In the eighties, I went to Montreal and my brother and sister took me to a bar that Ivan Doroschuk was known to frequent. I had heard of him because I liked the pop band Men Without Hats that he fronted. Although this was an eighties pop band, Men Without Hats also put together listenable albums which was rare at the time. Their biggest hit was Safety Dance and from that video I imagined that Ivan was six feet tall.
So in that Montreal bar we did indeed see Ivan that night. I make a poor fanboy as I didn’t go up to him and try talking with him. But I could see that he was 5’6” or maybe even shorter. This surprised me.
My sister once tried to explain to me that I thought he was tall because the Safety Dance video has him and a short girl and a dwarf. Of course he looked big next to those two. But that’s not the only reason I was under the misapprehension that he was tall. It is also true that he has a low singing voice.
I am a fan of the band Yes that is just this year being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Their most well known singer is Jon Anderson who is about the size of Ivan. Jon Anderson has the highest singing voice of any male singer in rock. Also Jon Anderson wasn’t able to go on tour a few years ago and his two replacements, Benoit David and Jon Davison (who are former members of Yes cover bands) are shorter than the rest of the members of Yes. I believe that all three are about the size of Ivan Doroschuk.
Indeed the idea of shorter people having higher voices carries over to primordial dwarves. Primordial dwarves have the proportions of most humans. So they have very high voices because of shorter vocal cords.
Do you wonder why a mouse squeaks? Why that is really a fierce roar that other, bigger animals aren’t afraid of.
So I think that Ivan is an outlier. In the interest of science, I think he should breed with a woman that is well over six feet tall. If Ivan were to have a 6’6” offspring male, I bet it would have the voice of a Barry White as it grows and finally, after his voice changes, he will be left inaudible to the average human’s ears.
He would appear to be a mute human but I wonder if he would find friends in the greatest of whales, the blue whales, that also use sounds too low for human beings to hear. If he practiced singing while he was a kid, perhaps he could sing songs just to the blue whales. Perhaps this would make him the whale whisperer.
