Oh No! This Singer Raised Her Soft Palate So High It’s in the Land of Oz Now
After years of continually being told to lift her soft palate, Linda Greene no longer has one.
While practicing last week in her home city of Halifax, the soprano’s soft palate ascended so high it completely left her body.
Sources say it was last seen in the magical Land of Oz.
Greene said in a texting interview that it started out as just a normal practice session. She was warming up her voice while focussing on creating space and raising her soft palate. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the sound stopped.
At first, Greene didn’t know what happened, just that she felt different.
“Something has changed within me,” she texted her friend. “Something is not the same.”
Once she isolated the problem to her throat, she discovered what was missing.
“Suddenly I realized it felt kind of empty in there, and I was like, oh my God. My soft palate. It’s gone.”
Dr. Jeff MacDonald, Greene’s ENT, said she calls his office almost daily using a text-to-voice app to ask him how this happened, and she never accepts his explanation.
“I keep explaining that when you physically raise something, it goes upwards instead of falling, and it sounds like she accidentally raised her soft palate too high,” said MacDonald. “It’s pretty simple. I’m basically just defining gravity.”
MacDonald says he wishes he could help, but helping her achieve a full recovery is beyond his scope of expertise.
“She can’t just ask me to give her a soft palate,” said MacDonald. “I’m a doctor, not a wizard.”
Her teacher, Danielle Tyler, says that while she feels sorry for Greene, she doesn’t feel at fault.
“I didn’t tell her to raise it to that extent,” said Tyler. “I gave her very clear and tangible instructions to picture her voice floating in the clouds like a hot air balloon, and make space for it by lifting her soft palate as high as possible . . . wait scratch that, I didn’t say as high as possible. You scratched that from the record, right?”
Friends and colleagues say her singing will be missed.
“Linda doesn’t deserve this,” said Greene’s best friend, Teresa Brown. “She’s such a lovely person. And I’ve never heard a more resonant voice!”
“I feel so bad for her,” said soprano Charlotte Mayfield, who spent most of her interview looking at the ground. “It will be such a shame to have one less soprano at local auditions and competitions.”
Greene is doing her best to move on and not linger on lost dreams of singing. She said practising mindfulness and staying in the moment is helping.
“I mean sure, every so often I long to steal to the land of what might have been,” acknowledged Greene. “But my therapist pointed out that it doesn’t soften the ache I feel when reality sets back in.”
Ozians say you can sometimes spot her floating soft palate if you look to the western sky.