Somewhere over the East Coast in the early 1990s, a 9-year-old boy flying alone discovered the flight attendant’s call button.
He pressed it. A flight attendant appeared. He turned off the light. He pressed again.
“I’ve probably done it about 15 times,” Chris Donisi told TODAY.com. When the plane landed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the captain came out, took back the little plastic wings he had been given and told him he would never fly Delta again. His aunt Phyllis saw everything and she walked him to the car by his ear.
This was Donisi’s first real memory of Boston Logan International Airport. His next one will have a much wider audience. Starting this month, around 43 million travelers a year will hear it welcome them home.
On November 5, the Massachusetts Port Authority named Donisi, 43, the first “Voice of Logan.” He is a pipe fitter from East Arlington. The competition, which lasted two months, attracted nearly 6,000 audition videos and approximately 35,000 votes from the public. Massport CEO Rich Davey announced the news live on Kiss 108’s “Billy & Lisa in the Morning.” He then introduced Donisi at an airport news conference as “a pipefitter with pipes.”
The gig is unpaid. Donisi keeps his day job.
‘Mom, very good’
Massport launched the competition in September. Participants, all Massachusetts residents, read a short welcome script. The search became a local sensation. It inspired reader-submitted scripts, an open casting call at Terminal A and, on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, a Ben Affleck audition.
Donisi almost didn’t enter. His mother, Helen Donisi, 70, found the opportunity and sent it to him. The weeks passed. Three or four days before the deadline, she asked him if he had recorded her video.
He hadn’t done it.
“She got angry and said to me, ‘Do it, please do it,'” he says. “And I said, ‘Mom, okay, I’ll do one quickly.'” He went down, did a few takes and hit send.
“It’s an ‘I told you so’ thing,” he said.
When the eight finalists were narrowed down to one, Donisi had no idea. He had received an email about a media training session. He assumed he was logging into a Zoom group with the other candidates.
Instead, he found Kiss 108 and Davey waiting for him. “It was a deer-in-the-headlights moment,” he says. “The emotions just flooded in, and it was just good things and just excitement, overwhelmed, but in a good way.”
What got him the job, of course, was the voice, and Donisi has his thoughts on what makes Boston so special.
To most foreigners, a Boston accent is a Boston accent. Donisi understands it differently. Residents, he says, can often place a loudspeaker around the neighborhood or city just by listening.
“People call you. They say, ‘Hey, are you from Somerville? Are you from Charlestown? Are you from Arlington?” he says. “It’s almost like people can point out the accent of a specific city or region.”
He says it’s not really about the dropped R’s.
“It’s about the fluency of the accent,” he says. “It really, really changes from neighborhood to neighborhood. It’s just the way people, you know, dance when they talk.”
The accent seems to be transmitted. Donisi and his wife, Kristin, have two children: Freya, 3, and Odin, 2. Kristin is a nurse and is also from Arlington. Odin is still mostly in “dada”. Freya, he says, “really understands it.”
Some people come from Boston. Others appear to have been built by him. Donisi is firmly in the second camp, and his answers to a few quick questions prove it.
The whirlwind tour
The most Bostonian thing he ever did: riding the T all night when I was a kid.
Favorite team: The Bruins, “all day”. The Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics are equally beloved, but “when it comes to brass,” the Donisis are hockey people.
Dunkin’s order: a regular medium with a Boston cream. Sometimes hash browns.
Restaurant to visit: Caffe Paradiso in the north.
Celebrity he would choose to present via loudspeaker: Ben Affleck. “After seeing him do the Voice of Logan thing,” he said, “that should be him.”
What Boston means to him: “Boston is my heart, for sure,” he says. “Boston made me who I am and how I work.” For 43 years, he said, he observed the ups and downs of the city and the way people came together, “even with this competition.”
That includes his fellow finalists, who he also calls winners. The group has been texting since the news broke. They try to come together to celebrate.
Massport says Donisi will start recording soon, so his messages can be out by mid-November, in time for the holiday rush.
Gn bussni
