Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Watergate Still Kind Of Bothers Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 4 | Aired on 01.29.2007
Spooky music begins to play as Victoria tells us that she sounds "like a Disney princess" and twirls slowly and creepily around with her hair in her hands like she's about to fly away or turn into Agnes of God, and Ryan is fairly indulgent with her nerdy, needy, unsocialized self, and is again just adorable, turning cheesily to the camera as she heads inside, What he says is: "Hair we go!" But what he means is: "This goddamn show is not going to break me."
Simon is not feeling her when she walks in, because she's dressed like a Mennonite, and they stare at her and at the hair, and Randy calls it a conversation piece, and Simon's like, "Whatever. Why are you here?" She talks unending madness about how she wants to be a "role model" and "touch people's hearts" and -- get this right here -- to "uplift them when they need it most." I defy you to find the problem there, because there isn't one, but if that's entirely true, then how come I keep making a fist without noticing it? Simon admits that Victoria is a genuinely nice person, and gives her a beautiful smile. She leaves to get her mother, for some reason, and as they're heading back into the audition room, she snatches her mother's dorky glasses and passes them quickly to Ryan. Hilarious and smooth, this girl. I think I just like the economy of scale, like what's embarrassing is like a matruschka doll and no matter how nerdy you yourself are, there's something you yourself find mortifying and would like to help with. Everything that rises, I guess.
Victoria still hasn't sung, though, which is a danger sign. So Simon stares at both of them, with their stupid hair and their dickies and culottes and whatever's embarrassing, and mom laughs how "it's a family thing," which is a huge clue to how mom operates, right there, because what it is, is a "mom and daughter" thing that A) you started and B) would make Sigmund Freud shake his head worriedly and go, "Vaaaas?" Victoria finally, finally sings, and of course she sings "You Raised Me Up," because people in cults only get to listen to like three cassette tapes, now that Amy Grant's betrayed us all, and she sings with her back straight, like in choir, and sounds like choir, and her mom's standing right there, and whatever. At some point you stop bathing your children and trust yourself to have at least gotten the basics across. She has a total choir voice: good high range, tone clear as a bell, weird pronunciations. Randy stops her fast and thanks her, and Simon tells them that they are creepy and this was not an audition but a valentine from one head of hair to another. Victoria has trouble believing that she's good but not great, and outside, Dad's totally effin' creepy with a red shirt under a black suit, mom completely forgotten as she burrows into him, and he's saying there are no losers, and she's repeating the same thing over and over and over: "It was meant to be, it's fine, it's fine," and whatever Calvinist thing they still do in the woods, and Ryan's very wicked uncomfortable, and then there's a long slow procession of the hair people leaving, and the sad music of their passing. He Who Walks Behind the Rows apparently says better luck next year.