Hi!  My name is Annette Gary, and I’m a baritone.  (Hi, Annette!). 

I guess I’ve been a baritone for years.   I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve used every excuse to sing baritone, and I’ve sung just about everywhere you can imagine….in the shower, crowded airports, airplanes, restaurants, Disneyworld, Times Square….even in the street in front of my friends homes.  I guess I’ve just been in denial for years, and maybe it’s finally gotten out of control.  I mean, I haven’t thought about becoming a Tenor or anything like that, and I’m certainly NOT out there singing Lead, am I, so give me a break, ok. 

My family and friends knew I was a baritone YEARS before I actually realized that I was one, but they just didn’t know what to do about it.  It all started innocently enough, first, it was Nursery Rhymes when I was a kid (“Hello, Scooby Doo, Where Are You, we’ve got some work to do now” , and then more recently with Barney (“I Love You, You Love Me, We’re a Happy Family”) (don’t you just hate that guy!); then, I moved up to the hard stuff, you know TV commercials like “Fly the Friendly Skies of United”, “You Deserve a Break Today”, even the Senokot commercial (I feel good, like I knew that I would now!)….  Finally, I began staying up late and missing work just to watch reruns of  TV shows like “Laverne and Shirley” (what exactly is hassenpfeuffer, inc. anyway???) and “The Monkees” (“Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees, people say we’re monkeying around,”… well, you get the picture)  just so I could sing their theme songs. Sometimes, I even tried to harmonize to the instrumental theme songs (“Law and Order”, “ER”)--now, THAT’S great stuff!.  And, if there’s a group of baritones standing around singing baritone, well….I even try to harmonize with them! 

Now to some of you, this probably sounds pretty bizarre, and maybe things have finally gotten out of hand, I don’t know.  But….I guess the truth is:  I LOVE singing baritone—I don’t want to sing anything else.  So there!