Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Take Seattle To The Zoo
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.16.2007
Paula makes it clear that she only likes the Hotness's horrible personality, and definitely not the singing. I like anything that reinforces the idea that only trash talks back to Simon, because I think this whole show would be a lot more respectable if it didn't play off the anti-authority stuff with Simon, who is ultimately the final word and is always right. Whatever. If we'd listened to him about Clay, think how much trouble we could have avoided. Or effin' Taylor Hicks. She starts singing some other, even scarier song about how she's going to die if you don't... who cares. Paula's adorable but repetitive, Simon's awesome, begging her to stop a million times before offering that her best option might be going down to get a job "at the port." Either this is totally hilarious, or my affection for Simon is clouding my judgment, but man did I laugh. She tells him to get a lobotomy in return, which is somehow also funny, but there's just so much more of this show to go. He makes this funny new face he's debuting this season, called the Sad Clown, which is very cute, and lies that he would have said yes if the others weren't so against her, and then outside she says, awesomely, that probably he only likes "back-country Englishman sheep stuff," so she doesn't really care what he says. Heh. She explains that she was "just too hot for 'em," and then outside the building there's a very fake scene of her commiserating with Brandon G., who is many things, but I doubt his judgment is so very poor that he would engage in a conversation with this... creature.
By 11 AM, Simon has said "no" to approximately a billion people, including a cute dude who apparently was told he sings "like a Shakepearean actor," and a little high school guy who yells at Simon that he is "ridiculous."
Next up is Amy Salgado (23, Seattle), who for some reason I find a lot more offensive than I really should. It has to do with this weird obsession and personality and ego that she gets from being a mother, how her six year old son Armando is like her only friend in life. She's like the kind that if you asked her a question about anything at all, she'd relate it back to her kid, because that's her entire personality. That, and hating her husband with a poisonous hatred for simply being of the correct belief that she cannot sing. But Armando thinks she can, and blahblah emotional incest scary stuff and she cannot get herself off the topic of this kid, and like you wonder -- you've met these people, you know who I'm talking about -- if she ever hears herself talking and wonders silently, "Am I ever going to shut up about my damn kid?" I just want to know which of the ways he's going to deal with her unhealthy attachment to him and her motherhood role: are they going to find her, like "A Rose For Emily," or is he going to get married to a woman with the same name as her and be unhappy, or is he going to live at Oilcan Harry's? These are the choices. Good luck having a personality of your own, Armando. She talks at length about her son's professional opinion that she's a great singer, and how he has eradicated wire hangers from their apartment and whatever, and makes herself cry like six different times talking about what a creepy, greedy, grasping mom she is, and finally shuts up and goes in to see the judges, and manages to shut up for five seconds about her kid, which is just long enough to sing a shitty, shitty rendition of Xtina's "Reflection," a song I hate anyway. Think about this: while Xtina is wonderful in every way, and I do adore her professionally and at this point personally, she's still the Juliana Hatfield for the next generation. (In turn the Janis Ian, if you're making a timeline). Songs about how ugly you are, but really you're pretty, but secretly you know you're ugly, but you need somebody to tell you you're beautiful, but if they did could you really believe it, but you still hope somebody tries, even though you don't need anybody's evaluation, except for how... I don't know. Secret cutting and a Janeane Garofalo kind of self-hatred that thinks it's anything but. Like nobody knows if they're the good kind of Tori Amos fan or the bad kind until Judgment Day. Amy is the bad kind of whatever scale you're looking at right this second. She tells them again and again that her horrible singing is due to dryness of the throat, and whatever whatever, Simon makes fun of her, she's awful, a repellent person in many ways who cannot sing. Good luck to Mr. Salgado, not that he deserves it. Good luck to Armando, who is going to be one of those Tori Amos fans before you know it.