A Whole World Of
Performance Enhancements
By Marjorie Drysdale

About 15 years ago I was playing my flute in a recording studio. I had never done this before, and was surprised to be instructed not to taper off my final note, as flutists are trained to do.

"Just keep playing strong," he advised. "I'll do the tapering." And so he did, with a little round knob.

A recording engineer can do all sorts of things for you. For example, a flat singer's pitch can be raised. A sharp singer's pitch can be lowered. No vibrato? He can add it. Too slow? He can speed it. Too loud? He can soften it. You can end up sounding pretty darn good, thanks to the mixer man!

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago while reading about Barry Bonds and the performance-enhancing drugs he is purported to have taken. Now we also have Floyd Landis, who has lost the crown that he won at the Tour de France, and track superstar Marion Jones, pleading guilty to previous denials.

Then there’s the scandal at Hanover High School. Students not only stole tests, they actually broke into the school to do this. All so that they could enhance their performance on a few tests, and appear smarter than they really were.

Guilty people have to pay the piper—agreed. But let's take a look at the world we all live in. It’s a world of performance enhancement.

Does that model on the cover of your favorite fashion magazine really have eyes that big and thighs that small, or is there a digital enhancer lurking somewhere in the background, fiddling around with Photoshop?

How many entertainers visit a plastic surgeon for nips and tucks, just to get a crack at a performance—any performance? Others prefer the needle to the knife, injecting collagen into their lips, silicon into their breasts, and botox into their foreheads.

Breasts don't even look like breasts anymore. They look like round, hard grapefruits. And don't give me the "it just evens the playing field" argument. The playing field never evens out. Somebody's always upping the ante. Pretty soon women are going to start falling over.

We're enhancing our dogs. We’re putting little plastic things between their ears so that these appendages will grow at just the right angle. We breed collies to have pointy noses, even though this leaves less room for their brains.

Then there's Viagra, which is nothing if not a performance-enhancing drug. And it's not just the older men who are buying it. Younger men are following that old adage, "Good, better, best, never let it rest, until the good is better and the better is best!"

Not to be outdone, we now have libido-enhancing pills for women. Couple that with the extension of the childbearing years—just last year we had a 60-year old woman giving birth—and soon we'll have to enhance the nursing homes with cribs and changing tables.

And how about the companies who make these drugs? You can bet that hot sales have been enhancing the performance of their stocks!

Our politicians? Their performances are regularly enhanced by speech writers and spin doctors. I don't begrudge them the image-makers who style them to look good on TV, but couldn't the candidates at least speak their own thoughts?

Let’s get to our personal performance enhancements. Spell check. Grammar check. Online services that translate into other languages for you. Piano keyboards that play the chords for you.  

Enter "Baby Einstein," a DVD series put out by Disney that is supposed to make Baby smarter. Turns out, though, that infants who were plunked in front of these DVD's actually understood fewer words than did babies who didn't watch them. 

Food for thought.

Finally, consider our weapons. Just how illusory is the strength of our war machine, "enhanced" as it is with mega-bombs that are of little use in guerilla combat? 

The trouble is, power isn't wisdom. Louder isn't better. Bigger isn't better, richer isn't better, prettier isn't better, younger isn't better, sexier isn't better. But oh, how we chase after these chimeras! 

Remember how hard Dorothy and her cohorts struggled to reach the Emerald City? How they trembled at the sight of the mighty Oz? His frightening face filled the room and his booming voice shook the rafters. It took a little dog to discover that the powerful Wizard was really just a small man, much enhanced by the levers he manipulated behind a tall curtain.

The Emerald City. Maybe that's where we're headed. We're certainly not in Kansas anymore. And no host of performance enhancers hiding behind the scenes can give us the brains, or the heart, or the courage to find our way home again.