Episode Report Card Joe R: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bo Bice is the New Clay Aiken, Part II
By Joe R | Season 5 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.23.2006
Jordan Southerland (24, Beulaville NC) is dressed in his father's firefighter uniform. He's a hulking sort of guy, receding hairline and rosy cheeks. Really sweet, from the bits of him we see. He's singing "You Raise Me Up" by Josh Groban -- which: minus a million points -- but he's actually pretty good. You can see Paula start to look off to the side and giggle until she realizes that he's not the awful singer she thought he'd be. Because he comes in the packaging of someone who would be awful. You can't yet peg all the normally-dressed auditioners as the good ones, but among the people who come dressed for Halloween, 99 out of 100 will be car wrecks. Jordan is not. He's more of a nice guy than he is a good singer, though. He sold me when he met Randy's lame "fire in the hole!" line with a barked "bring the heat!" which instantly turned Randy's dumb comment into this football huddle solidarity thing. This kid can win friends and influence people, I think. Randy hauls out the season's first "I thought it was oh-kay," which I am fucking thrilled to hear, let me tell you. Christ. Randy's a "no," but Paula is a "yes." Simon goes the "sorry, but I'm going to agree with...Paula" route, and it's tough to tell who is more pleasantly surprised by this, Paula or Jordan. Randy tells him he has to bring the fireman's outfit to Hollywood, and then Jordan is awesome again when he looks over to Simon, shakes his head a little, and they both say "no." Simon shoos him off before he can get into gushing about Kelly Clarkson. Heh.
And now the soundtrack goes all AI Sprach Zarathustra and Seacrest VO takes us on a tour of the worst auditioners of all time. I will have to take Ryan's word for it. We see: some baseball-hat-wearing toothpick named Derek (don't remember him); some freak named Keith who apparently sang "Like a Virgin" (ditto); William Hung (sigh); Leroy Wells (wait, the dude with the fronts? I think I did see that one before); and finally Mary Roach, whose episode I never saw and is the only one I regret not seeing. This all leads up to the blonde-wigged, tube-topped, probably-hooker Rhonetta Johnson. If you can picture an even squattier Li'l Kim, you're more than halfway there.
Rhonetta struts down the sidewalk, shows off her tacky silver-sparkly boots, dances in front of the AI backdrop, and then busts what must qualify as a "high" kick, by her squatty standards. It's high enough, however, because with her skirt being as short as it is, the porch door is wide open when she kicks like that. And then, and I wish to God this didn't actually happen, but as she kicks, the silver-sparkly font reading "Rhonetta" comes flying out of her cooch and plasters itself on your TV screen. I think I tried to will that part into not being true, but there it is. She interviews some tired bullshit about everywhere she goes people stop and stare, and girls be jealous of her, and she does some sort of Batusi crap with the fingers across her eyes, and she flashes her cooch again, and dances with a chair. She always dresses "real nice like this," by the way, lest you think it's all just for TV. Ryan interviews her about how much of an asshole she looks like, and off to the side, the Rainbow Brite chick from the top of the show is like, "Even Canary Yellow wasn't that much of a ho." I feel sad for Rainbow Brite, because I get the impression that she had to stand in line with Rhonetta all day.
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