Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bo Bice is the New Clay Aiken, Part III
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 3 | Aired on 01.30.2006
I guess you probably don't live in Texas, so I'll tell you a secret: Tyler and Longview are basically Dallas. Arlington and Ft. Worth are basically one creature with Dallas but they're big enough that you'll get beat down if you say they're Dallas. Pflugerville and Round Rock are basically Austin. The Woodlands is basically Houston, but north, which equals money (south equals crude oil fumes, which smell like death by stink, and the Gulf, which smells like: ditto). Because Texas was a pioneer place for so long, there are way more towns than there need to be, jealously defending themselves from annexation by other towns, even if they are merely feet away, and they all have like ridiculous names, like "Notrees" (guess what they don't have there?), and they all worry about who's a suburb of whom, when the fact is, they're just refusing to give in to the fact that there's no difference between them, so, like, Midland is a suburb of nothing, like there's no larger town nearby to be a suburb of, but it acts just like a suburb, and even though it's a farming and oil community of like 100,000 people, it still has its own suburbs, like the prenominate Notrees. Midland and Odessa are only about twenty minutes apart, which you'd never guess by the fact that each town blames the other for all drugs and prostitution, which is a classic case of slapping Peter when it's Paul's fault, because everybody knows that all drugs in this country come from Plano. So now you know -- and please don't email me about it to say that Tyler Effing Texas has this rich culture and should not be considered as a suburb of Dallas or whatever, because you and I both know the real deal. Plus, in twenty years we'll all be suburbs of Houston anyway. And soon after, we'll just be "Houston," and I'll finally be back home where I belong.
Meet Cierra Johnson (20, Pflugerville TX), who brought about the tangent above, because something called a "Pflugerville" deserves for you to know it's really just one of about a hundred outliers in the Austin cityscape and not some kind of cowboy desert town with serapes and Clint Eastwood or Li'l Abner or whatever you were thinking. She's very, very pretty, that pore-less TV kind of pretty, and says she's a veterinary assistant and "part-time dance choreographer," and her take on all of this is that the big mistake is trying to audition by singing like your personal idol. She prefers to sing with her "new, jazzy voice," and would like us to know that she is "great." Simon is immediately in love with her, and the song she's going to sing is his favorite song of all time, and he's just staring and creepy, and honestly, she's not good, but she's not bad. The vocal quality is just not that...oh, there it is. Oh, hell. Things go south and ugly in a very real way. Everyone's bummed, but especially Simon because he wanted to love her, which he tells her. It's awful. Randy's like, "You have twelve keys going on there." Simon still can't believe she was bad, because he assumed she'd be great. She offers to sing another song and he snits, "'Silent Night,' but leave off the 'night.'" She starts singing "Silent Night" and won't stop for anything, and they all laugh at the weirdness and stupidity of that, and finally Randy's just reduced to yelling, "No to the Christmas Girl! No to the Christmas Girl!" Paula passes, and Simon lies, "I would have said yes." She leaves and Paula's jaw drops; Simon refers to it as "the soundtrack to Nightmare Before Christmas," and then outside, she tells us we'll be buying her album soon, but "that's all I have to say because I don't wanna be embarrassed on TV more than I already am." Aww. She kind of got to me there at the end. I mean, I'm not going to cry or anything, but I feel that.