Chapter 6: Bow Chicka Bow Wow

Saturday December 10
I had my first singing lesson today at the studio. Jane, who was usually Rita’s security, was my driver. I found her in the kitchen drinking coffee with my dad and Hana.

“Isn’t this a pleasant surprise? I take it that Manaia got a day off,” I said in greeting.

“Fritz is getting soft,” Jane said with a smile.

“Bacon and potatoes are in the oven. Make your own eggs,” Dad said.

“You need to look at the TMZ website,” Hana said.

I grabbed my tablet and set it on the counter as I made my scrambled eggs. I was on their home page, which made me smile.

The headline read: David A Dawson -- Skinny-Dips With Smokin’ Hot Chicks

It showed a picture of when I got out and had the towel strategically placed. Behind me, you could see the pool, and they’d put black boxes over the women’s breasts. They had arrows pointing at Zak, Tanya, and Jessica, who were all in The Secret Circle with me. I scrolled down to the article.

David -- the dude in the upcoming movie The Royal Palm -- was at a party thrown by his pal Zak Verwood ... and he decided to go skinny-dipping. He was joined by several other Hollywood types including Tanya Bishop and Jessica Abbot.

We love David -- he’s always been super cool to us -- but what we want to know is ... who was the hottie he was dancing with all night?

It seems like David has announced he is back in Hollywood and is doing it with style.

Under that was a picture of me and Teresa dancing. It showed her focused on busting a move while it looked like I was perving on her. I was so busted because that was precisely what I’d been doing.

“Uh oh, I need to make a quick call,” I said as I made my plate of food and took it into the dining room for some privacy.

“This better be good,” Brook grumped.

Brook was a firm believer in sleeping in on Saturdays. I looked at the clock, and even I thought she should have been up by now.

“Uhm ... I can call back later,” I tried.

“I take it your cryptic message about getting naked has bitten you in the ass.”

Damn, it doesn’t pay to date smart girls.

“TMZ got a picture of me skinny-dipping. They also have a picture of me dancing with Teresa, and it makes me look bad,” I confessed.

“Did you get naked with her?”

“No. Teresa and I talked, and she’s nothing like her mom. She’s actually level-headed,” I said.

“We are talking about your stalker, right?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“Okay. I’ve been warned. Let me get back to sleep,” Brook said and hung up on me.

That could have gone better.

Jane had me get my drone before we left.

“Manaia had an idea. When you get ready to get out of the car, we open a window and let the drone out so it can do a sweep. From a higher vantage point, it should be able to show us what’s around the vehicle better than when I step out and do a visual sweep,” Jane explained.

I got into the back of the car in the drive and turned on the drone. It acted like it was confused because we were in a confined space, so I shut it down. I put it in my palm, held it out the window and tried again. This time it rose up and circled the car just like it did when I was outside it.

Jane had her tablet out and watched the screen.

“Send your dad a text and ask him to come outside,” Jane prompted.

When Dad received the text, he walked out the front door. The drone reacted to the movement and went to where he was.

“Cool,” Jane said and then leaned out of the car window. “Mr. Dawson. Walk to the back of the car, please. I want to see what the drone does.”

Dad walked to the back, and the drone followed him. When he went across the street, it came back and began circling the car again. She had me send a text to Hana to come out as well. It reacted to her the same as it had with my dad when he first came out.

She called my dad to come closer. When he began to move, it turned and flew to him. I recalled the drone so we could get to my lesson.

At the studio, they directed us to one of their sound booths. They used it to do voice-overs as well as for record singers. A technician was sitting behind racks of equipment, looking through a window into the room where the artist would work.

This all felt surreal. I was the furthest thing from a singer. If I didn’t have a soft spot for Rita, Halle, and Trip, I would never have agreed to do this. I was about to say ‘the heck with it’ and walk out when my friend Jett, the lead singer for Birthrite, walked in.

“Mr. Dawson,” she said formally.

I broke out in laughter because Jett was the last person to act like that. Plus, she was dressed like you would expect a rock singer to be. She gave me a lopsided smile and a hug.

“I was about to bail. I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to do this,” I admitted.

“Don’t do that. Because of you, we get to sing on the TV show too. I guess Rita James was talking to your people, and they suggested I might be a good choice as your voice coach. When we heard what you were singing for, I had Angel call and see if we could get a spot on the show,” Jett explained.

I had a sneaking feeling that Rita had predicted that I might decide to bolt, and the offer to Jett’s band was used to make me feel obligated. My internal debate finally settled on, ‘How bad could one song be?’

“Before you have a meltdown, let’s have you sing so I can see what we have to work with,” Jett reasonably requested.

“Okay. But if I’m terrible, I want you to be honest and keep me from making a fool of myself.”

“Sure,” she said, and all but pushed me into the sound studio.

She guided me to the microphone and had me stand in front of it.

“Which song do you know the best?” she asked.

“Silver Bells.”

“Cue that one up,” she said to the technician on the other side of the window, and then looked at me. “When you’re ready, just nod, and he’ll start the music.”

I nodded and began to sing...

Halfway through, Jett had heard enough. I could see she was trying not to laugh.

“Dang it, this is a disaster. I think we cut our losses,” I said.

“I’m sorry. In your movie soundtrack, I’d assumed you were trying to mimic Sir Richard Jackson. I didn’t realize that you were really singing,” she said, which didn’t help.

“How did you get the soundtrack?” I asked.

“Rita sent it over.”

“Dear Lord. She heard that and still wanted me to sing?” I asked as I looked up for divine intervention.

“Have you had any voice training?” Jett asked.

“No.”

“Good. I know we only have a couple of weeks, but I think we can get you to the point where you can hold your own. Your tone needs some work, but the lower portions of your sound could be special. It’s your higher range that we need to work on.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Look, give me today to see if we can take some shortcuts to get you there. If I don’t think I can get the job done, I promise to tell you. I don’t want you to look foolish either,” she promised.

I was there anyway, so why not?

Jett started with the basics. She had me learn to breathe correctly and helped me adopt the proper posture. She said that it would help me project better and would also help my acting voice. Jett was pulling out all the stops to get me to buy in by adding the acting reference.

Then she delved into the different kinds of voices. I’d heard the term ‘head voice’ before but had no idea what that actually meant. I discovered there were three voices: head, middle, and chest.

“Trying humming and pay attention to where you feel the vibration as you raise and lower the range,” she said.

When I started high, I felt it in the upper half of my face. Jett said it was my ‘head voice’ because when I used that voice, the principal body part in resonance was my sinuses. As the tone went down, the vibration traveled to the lower half of my face, chin, and upper neck. In this scenario, the vocal structure in maximum resonance was my hard palate (roof of the mouth). As I hit my lower notes, the sound vibrations were felt around my lower neck and chest area. Jett explained that this was the voice most people used during regular speaking. If I put my hand to the center of my chest when I spoke, I could feel it vibrate.

She explained that you couldn’t do one voice without the others. I had to think of it as a continuous spectrum. She warned that if I didn’t, I would risk my voice breaking as I tried to force the change.

Jett took me to the women’s restroom and had me stand in front of the mirror.

“I want you to say the vowels in the alphabet and watch your face.”

“A ... E ... I ... O ... U.”

“Did you see your mouth close at any time?” she asked.

“No.”

This must have meant I’d closed my mouth when singing.

“Now, do it again.”

When I was about to begin, Jett put two fingers into my mouth and forced me to say the letters.

“See and feel the difference? Your mouth needs to be opened about half an inch more. Try it again, with your fingers in your mouth. I want you to focus on how it makes your tongue and throat work differently.”

She had me do it five times. I finally noticed that she was right.

“Again, without the fingers,” she ordered.

It felt unnatural.

“Now, sing it.”

She had me do that again and again until it didn’t feel as awkward.

“Sing the first two verses of Silver Bells while you focus on keeping your mouth open.”

After I’d done that ten times, she stopped me and took me into the studio again. She had me sing the song.

“Play back the first few bars of the first one and then do the same for the second,” she directed the man behind the glass.

I listened to them both, and the second did sound better.

“Your sound resonates better and is louder. If you sang much, you would find that by doing it this way, there’s less strain on your voice when singing louder. The way you were doing it, you unconsciously tense up, and it affects your throat, jaw, and neck muscles,” Jett explained.

“Okay,” was my one-word response.

“We’re only halfway there. I think you can have a good singing voice if we work on your tone. The tonal quality of your singing voice depends on two important places within your body. The first place is where the tone is produced, and the second is where the tone resonates,” Jett said.

She grabbed my hand and put my fingers on my throat above my Adam’s apple.

“Swallow.”

I did and felt my throat move.

“Notice how the notch above your Adam’s apple moved upwards when you swallowed?”

I swallowed again and noticed that she was right.

“Now, sing.”

I sang the beginning of Silver Bells. I felt my throat do the same thing.

“It did it again, didn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s your larynx moving upwards. It can disrupt the tone of your singing voice. To fix that, we are going to do some exercises.”

The first one was to say the phrase, ‘Sally sells seashells by the seashore.’ She had me repeat it until I could speak it quickly, correctly, and with no breaks in my voice. She explained that by doing that tongue twister, it would also help with enunciation while it gave me a better-balanced tone.

The next exercise was to sing scales. The reason I sounded better in my lower range was that my larynx didn’t go up until I tried to sing higher notes. Jett said I had to think of it as an elevator being lifted by a counterweight attached to a pulley. As the weight went down, the elevator would rise. As I sang higher notes, I needed to imagine the weight, or my larynx, moving downward. That’s much easier explained than done. This was something I would need to work on.

As I said, the high range was my biggest weakness. Jett addressed that next.

“You notice that when you sing the higher notes, your voice is sometimes breaking?” she asked.

I just nodded.

“That’s because as the notes get higher, so does the tension in your throat. You eventually reach a point when your vocal cords can no longer take the tightness, and that’s when your voice breaks. I’m going to show you tricks to teach your voice how to stay relaxed when singing those notes,” Jett explained.

She showed me where the digastric muscle was located right under my chin. It caused my vocal cords to tense up when I sang high notes. It was another case where it tensed up naturally, and I would have to learn how to keep it relaxed when I sang. She gave me exercises that I would have to do daily for that to happen.

She promised that once I learned this, I would be able to sing the higher range as comfortably as I did the lower one.

Before she let me go, she had me sing Silver Bells one last time. She played back all three versions, and I could see we’d made progress. Maybe there was hope for me after all.

She sent me a text with where her band would be playing for the next couple of weeks. I promised to come see her. She made me promise to practice what she’d taught me, and we would get together on Thursday to work some more.

When I got home, Dad told me that we were going to Coach Mason’s house. The reasons we were going to his place instead of having them come to ours were twofold. First, he was still recovering from his stroke. Second, Bo Harrington was there too, and if Bo came to my place, it would be considered an in-home visit. This way, we could say we just bumped into one another at a mutual friend’s house.

Flo, usually Halle’s security person, took over for Jane. I was quickly finding out that in LA, nothing was as close as it seemed when you looked on a map. Dad and I settled into the back seat, and it gave me a chance to talk to him.

“Why are we meeting with Coach Mason and Bo Harrington?”

“With you so busy, I imagine you haven’t really thought about your plans for school next year.”

“I can’t say that I have since our trips,” I admitted.

“When I talked to Bo Harrington, he told me that the first period to sign a National Letter of Intent to play college football begins this Wednesday. I know that there’s another signing period in the spring, and that’s when you intend to make your final decision. I just thought that for something this important, you needed to start thinking about it more.”

“It makes sense, then, because I trust those two the most to give me good advice.”

“That was what I thought. It would give you a chance to bounce your thoughts off two guys who know what you can expect, and they can help guide you to the best choice. It was nice of them to volunteer,” Dad reminded me.

That last statement made me realize that they were more than just my coaches; they’d become friends.

Bo had experience at both the pro and college level ‘fixing’ quarterbacks. He’d been the coach that helped me develop to the point where, in my junior year, I won Elite 11. That was the competition Nike put on each year to find the best high school quarterback in the country. He was currently the quarterback coach at Alabama.

Coach Mason was a longtime coach in the NFL. He’d been involved with the Oakland Raiders and worked his way up to become their offensive coordinator. When there had been a coaching change, they had retained him as a consultant. He was retired now but had kept in the game, teaching young quarterbacks at camps like the one I’d attended in Houston, Texas.

We’d bonded. Coach Mason must have seen something in me because he had volunteered to be the offensive coordinator for my high school team. That was after we lost our old one to conference rival Washington.

While everything Bo taught me made me technically a top-tier quarterback, working with Coach Mason on a full-time basis was invaluable to my development. He taught me how to think like a quarterback. It all began with preparation and knowing how to look at game film. By watching him break down film, I started to understand the nuances of the game. That understanding translated to the field. I was able to process what I was seeing in the game and figure out what defenses were trying to do to stop us. I went from being the guy who got by on extraordinary athletic ability to becoming an actual quarterback.

What Coach Mason had taught me would usually take a college-level quarterback leading their team for a couple of years to learn. That was why one of the primary considerations NFL teams had in drafting quarterbacks was how long they’d started. The sad truth was that the starters got the lion’s share of the coaching. You needed that to be able to break down a game correctly on the field and in the film room.

Dad’s point about me using them as a sounding board was spot-on. These two men had been around higher levels of football, and both were within the higher levels of my circles of trust. That made me confident they would give me good advice.

Coach Mason lived in a condo near downtown. When Coach Mason met us at the door, I noticed he had a cane.

“When did you get that?” I asked.

“My left side is still weak from the stroke. I sometimes lose my balance.”

That sucked.

Bo Harrington was already there. I gave him a warm smile and shook his hand.

“Congratulations, I see you’ve made it into the National Championship Playoffs again. I expect you should be able to handle Washington,” I predicted.

They’d announced the matchups. Alabama faced Washington, and Ohio State had drawn Clemson. I predicted that we would see a rematch in the Championship game of Alabama and Clemson. Neither Washington nor Ohio State had the talent and depth of the top two teams in the country.

“Let me know if you want tickets to the game,” Bo teased me.

That would cross so many lines that if the NCAA caught wind of it, I would never play a down of football.

“Maybe a booster could fly him out on his private jet and put him up at a resort while you’re at it. Oh, and don’t forget to invite me,” Dad said.

“I’ll look into that the minute he tells me he’s coming to Alabama. We try not to hand out the good stuff until you commit,” Bo said with a laugh.

“I’m hungry, so I had the place across the street deliver dinner,” Coach Mason said as we went to the dining room.

Bo and I helped organize everything. Coach Mason had bought salmon with dill sauce, roasted potatoes, and broccoli in a butter lemon sauce. Not too shabby for takeout. Over dinner, we began to talk about why we were there.

“Before we weigh in, why don’t you tell us the schools you’re looking at and why they’re on your list,” Coach Mason said.

“Wolf, Tim, and I went on several school visits over the last two years to figure out where we wanted to play. If I can, I want to go to the same school as they do. We looked at the Power Five conferences and then Notre Dame as the lone independent.

“When we determined which ones would accept all of us, it came down to Michigan, Oklahoma, and USC,” I said.

“I assume the front-runner is Michigan,” Bo guessed.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“They had a camp at your high school to show their commitment. I’ve heard that Ty will commit to them this week, and they’re in the Big Ten, right in your backyard,” Bo reasoned.

Those were pretty much my reasons, so I just nodded.

“I want to hear why you’re considering Oklahoma and USC,” Coach Mason said.

“Oklahoma offers me an excellent path to the NFL. The Big 12 Conference is focused on offense. I would be able to put up huge numbers there. I also liked the fans and students. Their fan base is enormous, and they rabidly support their team. The community itself was somewhere I’d be comfortable living. Except for one incident with a recruit’s father, there wasn’t much not to like. And now that the conference has its own championship game, I think you’ll see a school from the Big 12 in the conversation for the playoffs each year,” I explained.

“USC?” Coach Mason asked.

“They have a tradition that stands up to anywhere else in the country. I also have two friends that play ball for them, Ridge Townsend and Bill Callaway. USC may actually be the best spot for me if I want to make it to the NFL. Each one of their starters over the last decade has made it to the next level. Nowhere else can make that claim,” I said.

“I agree, but they haven’t had a great one since Carson Palmer, who won the Heisman and was drafted number one in 2003,” Bo pointed out.

“Good point, but they have been good enough to send quarterbacks to the NFL consistently. I also contend that Ridge might be the next one who wins the Heisman and gets drafted number one.”

“You might be right,” Bo conceded.

“There’s another factor outside of football that makes USC a good fit for me, and that’s Hollywood. The downside of that is that the NCAA isn’t sure how to deal with my acting career. We’ve come to an uneasy truce, but I worry that they’ll change their minds at some point, and if I go to USC, that’s more likely. That being said, it would be much easier to get work if I were out here.

“There is another downside. USC is in LA. I’m not a big-city boy, and the temptations out here could be a problem. I would be living under the constant scrutiny of the press. I can’t even take my clothes off and go for a swim here,” I said.

“With about thirty other people,” Dad added.

I shrugged, and Bo and Coach Mason gave me looks that said that someday I would grow up, but they were envious.

“Are you sure that’s a negative?” Bo asked.

“My girlfriend thinks it is,” I shared, and then got serious. “The culture out here is so different from where I’m from. I like that I know most everyone in my town. They don’t get goofy when I meet them. There I’m just the youngest Dawson. Yes, they get excited when I do a movie, but it isn’t like I have paparazzi staking me out like I will have here.”

“I admit, I liked living there,” Coach Mason said. “I think you would get used to LA in short order, though. There’s a lot more to do here.”

“The only factor that makes me hesitate about USC is its fan base. I’m sure if we were winning games, they would be out in force. The problem is there is too much else going on. We have a great example of that with Northwestern in the Chicago area. There are no other college teams that close to the city, and they couldn’t even sell out when a nationally ranked Stanford team played them. If I go to either Michigan or Oklahoma, I know that I’ll play in front of sellout home crowds.”

“I agree that a huge home crowd makes a difference. You see it in the professional teams as well. Fans here tend to show up late and leave early. Like I said, a lot is going on here,” Coach Mason said.

“May I ask why Clemson didn’t make your final list?” Bo asked.

“Competition. Someone would end up dead if you tossed David into that mess,” Dad said.

“I get that,” Bo said. “They seem to take a top ten quarterback each year. There’s no way all that talent will make it onto the field, and that’s a shame. I think the ideal situation for that kind of talent is to go somewhere where they can redshirt and then play two to four years as the starter. Having someone with game experience is critical, as far as most NFL teams are concerned. In the Clemson model, either someone beats everyone out in a bloodbath, or you might only get one year to start.”