least, he said, I put all the upswings in the right places. But then, it could have been worse. He could have loaded my mouth full of marbles like Henry Higgins.

Then he had me speak extemporaneously, about the things I was interested in, and I fared better there, going between about 188 Hz on the low end to 216 on the high.

So in short, I came away with at least a little reassurance, even if he really couldn't do anything about the wild variation in pitch when I change my body position. Like the monkey who miraculously typed the script of "Hamlet", I happened to hit upon--entirely on my own--a method of speaking convincingly female that at least doesn't strain my voice, even if my track record with it isn't the greatest.

I'll just have to remember not to talk until I've had my coffee.