I will preface this by saying I’ve always been rather impressionable from the books I read. After reading Silence of the Lambs, I didn’t eat meat for over three years because the possibility someone could slip me human flesh Hannibal-style and tell me it was something else and have me eat it was too scary to allow. I will also preface this with a very important statement: regardless of what you might think from reading any of these posts so far, or what you might think if you’re one of those folks who knows me, if you disagree with this, as you will soon see, you’re wrong: I’m not very smart.
When I was much younger I read a Hardy Boys book, I can’t recall which one. What I can recall, however, is it involved South American murderous villains, a ventriloquist dummy with a turban full of diamonds and slightly racist undertones. It also involved the Hardy Boys’ goofy friend, Chet. Chet is like the Gibby of iCarly, the comedic relief who does so numerous an amount of strange things the reader quickly comes to accept it. He never has much agency in the books, he’s usually a damsel in distress type character for the boys to help when he is involved, but the Hardy Boys genuinely value his friendship which is ~sweet~ I guess. Anyway, their dumb friend Chet decides he’s going to learn ventriloquism, because that will get him all the girls, and buys a dummy to practice with that secretly contains a stolen shipment of diamonds the bad guys desperately want to recover. At first, Chet and the boys have no clue, they just know a bunch of big baddies are after them and they mean trouble. There was a point in the book I vividly recall where the bad guys had all but cornered the boys in a barn, but then, surprisingly, Chet saved the day by ‘throwing his voice’ to make it sound like he was around a different corner. The villains took a wrong turn and the boys took their chance to escape all because of Chet. There was also eventually multiple airplane crashes, a stowaway situation and a deserted island- a lot was going on in that book- but that’s not what mattered. The story lay dormant in my mind for years, only to come back into my memory in the spring I was a freshman in high school.
The Hardy Boys franchise, despite the fantastical subject matter, are set in this world, or at least one so similar it’s adjacent to it. No one can suddenly start flying or breathe underwater- there are real world limitations of human ability imposed on these books. That’s probably why I thought actually physically manipulating the origin point of my voice was possible.
I tried to explain the concept to my brothers, to my friends. They told me it was ‘impossible’ and the Hardy Boys weren’t ‘a great source’ to rely on. I told them they didn’t ‘get it’ and that 'I would show them', and went on practicing the basics of ventriloquism, until I could speak with my mouth closed as perfectly as Eliza Doolittle could normally at the end of “My Fair Lady”. I was always practicing with my pencil in English class, after I finished the readings, and I got so good at talking without moving my mouth, my friends actually started to get excited about when I’d hit the next step.
All the ‘how to’ videos on YouTube about ventriloquism stopped with the puppets; it made sense to me at the time, they were all amateurs; I needed real literature on how to get to start throwing my voice, and once I got it I would be unstoppable. The thing about it was there isn’t really such thing as professional ventriloquists these days. It turns out my friends’ initial impression was correct and ventriloquism was widely regarded as ‘lame’ and ‘embarrassing'.
Who could have guessed it.
I still hung on to hope a little while longer, but I started to feel silly sitting there in class, repeating phrases over and over again to a pencil. I started to realize that maybe the reason the YoTube videos stopped where they did was because that’s all there was to know.
You might be thinking,
“Shea, it is completely ridiculous that you thought that it was possible to literally throw your voice for months, you were in high school, you should have known better!”
And you’re definitely right, and I’ve heard it all before. But that doesn’t change the fact that a little something died the day I accepted it wasn’t true, a little part of my childhood I’d never get back.
The Hardy Boys betrayed me. There’s nothing else to say.
Comments