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
Simon laughs out loud because she's so cute, and then she tries and fails to sing Bonnie Raitt's "Something To Talk About," with a deep smoky voice and too much in the nose unpolishedness and some really bizarre pageanty moves, and Simon staring at her, now bored and hateful, and Randy staring at her and wondering what the hell. When she's done, Simon says this: "You sound very old-fashioned, and you sing through your nose, and it's a shame." Which is a nice way of telling her that her mom is right and that she's a commodity; the pageant circuit doesn't lie; but it's okay. Randy tells her she's got a lot more work to do if she really wants this, and outside Ryan again goes, "Awwww, noooooo!" So sweet. She cries on her mom, who assures her that doing your best is the second best thing to actually succeeding, and there are loud squeaking noises coming from her for a while, until Ryan gets bored.
So that's the end almost of Birmingham, but Ryan wonders if they couldn't just find one last person to rescue them: somebody to pick up where Ruben, Bo and Taylor left off. Jesus God I hope so. Nothing would better make my day than to see that particular fuckin' legacy continue unbroken.
Brandy Patterson (28, Birmingham AL) looks a lot like Nicole Randall Johnson, of the late, lamented Significant Others, the currently lamentable MADtv, and the soon-to-be lauded, then immediately lamented, Andy Barker, PI. She's not a genius of hilarity like Ms. Johnson, or a genius of any kind, although she's interesting in certain ways that hold your interest a bit better than that awful old woman that we started with: she's jumpy and erratic, and talks exactly like somebody making fun of a cleft palate in the 1950s, cf. that nerf-nerf joke your dad tells. She's adorably extraordinary! Brandy! "They're going to think, 'Where have you been? We've been waiting on you!'" she tells us. And you know what, I didn't know that I was waiting for Brandy, but part of me really, it turns out, was.
Randy, apparently feeling her crazy field all around as she walks in, reacts by getting crazy too: "Brandy and Randy!" he says. "Simon, have you met Brandy?" Simon wonders how it is that Paula is not here, but somehow she still is. Brandy says a lunatic hello and explains that she's "the only person [her] family" that "gots the nerves" to be a star, and then she sings "Like A Virgin," and it looks like she's the only person in her family with a disorder of the nerves. She sounds like she's making cruel fun of the hard of hearing, while throwing her limbs around and bugging her eyes out. Somebody needs to get her the hell in hand. Simon grins at her like a vacation in somebody else's mystery and she takes off her jacket. As she heads into the chorus, Simon and Randy whisper, "One...two...three! Like a virgin!" Simon finds it all too difficult to watch; afterward, he thanks her for "an absolutely rotten audition." Things go from cute-crazy to scary-crazy faster than you can say "sugar tits." Brandy yells at Simon that he -- and not everything that just happened -- is "wrong," and he tries to explain how charming her craziness is, which makes the job of seeming honest and not mean even harder, but how "on this, I am so right." She offers that perhaps it is the wooden floor on which people have successfully auditioned any number of times, not that we've ever seen them, and Randy laughs that it's possibly "the wall to the left" that's throwing her off. She gives him a hilarious look like that's the most retarded thing she's ever heard. "You are barking mad, aren't you, Brandy?" Simon says to himself.