May 7, 2015 3 min read

So I’m sitting in the big reclining chair, telling the dentist all about my strange situation.

“That’s a new one,” she said. “I usually hear the opposite problem.”

My problem, as I explained, is an abundant amount of saliva. It had been such an annoyance that I concluded there was something horribly wrong with me. After a few nights of Googling “too much saliva” gave me no answers but fed my hypochondriacal tendencies, I went running off to the dentist.

“We worry about dry mouth,” she said. Turns out that when something’s amiss in the mouth, the saliva’s the first thing to go.

She went on to tell me she sees patients everyday who aren’t making enough saliva, and it causes all kinds of problems. I asked if there was such thing as a saliva bank, because I would happily be a regular donor.

I’m bringing this up because of a career opportunity I had this week. I’ve always loved doing voiceover narration – whether in my news reports or for documentaries I’ve done at WQED-TV. I have what’s been described as a bright, authoritative voice – that’s what the guy said when he hired me to narrate a video he was producing.

I knew it would be a lot of talking, something I’m well-accustomed to from teaching three-hour college classes. There I am in front of the students, blah, blah, blah – and I never run out of saliva. And so I went into the recording studio with my throat all smooth and ready, and no water bottle. I didn’t need it.

The sound engineer handed me a stack of scripts and I began. It was technical subject matter, with plenty of long words about computer science and systems administration. With every paragraph, the words grew longer and the sentences, more complex.

And what the heck?

My mouth was drying up right before my very tongue. Two pages in, I went running to the water fountain down the hall. Slurp, slurp, slurp, and I was ready. By the time I was back in front of the microphone, I was parched again. With my tongue now Velcroed to the roof of my mouth, I had trouble saying words like “laptop” and “password.” After three tries, it was still coming out like slapworth.

“You need a drink?” the sound engineer said about 18 more times. Not wanting to be unprofessional, I avoided running back down the hall and tried, instead, to drum up some of my own saliva by thinking of Sour Patch Kids.

An hour in, my teeth were so desiccated my lips were curled above and below them. I looked like Mr. Ed.

I thought of kosher dill pickles and soldiered on.

I thought about telling the sound engineer I normally had much more saliva and also, was much cuter, but there were more lines to read.

I’m still wondering what happened in that sound room. Why did my saliva abandon me right then, when I needed it? Could it be that all the foam sound-absorbing material on the walls of the recording booth was absorbing more than just sound? Or was it just that the subject matter I was reading was so dry?

Whatever, I completed the last line readings. The engineer thanked me and told me, “Good job.” I shook his hand, walked out the door and ran down the hall to the water fountain.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.