Bo Bice Is The New Clay Aiken, Part I

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Tuesday

So I guess we're doing two hours in each audition city? How insanely worthless. In fact, though, this is a great first episode, all-formula all the time, but: we actually get to see a few of the 34 that get through to Hollywood, there are only a couple of really offensive auditions, Paula literally cannot make it through a single sentence without going off the rails at some point, the classless inter-contestant hateration is addictive, and the bad auditions are smack-yourself awkward.

Derek Dupree (25, Chicago) is incredibly sweaty, can't sing, and freaks out the judges, then comes back an hour later and still can't sing. Two sets of twins get through, four awesome guys in total. One set (the Brittenum boys) wear cravats and weird little beards and look 40, but are great. The other set (the Simmons boys) are wearing multiple polos, collars popped, and look like what might happen if you ever saw a black person on The O.C. Kevin Brenneman (21, Cuyahoga Falls OH) has a whole Adam Pratt thing happening, including bad singing. Simon humiliates both Charles Berry (23, Darby PA, told to become a female impersonator) and Erik Lawhon (18, gender-complex, Maitland MO, called an "auntie"). The brunette Barrettsmith sisters (19 and 23, Spring Grove IL) look completely different but sound nearly exactly the same, in a good way -- they even get the full twenty-minute hometown edit. Eerie doppelgangers Zachary Smits (17, Hudson WI) and David Radford (17, Crystal Lake WI) are boring Abercrombie hot and do that weird speech-impediment big band singing, but I think they will go very far in this competition and I will spend this whole season confused as hell. Crystal Parizanski (16, Palatine IL) is the Paris Hilton-looking moron the color of fake walnut paneling who can't sing, but we spend 100 years on her and her disgusting mother anyway. Yuliya Matus (24, Ukraine via Naperville IL) does a Pussycat Dolls rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody," and then we basically fast-forward to when they find her bones in a shallow desert grave in Vegas or the Valley. David Hoover (28, Wexford PA) has a psychotic break right in front of the judges, eyes rolling, legs twitching, and Paula puts him through in the name of crazy people solidarity. The multiple-suckage montage tonight is "Lady Marmalade," and it's the best thing that happens all night. Congratulations, Chicago! Tonight: Denver.

Wednesday

The Good: Lisa Tucker (16, Anaheim) sings "One Moment In Time" and is sold to us egregiously, but it's valid. Ace Young (24, LA), the biggest pre-season pimpee, luckily also lives up to the hard sell. Good voice, boring as hell, very cute (and a dead ringer for Scott Peterson). Best of the night goes to Rochelle Elaine Dye (25, Kansas City) gets it done, singing "Chain Of Fools." Actual years are spent getting to know sleeper hottie Chris Daughtry (25, McLeansville NC) and lovely wife Erin Brockovich before a rushed, rocker rendition of "The Letter" that is both soulful and profoundly boring. April Walsh (27, Laguna Niguel CA) does a nervous "It's Oh So Quiet" with more energy and spirit than the rest of the episode put together. The Bad and/or Ugly: These audition rounds are rarely simply bad, because it's not very interesting, and that's double true here. Marlows Davis (16, Denver) sings Alicia Keys weirdly, and then wigs out, predictably. The montage of suck for the night is devoted to "rockers," boy ones and girl ones both, and in true Denver style, there's not really much to say about them. Angela Garcia (25, Hobbs NM) is kind of icky and butchers "Rush Rush," for which I cannot forgive her. The pointless cruelty of showcasing the impaired likes of Nick "Flawless" McCord (25, Athens GA, clothing by Butterick's) and Ben Hausbach (24, Pompano Beach FL) is not lost on the audience, but relatively humorous due their lack of clue. The Other: Garet Johnson (18, Veteran WY) is…deeply weird, like a Pennsylvania Dutch kid, who sings in a pleasant voice which is very different from his speaking, and basically gets through on his immensely likeable cowboy oddness. Gender pioneer Zachary Travis (18, Denver) sings Whitney Houston's "Queen Of The Night," causing both Paula and Randy to be five times cooler and nicer than maybe ever before, and causing Simon to lose his shit completely. While Zachary's confidence and will in the audition are impressive, the defensive whining after the fact removes several points of goodwill from his overall score. Sometimes a little self-consciousness is a good thing, dude. week: Joe R. will be your tour guide in Greensboro, NC, and an unnamed third city which better not be Austin, or there will be arm-wrestling. Want more? The full recap starts right below!

Tuesday

Hi, guys! I missed you! Okay, so Seacrest's decided to greet us at Kodak House wearing a blue velvet coat and dressed violently right, to the point where it's gotta be as uncomfortable for him as it is for us. There's Cecile Frot-Coutaz in the credits, but I'm so over her now that I've met Dan Etheridge. You can only love one producer of television at a time, and that's a fact. So Chicago is cheering and singing and there are a billion of them, like usual, and it's an overwhelming wave of people, like usual. I've never met anybody from Chicago, native or transplant, that I didn't like. It's a bit too far north for my innate old-man fear of the cold and generally all weather, but I'd like to invite all of Chicago to come visit me here in temperate Austin. We have several tall buildings, and sporadic organized crime!

Since 2002, Ryan tells us to fill time, over a billion votes have been cast. We see shots of people you might have voted for, such as Carrie and Fantasia and Josh Gracin and Mikalah. Remember them? Remember when Simon was mean to Scott Savol that one time? Remember how Bo Bice would sing songs, and William Hung would not? Remember how American Idol is an "integral part" of American Culture? Remember when Constantine went home and I was so pleased I didn't have much to say about it at the time? Because that's how I remember it.

Remember when Ryan was vastly younger-looking on the cover of EW? More than a half million people have auditioned, and Randy has the most blinged-up watch I've ever seen. Lots of people talk about how they want to "touch people" with their singing. There's like two seconds of Adam Pratt, but I don't even know if I want him involved with this show, moving forward. Remember the collapsing mom of the one guy? This is so lame. Why the filler, show? Ryan then crosses the line, getting hyper with his bollocks about how auditioning for the show is your right as an American and how American Idol auditions are just the same thing as: going to prom, learning to drive, graduating from high school, getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, getting manicures weekly with Paula Abdul, and blowing old guys for your own radio show. I don't know about you, but I can identify.

We see a bunch of talented people we won't be seeing again for weeks, and then settle right into the cruel laughter: we see up a gross kicking girl's skirt, we see into the sad mind of a dork singing "Thriller." We see a depressing girl with Trump hair singing "Lean On Me," and I mean to tell you that she has the Trump hair exactly. We see Flawless, who we'll meet in exactly one hundred years from this paragraph -- synchronize Swatches on my mark -- and a dude doing cheerleader dances, a female impersonator, tomorrow night's April Walsh going up the wrong escalator and Garet the cowchild, the older set of twins from tonight who turned out to be identity thieves in a very real way, and Seacrest admits that the auditions are going to be hell and last one million years. He calls this "kissing frogs." I just call it "fucking amazing television, and a privilege to watch."

Seacrest points out that Chicago is windy -- good one -- and he's standing in a convention center with a massive crush of people standing behind him all the way to the horizon and around the curve, who make me nervous, and there's a lot of weather, and they put on a parka and poncho fashion show, and this is exactly the kind of boredom-and-innate-dorkiness-induced bullshit that made me avoid the Austin auditions, and then Seacrest is literally trampled by them running toward the camera. Like that many people wouldn't smell weird anyway -- now you've gotten them wet.

Up first of all in the whole season is a very sweaty man named Derek Dupree (25, Chicago), who gets weird in front of the camera and talks about "I'm so passionate that I just can't stand it, because I often get turned on by myself...oh, look at all this passion running through his veins! It's wonderful!" I already hate him and his very unhelpful antiperspirant. He says he's "confident to the point [that] it hurts," and that this confidence "cuts off the circulation." He strides into the judges' room and acts weird and Paula asks if in fact he really can sing "any pitch" and he puts his no-doubt extensive musical training to work: "Not any pitch, three different pitches. Bass, medium and semi-high." Paula: "Semi-high?" See, this is funny because that's what they both are, rimshot. He then warns them he's going to "break out an original medley," the contents of which he wants to keep under wraps. He starts low and unimpressive, then pulls out some money and wipes his brow with it. I'm so over this tool; let's wrap it up. The following takes place between 8 PM and 8 million PM: He continues singing awfully and acting like a jackass, they finally tell him to get lost, Randy asks him to respect that he is not very good, he asks if he can come back in an hour, for no good reason they say yes, he leaves, Paula points out that he is easily 43 years of age.

The somewhat irritating but very pretty Katrina Yaukey (28, NYC) starts in with "The Humpty Dance," and the tragic thing here, besides the obvious, is that at the end you can hear that she has a good voice, but Simon cuts her off right at this place, throwing her whole strategy off. They ask for another song, and she immediately forgets all the songs in this world. I feel bad for her, but dude. Paula tells her the lesson is that you have to come prepared, and after she leaves they talk about how nice she was. Then comes the very happy, very deluded and rosy-cheeked Justin Whocares, who sings two lines from "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)," the title of which gives me hives of mystery and confusion, and then about three words of "Beyond The Sea," both times stopped by Simon, and they stare at each other for a while, and he leaves. Randy laughs about how Simon is being pretty cool right now, and Paula shakes her head. I like it: why draw this shit out? They know immediately if you suck or not, and if they don't stop you after a single line, you know you're either the best or the worst, like in Project Runway. There's no middle ground.

Ryan sits with the Brittenum twins, who are...hmm. They have big, weird beards that are like goatees with a little extra coming out the bottom, and they have strange voices like the D-Squared guys. They explain to Ryan that the twin gimmick always falls through, not because it is a stupid gimmick, but because the twins usually suck, and because they depend on each other too much. This is all very interesting, but it would be more interesting if they weren't jailed as identity thieves the day after this aired, rendering the whole thing moot in addition to being a missing the train of colossal proportions. And then we don't even see their auditions yet, but we do dispatch a weird girl, a hipster, a gay homeboy with Muppet eyebrows, a confused girl, a girl who wants them to suck her dick, a guy in a big shirt who apparently "riffed too much," a pretty girl with a fauxhawk, and a man in a dress and blonde Pippi Longstocking braids, who thinks that his legs were simply too hairy for America. I personally feel that the problem was more likely the jackass in the dress that was attached to those shapely legs, but I guess we'll never know.

Randy calls the Brittenum twins (27, Memphis) "dudes," and they squeak with laughter and then do that creepy Sarah Silverman same-voice-at-once talking that twins do. They sing an original song that does not suck at all -- they have great voices, wonderful harmony. There are not many people ever on this show that I would listen to on purpose, but these are two. Unless they stole my identity, then it might get awkward. Paula also thinks the whole act was really cool, and then they do their solo thing. First is Terrell, who interrupts her accolades to start singing "My Girl," beautifully, with this very old-school Nat King Cole stuff happening, and then Simon asks the other one if he's going to sing "My Guy," which is admittedly funny, and everybody laughs because everybody knows the real deal here. Derrell sings "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" and Randy and Terrell clap along, and Terrell joins in on harmony a little bit, like he forgot it was a solo, but it doesn't really matter because they are both really good singers. They talk about how most twins on the show suck, or are creepy in other ways, and they get through to Hollywood unanimously. As the first successful audition in the season and the show, they are within their rights to run screaming through the streets about it, but I can't really join in. There's a middling funny bit where they run back and forth in front of the camera with different groups of randoms running and screaming along with them, but I bet those passersby stopped laughing when they found out their credit history was trashed.

Randy and Paula bitch at Simon about how mean he's being, which would make more sense if we'd seen him being mean yet. It's weird. This dental assistant girl talks about how hot Simon is and how she loooves him and whatever, whatever lady, because her boyfriend is ten times hotter than effing Simon. She tells us there's more to dental assistance than "the suctioning of saliva," which if you even say it stops being true, and we see her performing in a band called Catfight. Yeah. Meet Gina Glocksen (21, Naperville IL), and see her sing "The Power Of Love" by Celine Dion. She's got a good voice, a lot smaller range than she thinks, but mostly I'm just concerned: why you wanna sing Celine Dion in front of people? There's not a damn thing right with the woman except her obnoxious voice, which is technically awesome, so why go there? (Oh dude, have you seen that Anne Geddes book where Celine Dion dresses up like vegetables and poses with other people's babies also dressed up like vegetables? It's the most fucked-up thing in maybe the universe. You can find it in your Photography/Fine Art section; at least, that's where I find it every time I'm in a bookstore.) Gina teaches me that "The Power Of Love" is the same song as the "I'm your lady" song, which thing I did not know, because I could have sworn they were two different songs. Like, you could have made an easy $20 off me in a bar bet with that fact. Too bad that now, you cannot. Thanks, Gina. They put her through and everyone cheers, even an infant. The infant is not dressed as a vegetable. This child is not incredibly well-dressed or anything like that, it's just a normal baby, but at least it is not a food.

Then comes the bad singing of Gina Noriego (21, Chicago), who sings words from "Blue Moon," the few of them she knows, in no particular order, maybe twenty times before mixing it up with some other song's words, scaring Paula, then goes back to the random gerunds and adjectives from "Blue Moon," then starts crying and runs out. Mandisa Hundley (28, Antioch TN, cool as hell) opens with, "It's just Mandisa. The first name is enough to deal with." Normally a one-name person gets smacked, but that's such a good opener that I love her. She sings "Fallin'" and for once I don't mind hearing that song, which means Mandisa is more powerful than even she herself knows. Simon is deeply in love with her: "Everything I hoped you would be, you were." They all attempt to say yes on Hollywood simultaneously, and fuck it up, and they applaud. Simon cracks a fat joke, and Paula attacks him. Paula compares her to Frenchy, and Simon cracks another fat joke, and Paula attacks him again. Randy laughs like an imbecile the entire time. That one laugh he does, you know it? That's all he's got right now.

Whoa. Okay. Combine Adam Pratt and Gabriel Koerner, shrink the result, and you have Kevin Brenneman (21, Cuyahoga Falls OH). Needless to say, I am utterly smitten. Since we last spoke, I took over as the Battlestar Galactica recapper, and yeah, it's the best show on television and I love it, and the fans, and I love writing about a show I love, but the honest real truth is that I only took the job because it gets me one step closer to Gabriel Koerner. Life is a both a chess game and a highway, people. Kevin attempts "The Wait," by The Band, and it is terrible. Terrible, terrible. I love him so much and he is wearing a tangerine polo under a stripy coral t-shirt. It goes on and on and he's singing his ass off and the judges just look at him like he's killing them. They really should have stopped him sooner, but I want to marry him on top of a mountain, so I don't mind. Simon calls him a tiny "buzzy energetic thing" and compares him to a wasp, and then Simon and Paula do their whole bullshit Rugrats deal from last year, and it makes just as much sense, which is none, and is just as funny, which is a negative amount. Basically, Paula says he has a good voice for voice acting and the like, funny voice-overs, and Simon translates this to her calling him a rat, and it's maybe even stupider than last year, and Kevin almost cries and I nearly Hulk out, all, "Jacob fix it!" Paula loses her word control for the largest time so far: "You know what Simon I'm going to just try to shut your mouth right now." Having said her piece, she then...stares into space for an unlimited time. It was like the season hadn't really started until this happened. Hi, Paula! Hi, Paula's Crazy! Kevin leaves, and even Simon is chastened by his sad little face. That's pathos, dude.

Charles Berry (23, Darby PA) went to two auditions last year...and that's all you need to know, you know? But he continues, saying that he's learned from the judges' comments and is following their tips for this year. They seem to recognize him, and Paula remarks on his very smashing outfit. Then he screws it all up by singing a song of his own horrible invention about being the American Idol which is terrible both in concept and execution, sounding like an alternate National Anthem, only about the show, and sung by your mom. Randy's like, "Doesn't get any worse than that," and Simon advises him to shave his beard, put on a dress, and become the best female impersonator the world has ever seen. Paula interprets that Simon's saying Charles "should be a woman," which is not what he was saying at all, and Charles starts crying and leaves. Paula calls Simon an ass as Ryan is wrapping himself around Charles outside and trying to Horse Whisper him. Charles shrugs off the Seacrest love and runs outside, talking on the phone about how he has been humiliated. It's pretty sad. I don't guess we'll be seeing him year.

Amanda Rabideau (25, Hoffman Estates IL) enters hilariously with her goofiness all on shout, screaming her greetings, and then she and Simon have a contretemps about what is and is not interesting about her, and she talks about selling furniture and showing cattle, and it's boring but she's so cute and awkward and funny. She sings "Something To Talk About" and her voice is not bad, it's like if your mom was singing at first, but then it all goes to hell, just goes haywire painful and out of control in a nervous kind of way. Simon starts in immediately with hurting her feelings, and it's the way she keeps smiling that makes me like her, because she's clearly slapped by all this. Paula and I applaud her "passion" and Paula simply says she's "not right for the competition." Simon tries to force her to say "no," and even Randy's like, let it go, dude. "Simon I just want to squeeze your neck and pop it off your head," Paula says, then stares into space. Randy tells Amanda to name one of her cows after Simon, and Paula suggests she call it "Mad Cowell." I've never in recent memory wanted anything so badly as for that to have happened off the cuff, as edited, but I doubt that highly. Good on Paula either way. Amanda leaves, gracious and sweet as ever, and the other judges turn on Simon for being a dick. Amanda cries in the interview booth, and it's sad, and meanwhile Paula calls the "yes or no" thing that Simon just pulled "the weirdest thing you do" and says it drives her insane. And yeah, it's a dick move, because Paula cannot get to the point, ever, and making her do it is like asking Seacrest to kiss his sister. Or any girl at all.

The violently boring Deputy Brandon Groves (25, Wheeling WV) doesn't get Seacrest's stupid CHiPs joke, doesn't get the judges' banter, doesn't get the point of singing, doesn't know the words to "I Shot The Sheriff," doesn't care -- upfront he says this -- to sing any words but what he calls the chorus. Which amounts to him singing "I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy" seventeen times in a row without stopping or varying his tone in the slightest except to fuck it up, and every time you think he's done, he goes back for one or two more. Repeat eight cycles of this stopping, then starting again. The judges, unsurprisingly, are as bored as I am, but the real question is: why isn't Deputy Brandon yet bored with himself? Paula: "Oh Brandon, no." He leaves and she whispers to the producers: "Oh my God. For real. For real? For real!" It's like the most authentic she's ever been on the show. The most "for real," rather. I guess.

There's an unfunny and unending thing with Ryan and Derek Dupree, the guy on one-hour reprieve, begging strangers to let him sing for them. Nobody will, and we go around and around with this for a long time, and finally there are people around who don't care either, and this guy tells Ryan he likes his show, and it is super-cool how fast he flips to his other persona, production schmooze guy, all, "Would you like to be on it?" and with the eye contact, and poise, and just general demeanor, whom we won't be seeing for weeks and weeks, and without whom this show is nothing to me. The guy's like, "Not necessarily, no." Ryan drops his interest in this guy immediately. "Thanks anyway!"

Christine Davis (17, St. Peters MO) comes in wearing a frothy wedding dress, and there's a whole boring conversation with Paula and Simon about how American kids dress for prom and it's dumb, and then she sings "My Heart Will Go On" -- why? -- and generally I like her voice, although there are some bum notes for no reason. Simon is unimpressed and smirking, and after one particularly easy note that she biffs super-bad, even Randy has had it. Paula says she has a nice voice, but lacks experience, and Simon says that he hated everything about the audition, the dress, everything, and calls her version of the song "mediocre." Paula asks her to pursue voice lessons, and reminds her she's only 16. The girl says she'll be seeing them in the city, and not unkindly, Simon tells her to save the airfare. Again they fight about how mean Simon is being, and I still don't see it. Seacrest makes a dumb joke about how "Any time Simon sees a wedding dress you have lost him." Trust me.

More tourists laugh at Derek's awful singing, and then Blake Boshnack (20, Hewlett Neck NY) comes in dressed as the damned Statue of Liberty and only gets two words into "Start Spreading The News" before Simon dismisses him. That's what I'm talking about. Blake can't believe it and Simon has to tell him to leave about eight times before he does, visibly stunned and very pissed. Derek finally returns to the building. Why is Ryan even giving this dude the time of...oh, Ryan rolls his eyes at the camera. Ryan hates this storyline as much as I do. Good. Paula laughs out loud when Derek walks back in, and the judges are all clearly not feeling it. He sings this creepy song about "Susan in the bathroom stall" and "Constance on the make" which if you Google it, it's just bloggers talking about how creepy Derek Dupree is. He admits that he does not know the name of his awful song, making them laugh, and Simon floats the theory that Derek has been possessed by a six-year-old. In the interview booth, Derek admits the possibility that he is not "the music type," and then fills us in at length about how he is trying not to cry. I hate it when actual crazy people get through. It makes me feel like an ancient Roman or something.

Oh boy. Here we go. Meet Erik Lawhon (18, Maitland MO), the poster boy for all "American Idol is evil and homophobic" rhetoric until 24 hours from now, when a whole other mess of problems walks into the door. He's got red hair, pretty skin, and a slightly google-eyed gender ambivalence. Erik's grandmother and mom talk about how he has a great voice and how his music teacher, a reckless individual indeed, has said that he will "go a long ways." The grandmother talks about how she will, if necessary, "pull Simon out of here" and will "hurt his body." Which is funny, but not as funny as the sproing sound of Ryan's giant boner hitting denim just then.

"There's something about that that's exciting to me…" he begins, then trails off, trying desperately to back up time just five seconds and self-edit, "…in a way where, uh, I mean, like, in a way where he would have...um, bruises?" She asks if he'd like to help her "hurt Simon's body" and he actually chokes on the mouthwatering thought: "God, you don't know how badly." He says this last not unlike Pat O'Brien might on your voicemail, weird and accidentally salacious and aggressive and awesome. It's so, so rough when you read this much of your own press that you have to remember that you're you, and not the thoughts of people that don't know you. Like, he was just having his day, talking to people, said something innocuous, realized it was the first thing marked for the final edit the second he said it, then just dug himself into a weirder and weirder hole trying to cover his bases. It bums me out because he is a nice guy and the last thing he needs is to have to live simultaneously inside his head, my head, and the heads of a thousand fan-fic writers at once. There's not enough to Ryan Seacrest, to spread it that thinly.

Inside, Paula asks Erik what makes him different, and Simon and Randy giggle. Erik laughs too: "That's not nice!" He's kind of charming, and at least he knows he's got some baggage going on. His voice is out of this world weird, very high and friendly and strange. And he's not started singing yet. He's going to sing Simon's favorite song in the world, "If You're Not The One," the least of an unimpressive catalog by the very attractive car-flipper Daniel Bedingfield. This should be vile. Outside, the mom's talking about how she doesn't want to hear him singing because it makes her cry when he sings, and Ryan gets choice paralysis about what to say about that. Erik begins to sing, and it's so much weirder and scarier than you even thought. Just quavery and unmoored by your silly categories and all over the place and...you know Anne on Arrested Development? The girlfriend? Erik sounds like how she sang in the office party episode at her parents' creepy Christmas party. He's so, so young and there are so, so many things he urgently needs to know. Ryan should explain some things to him, stat. Simon gets bored quickly by the giant farce of this, and Erik blames the terrible performance on his nerves. Paula: "At least you knew that." What else are you supposed to say? Not what Simon says, for sure: "You sing like an auntie...your auntie? That used to sing after lunch rather badly?" Randy and Paula give Erik firm no votes, and Simon dicks around: "Rather harsh. I would have said yes." Paula attacks once again. Who knew that all this time, the chronic pain was all that was keeping her from being a mugger?

Ryan sics the grandmother on Simon, who gets a little scared, because like most grandmothers on this show, she is obviously slightly bats. She demands to know why he is so rude, and Simon is actually confused. "All I said was, he sounded like an auntie." She does not deny this, but asks why that would be a problem. "What are you looking for?" Not him. "He's unique." Simon explains to her that she's giving Erik "false hope," but does admit that that is "what grandmas do," then takes his leave. "He's short," says the grandma. "And he's aging," mentions Ryan.

Welcome to the Barrettsmith sisters, Brooke (23) and Leah (19), of Spring Grove IL. They look like two very different kinds of sorority girl. We visit their tiny town for a good long while, and get to see: some cars, a stoplight, and a "corn maze" commemorating the time the Bears won. They scream and run around and a banjo goes crazy as they talk about how they will support each other no matter what happens. In the audition room, Simon asks for a verse and chorus from each. Brooke goes first, singing the "It's In His Kiss" song from Mermaids, and her voice is very beautiful, but in that tricksy tic way of Scott Savol where you're not sure if it's real. Luckily, she seems able to back it up so far. Simon's almost immediately like, "Okay great, ?" Leah sings a song I don't know, about wandering through wind and rain and finding the sun eventually, on which she goes nuts, and it is beautiful. They sound similarly, but have different styles and personalities. That's how low this show sets my bar. Paula pulls some lame shit about how she'll say yes to both or neither of them, Simon says no to both for no reason, but extends Randy's yes to Leah to both of them on Randy's behalf -- one of them goes "Drama!" at this point -- and Paula decides to say yes to both because she loves her sister or something. Something stupid and utterly unrelated, to be sure. Paula tells them to work on their vocals, and Leah helps Brooke figure out that they are going to Hollywood, and they both scream and jump around and are cute.

Yvette Gomez (27, Hayward CA) is dancing, dressed like Charmed, and her shirt is bouncing around weirdly. Not at the top part, where shirts like that are meant to bounce, but down at the hem, where her number is. It's creepy, and it goes on and on. She's pretty and seems fun, and speaks really well, really charismatically. She sings "How Come You Don't Call Me," by Alicia Keys, and I start screaming for Anna to drop the damned baby and come running, because that's her favorite Alicia Keys song and the only one I can stand. We call it the "stop touching me" song, because at one point, out of nowhere, her voice goes deep and she sings, "'Cause you're touching me" and it's super-creepy. Sadly, Yvette is not singing it in a pretty way, because she doesn't have the best voice in the world, and her shirt is still going crazy, and she's trying so wicked hard and it is not good and it won't end. AND she doesn't even sing the "stop touching me" part, which is like the point of the song. I really very much like her. Simon explains that the apostrophe won't pick up the phone "because he can hear you sing" and that it was terrible. She disagrees, and Randy must support Simon that it is bad. Simon makes fun of her and she leaves, and does her exit interview just poised and beautiful and cool. Simon says, "Imagine a bag with nine cats in it dropped in boiling water," and then makes this yowling noise that...

Okay. Step back with me for a sec. I never thought I would discuss Ryan Seacrest's genitalia with you, because he has none, and yet I've mentioned his Ken doll junk at least two times in this recap. And you know I got a concussion at the Veronica Mars event in Austin last weekend, to go with my unstoppable viral infection. (And managed to have an amazing time anyhow. TWoP people are awesome people.) I'm telling you this not for pity, but to illustrate something very important: I was not in my right mind until yesterday. So when I tell you that I found Simon Cowell making cat noises fairly attractive, you understand that my judgment was impaired, yes? Not to mention that it's incredibly close to something that I wrote last year, nine cats in boiling water v. two cats in a garbage disposal. Not the most original concept, I'll grant. Still. Suspicious. Maybe that had bearing on my delight at the cat noises. I cannot say. Maybe Simon's reading this right now, and tomorrow I will answer the phone and he will be making that noise, and I'll have to scramble and change my address and everything. I don't want to talk about it anymore except to say that it happens several more times over the few minutes, and I seem to think it's cute each time, and each time it is to me like a most beautiful poem of love.

Speaking of cute. Meet Zachary Smits (17, Hudson WI), who says very earnestly that "I'm In The Mood For Love" is one of the best love songs EVER and it's going to be awesome to sing it to Paula! Finally! I think that Mr. Smits is one of those hot nerds you remember from high school where it takes you a second to realize that he is actually not hot/dumb but a dork, accidentally hot, and you have to quickly change gears. And this is not a generalization, but of the five guys I've met from Wisconsin, Mr. Smits is not exactly a radical departure. After he gets through and comes out, even Ryan will not be able to peel away from this kid. He's very, very charismatic. Like, watch: now sadly, he sings the awesome love song with that weird Rat Pack speech impediment thing, like, "I'm inda mooood foh lovv," that I absolutely despise. However, he is beautiful and clearly very, very nice, and I give him a pass on the pretense because he is 17. Paula's face goes absolutely slack like she's going Emily Rose, or maybe she's peeing, but he keeps singing. Paula's tongue goes crazy in her mouth. This is like L.I.E.. When he's done singing, the first thing Randy does is remind Paula that the kid is 17, and she chills kinda, but babbles more intensely than she would if it were somebody else standing there. Simon smelled the money when the kid came in, and is like, "You're charming as fuck, kid, and that always trumps crappy singing, but I'm going to fake a no." Paula defends his cheesy vocalization the dumbest, wrongest possible way, saying that it's "unique," when that's the opposite of what it is, and then they put him through. As he leaves, overjoyed, Paula, desperate to retain their connection, babble-shrieks, "You know what you've gotta do now?" Anything to continue the conversation. And this is where Zach is awesome: barely turning back, he goes, "Yep!"

Jessica Nelson (18, Peotone IL) is a no-account blonde with the beautiful eyes of my current stepmother, like exactly, and everything else is wrong. She's that slow-eyed kind of country angry that says bad things about your mom's boyfriends, and she sings terribly, and she has chosen a very dirty song that is, I think, in praise of the love of a black man. Am I drawing you a picture? Simon calls it a "right mess" and she leaves, yelling hilarious and profanity-laden bullshit to the skies. Like a beautiful symphony, a hardcore hater girl mixes in with Jessica, the two of them like different parts of a theme about being an asshole. Hater Girl talks about how badly the show sucks, how the Final 12 have sucked each year because America doesn't get to vote for who they are, how much Carrie Underwood sucks, how the entire system is fucked because we don't get to vote in the Hollywood round, but doesn't notice how this would help her not at all. Another girl comes out of the audition room waving a golden ticket six inches from the Hater Girl, and everybody in the room simultaneously realizes something awesome is about to happen.

Hater Girl immediately starts talking shit about the Hollywood girl, of course, all, "I actually heard her sing and I didn't think she was that good," et cetera, and Hollywood Girl is like, "Well, you bring it or you don't." I love it, because it's no skin off her ass to have a dialogue with this freak. The thing is, though, that it's no skin off Hater Girl's ass either, because she's done and she can just go home and have a beer or whatever, but instead she's going to hang around and harass people and get more screen time to show her hater ass all over the place. Hater Girl keeps asking how Hollywood Girl got through, and she tries to explain that you can overcome a not-great voice by having star quality and bringing the performance factor, and a very cute boy on the sidelines goes from fascinated to worried, because this is clearly the wrong answer. Even though it is true -- Hater Girl has bitchface, and you can tell looking at her that she is deeply unhappy. Hater Girl says she is "not trying to hate" on Hollywood Girl, which is a falsehood, and then Hollywood Girl tries to distract her by asking her to sing, but The Truth Is Out There and Hater's not having it, so she tries to get Hollywood to admit that she hates Carrie Underwood too, which thing Hollywood will not do. Finally, Hater sings -- beautifully, which is the best part -- and Hollywood asks if she really does think she's better than her, but Hater just keeps singing, like a nutjob. Hollywood drops the whole issue ("The proof is in the paper!") and takes off. Hater Girl just keeps singing.

So the total for Day One of the Chicago auditions is 19 through to Hollywood, including: a surfer dude with his blond growing out worse than mine, a pretty black girl in a negligee with jeans, a skinny goatee guy, a man in an Izod shirt with a newsboy cap, a pretty girl with cool dreads and giant turquoise earrings, a cute girl in a red scarf, a guy in a fedora who looks like Jordan Peele, and a large jumping bald man. Minutes later, we recap what we just saw, and it's even more boring, but it says "recap" at the bottom of the screen.

Okay, so remember Zachary Smits from a second ago? He's changed his name to David Radford (still 17, now hailing from Crystal Lake IL), and methinks maybe he took some identity thieving notes from the Brittenum boys, because nothing else has changed. He has a cute conversation with Ryan, and sings in the car, and he name-checks everyone that was in, knew, or sold drugs to the Rat Pack, and he tries to be sexy into the camera, and his parents dance around in the kitchen while his beautiful mother sings. We went to their kitchen; he's fine. He enters and names some goddamn song by Frank Sinatra, which Simon loves, and he then sings it in that weird swinger voice. It's so weird and wrong -- why do that? Just sing! It's like putting on a Russian accent or something. They talk about how "the package" is great but one-dimensional, and Paula puts him through, and they talk about how he needs to learn to sing pop and not whatever the hell that fake crap is. Randy says that he can sing like Michael Bublé or Josh Groban, like that's a fucking plus, and they all eventually give in, but they plead with him to stop sucking immediately. Paula starts to say that Simon is going to cut him in Hollywood, but he hasn't left yet, so she has to dismiss him before she can finish her pronouncement of doom. Then she and Randy laugh about how screwed he is.

The repulsive Crystal Parizanski (16, Palatine IL) stands with her disgusting mother (Anna: "Which one's the mom? I dare you to tell me which one's the mom.") and talks about nothing, absolutely nothing, and they are so effed-up-looking and dead inside, and she's got fake blonde hair and a pound of makeup and skin like walnut trailer paneling and nothing happening inside, but she says "I listen to music every day" and that she is practically the Xtina because she has "attitude, like, [she's] going to do it no matter what." Mom looks like Anne Rice after fucking the National Football League on top of a tall mountain of cocaine. She wanders in and babbles stupidly for awhile before asking if she needs to explain anything. Right then you could bring her mom out and they'd go, oh, okay. Yes, says Simon, the tan. "Okay," she says, "My name is Crystal, I just turned…" No, I want to hear about your suntan. "Okay, I'm singing 'And I'm Telling You by…" No. No, no. I want to hear about your suntan. "Oh, my tan?" See, right then I would say, "Get out," but that's not how this show rolls. Paula just laughs and looks utterly creeped out. I am sorry, Mikalah Gordon. I love you. "[The fake tan] is not of main importance here," she giggles. She's like if Paris Hilton and Elizabeth Pha had a crack baby. A baby made of crack.

Simon's like, "It kind of is? Because you're scary to look at with the eyeballs." She giggles, "Yeah, whatever." Randy's like, "Just sing. God." Then a horrible screeching mess happens. Even Paula starts looking like Carolyn Kepcher in the face of this. After a long, long time she says, "I'm going to...have to...stop you." She shakes her head, and Randy also begs. Simon asks where the mother's place is, in this, and whether her mom is okay with the Prostitute Barbie look, and Crystal gets even more attitude-y with him. They send her out for her mom, and Paula whispers that she was afraid he was going to do that, because she saw the mom outside, and she's just as bad if not worse. The gross mom comes in -- doped up or naturally near-comatose, hardly matters at this point -- and the judges start laughing because now it's just gotten horrific, and the mom has worse conversational skills than her daughter, and they fight the judges about nothing at all, just about life, and Paula's getting more and more irritated, and finally when Crystal starts yelling at the judges, Paula throws them both out -- awesomely! -- and the judges all just stare at each other and shake their heads, and are sad about America.

Outside, Crystal babbles idiotically at Ryan about...something. Something about how the show is stupid and doesn't matter, and Ryan tries to make her admit that she did in fact come here to audition, so sometime in the recent past the show was somewhat more important than she's saying now, but that's too fucking complicated for old Crystal, so she just yells about how she will one day be a star. But she's not being completely stubborn, I think, because once he gets her to grasp concepts like "the past" and "the future," she does admit that she's at least heard of the show, and he smiles delightfully at this point. Like he just won something worth winning. Every year there's that one person that slides under my humanist/feminist radar and just presents as actually worthless, and it's always a shock and I have to be like twice as nice the rest of the day to make up for it, but Jesus, Crystal. You're getting what's coming to you, and your mom already did, and neither of you will ever understand how you're asking for it every single fucking second like an emergency beacon shrilling out too high for us to hear, "Please please please fuck me over and take away any chance of happiness or success I might wrest from the jaws of dumb luck, if nothing else, because I am too dumb to live. I lower your worth as an American." I mean, isn't that sad?

Then the Weirdos In Hats montage, which is irritating as shit and I don't want to talk about it except to note that: we would seem to be on a "roll," as they say; people in hats seem to cry more than regular people; there's a cowboy screaming that they have "ripped the heart from [his] chest," and then collapsing in tears -- right out in the outdoors! -- whimpering to himself, "Lord, how...how am I breathing?" and I really, really don't think he's joking; and this total freak with no hat falls asleep on a guy wearing a hat and apologizes and is crazy and homeless some more and then falls asleep sitting up. Okay, it wasn't that bad. The weeping cowboy was pretty cool.

All of which is a narrative device for introducing us to Stuart Benyamin (27, Park Ridge IL), who is dressed like a Small World After All and says that he's related to the "Assyrian Elvis Presley." He explains to the judges that he is wearing traditional Assyrian "folklore clothes" from the Fertile Crescent. He looks like a jackass, and I think he knew that, some time before now, like it was a conscious choice for him, to get attention. But he has forgotten this and he has forgotten that he looks like a jackass. He also forgot he can't sing. He's got that Marc Antony vibrato like the Chipmunks happening, and it's a traditional Assyrian folklore song from the Fertile Crescent about being deserted by a woman, requiring Randy to ask, "Were you wearing the outfit when she left?" ["I know he was fed that line. I knew it when he opened his mouth. And yet, I fell out laughing. I think he had some Catskillsy delivery on it or something, or gave it some eyebrow, but man, that shit cracked me up. Good show, Jackson." -- Sars] Although I think the singing would be the bigger deal-breaker. The judges pass, due to the crappy singing, and Paula asks for his hat. He leaves quickly.

Now there's Yuliya Matus (24, Ukraine via Naperville IL), who is fantastic to look at. Fur collar and cuffs, fake blue contacts, black-and-white static sweater, aqua blue fedora, gigantic sunglasses. She looks like the reality of those sexy ladies James Bond is always running into. She looks like a H&M ad dipped in LSD. And she acts like it too. She explains very seriously that she needs to get on the show to keep her VISA, and she tells you this like she's leveling with you. Like she wants to sell you some watches.

Jacob: "My pimp says he'll match funds for my IRA but I need some money for gambling first because I am into him for a cool thou."
Anna: "My whole day has been like this. I'm not gonna lie to you…"
Jacob: "Look, I'm not going to lie to you. My church bus just broke down."
Anna: "Look, my friend in Montecito got pregnant by a Gamma and I had to pay to take care of it."
Jacob: "Winona Ryder lent me her gas card and I really need a hot dog. Can I pump your gas on my card?"
Anna: "Have you ever heard of the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints? Because they are after me."
Jacob: "I must liquidate my assets!"
Anna: "I need you to hold this money for me in your bank account!"
Jacob: "She's a Concealed Russian Lady! She emailed me!"
Anna: "She is concealed in awesomeness."

Yuliya sings "Bohemian Rhapsody" like she's the missing Pussycat Doll, and it's totally freaky, although her voice is a stitch prettier -- and higher -- than exploited contestants in her demographic, and her accent is kick-ass. Her dancing is weird and freaky and bad and pornographically unoriginal. She wipes a fake tear, then flashes her crotch. She shakes one single breast like Shakira as Paula gets so bored and freaked out that she starts spinning around and around in her chair. For once I'm glad they're showing the whole thing. Yuliya simulates sexual congress and Paula starts stripping and throwing her clothes around. Yuliya drops to her knees, making the judges all jump, then flashes her fanny again, grinning insanely while singing about suicide. Her legs whirl around in the air and stuff starts flying off of her -- her number, her glasses, everything -- thanks to centripetal force. Finally Simon stops her, just as she's about to hump the floor, and she pops up, smiling brightly like this was nothing out of the ordinary. "That audition," says Simon, "could take you very far in Hollywood. Just not in this competition." She doesn't know what he means. "You have an appalling singing voice." Paula ventures to say that Yuliya is "sexy," which is as close as our language can come to what she is, and Simon mentions that she might consider trying out for Fatal Attraction III, should it ever be made. Word. She thanks them brightly and bounces out, and you have absolutely no idea what she got out of that. As Paula's admitting that it was pretty much a "great audition," which: agreed, Yuliya interviews that if they want unique, and found her to be unique, then she is at a loss as to why she wasn't put through. Oh dear. Ryan voices over a very mean but very funny "Looks like Yuliya's American Idol journey is over...and the journey home to the Ukraine is just beginning."

The very appealing Simmons twins (16 going on 25, Inkster MI) enter happily, wearing polos and being utterly charming. They do a double act with "Superstar," and chatter twinly about how it's going to go down. Joshua, in the brown, starts first, and it's very beautiful but a little tricksy. Jarrett, in the black with the tie, is...identical to the other one. Twins, you know. They walk up and take Paula's hands, and then both of them sing and their harmonies are very different from the other twins, but nice. Joshua's harmonies are beautiful, and his higher range is very sweet. Paula admits that the whole thing was corny to start, but got cool -- I think they got her at the same point they got me, which was towards the end. ["Yeah, it started off creepy, but then it…shifted, kind of." -- Sars] Simon's iffy about this, because of the twin thing, but Randy and Paula are both full-on into it. He shrugs and they usher the boys to Hollywood, Paula making a point of congratulating them on...being 16, basically.

There is bad singing by several people and the judges are exhausted, but then something stupid happens. David Hoover (28, Wexford PA) enters the picture. He's the only Pennsylvania person I've not liked, in this life. He explains to Ryan that he can speak to animals, and that they have "cartoonish" voices, and that this started when he was 16. (Anna: "But my psychotic break was not to be diagnosed for another two years.") Ryan is surprised by David's ability to speak to animals. David is not wearing shoes. This is because he did not like his sandals. Actual crazy people, guys. Come on with this crap. He enters the audition room screaming and hopping and yelping and wiggling and dancing around like a fool. He sings an original "song," and his voice may or may not be good, although it is somewhat lazy and nervous, and the song may be boring, but the actual problem is that his ass is crazy.

As he sings, his eyeballs roll around like in Equus and he stomps and his eyes roll back and his body shakes and he yowls and peels his lips back like the guy from Toad The Wet Sprocket and Randy makes the sign of the cross and Randy and Paula wobble around like he's going to start shooting pieces of crazy at them, and he nearly falls to his knees a couple of times, and his hands go all Leonardo in Gilbert Grape and his fingers pluck, pluck, pluck at his clothing, and his grin is shifty and fleeting, and it is an absolute nightmare. I think the lights actually go dim in the room at one point. Finally, he finishes, and Simon's like, "Catchy." Randy, of course, laughs, because what the hell are you going to do. David continues to writhe and jump and wriggle around silently, which is somehow worse, throughout the whole conversation, occasionally breaking into yelps and dog-barks. It's funnier than you'd think, but not at all as funny as it needs to be for this to work. Fuck homophobia, sure, but whatever the hell you call this bothers me more. Simon basically asks him what the hell he's thinking is going to happen, and he barks, and Paula's got this sympathetic bouncing crazy thing happening, like they are in synch, and Randy says he'll put him through if he'll talk to the animals for them. Simon: "Categorically never." Paula continues to weave and dodge and wiggle. David Hoover is kinetic. "For reasons of my own," Paula drawls, "yes." (Too easy, that joke. Let it slide, dude.) Simon is appalled. David screams and bounces and acts crazy and Simon, finally, throws him out. The crew and Simon make fun of Paula for putting him through. Outside he screams and howls. It's so fucking tiresome. Plus, plus the fact that you're not just punishing your future selves by sending him to meet you later, but also an entire plane full of innocent people. That's verging on evil. Then, in antidote to this bad, bad call on every level, there's a preview of the upcoming terrible montage of people singing "Lady Marmalade," which is comedy in the making and a welcome tonic. There's a guy with a lisp like Poet, the guy in the dress with the legs, and hot mess Crystal, and that's just for starters.

After that ad where the girl finally calls the guy, which tends to make me cry ("I'm so glad he had bars! He's very good looking! They are a good match!"), we learn the Chicago total, which is 34, and includes: Big Guy In Red Hat, Celena Rae, Skinny Black Chick, Awful Crimped Hair, Lots Of Necklaces And Barrettes, Green Polo And Denim Shrug, Crazy Braids Like Those Guys In The Second Matrix, Crazy Screaming Blonde Girl, Adorable Blonde with Glasses, Bad Bangs And Big Earrings, and Overexcited In Black Hat. Crimped Hair and Red Hat run screaming downstairs, and the losers are sad. This girl who was a witness to the whole Hater/Hollywood fight tells the cameras to go away, and she's still wearing a sparkly silvery thing on her head, like a necklace she couldn't quite fit over her melon, or else like she's secretly Liv Tyler, Princess of Elves.

Then, "Lady Marmalade." There's this chick with intensely articulated hips clicking herself around like a G.I. Joe; a creepy man in Tina Turner drag; a very bouncy girl in a too-small jacket, clapping with no energy; Elvira's sullen teenage niece; a person in a shiny black shirt; an idiot with American flag bandannas hanging from his pants, and a towel; a white pantsuit; the shapeless Princess of Elves; a very stretchy shirt; the "shave your beard" guy (which gives you some more background on how that really went down); an ill-informed girl with glasses and a freaky red dress sewn together with a black dress; the Poet guy in a Ruben shirt; a girl who looks like the country version of Portia De Rossi with a confusing ugly ruffled top; Yvette "Shirt Attack" Gomez with a knit cap somewhat diminishing her beauty; a guy who's not even a hipster, like a wannabe hipster -- shirt tucked in on one side only, sunglasses indoors, crushed velvet jacket, pink shirt, orange tie, fake and bake, you know what I'm talking about; four people (including a girl from earlier who got through); an even worse hipster dude that I will totally slap when I get a chance; a white hoodie and baseball cap with black parachute pants; three girls in various weird clothes, including Shirt Attack again, and possibly prom dress with a whole other thing on top; Assyrian Elvis swinging his tassels; aggressive cleavage and lipstick and a painful look; eight people, two of whom we haven't seen, including one guy with one eye closed, giving him this very awesome Compton pirate look, and then...hot mess Crystal. Singing FOR. EVER. It's funny, and the unendingness of it is not really a bad thing, especially if you've had a beer, which I did when this whole thing started, but...this shit was two hours. Two hours I have to watch. And actually pay attention the whole time. You know?

Wednesday

Ryan welcomes us to Denver, the Mile High City, and it's boring, and this guy raps like Micromachines, and a group of hundreds sings "Ain't No Mountain" and it's really pretty nice, it's a good mix, and this guy explains...something...who cares. Neither you nor I care. Let's get it GOING. A child whistles shrilly. Everyone's stressed out. Some guy on an escalator is excited on the escalator, then on camera. He's really, really excited, and you could tell that even if he didn't keep saying it over and over. Meet Marlows Davis, Jr. (16, Denver), who compares himself to Usher, only more excited. He's a natural. He is more boring than you can imagine. He's going to be singing "Fallin'," just for, you know, the "voice" song. Then there will be dancing, in case this show has secretly changed to a dance competition. He sings badly and wiggles these spirit fingers that Randy copies confusedly, and there is much drama all around, and lots of bad singing that is so earnest and 16 years old in every way that it's pretty lovable. Finally, Simon can take no more, and Paula and Ryan just chuckle about how weird it was. I don't even know what that word means anymore. "Weird" is the new "awesome." They try to convey his suckiness but he's not really getting it. "I don't think you're cut out for singing, dude," says Randy. He starts to beg like a little kid, like a third grader, all, "I came a long way!" Where did you come from again? "Denver Colorado!" Oh, okay then. They just laugh at him now, and Randy's like, "Dude, you can't sing." At least he doesn't cry. I hate it when they cry, and not in a sympathetic way at the moment, but in a way where showing weakness gets you a trip to the hot box. I don't even care right now.

Tiffany Christensen (25, Clinton UT) has those R. Crumb tree-trunk legs and red cowboy boots, is missing a sleeve from her t-shirt, and has flat-ironed hair going every which way. She sings that she is "here for the party" with a lot of yelling and weird faces and screaming at the top of her lungs, then simulates intercourse. Per Simon, "This is all going horribly wrong." Olivia Dudley (20, Arvada CO) sings "Straight Up" terribly, while wearing a multitude of black and white pieces of wear apparel. Paula: "Uh uh, no, honey." David Horning (27, Colorado Springs CO) reminds me, I was going to tell you about this movie I want to write, called Brokeback Palace, about a couple of stoner drug mules who go to Thai prison and fall in total gay love. Like Dude, Where's My Car, but even gayer. So far, financing is not going well. Now, Colorado Springs is gorgeous, a gorgeous place. But the rule is that where beautiful vistas are to be found, so too there are to be found dim-witted pot smokers. Oregon, Hawaii, the Land of Enchantment, Colorado. One of these is David Horning. He sings a song that goes: "Run with me...let's run...run with me...run with me," with a good second or more of just blank space between each line. David has a soul patch and a U.S. flag doo-rag. I think Crystal Parizanski has robbed me of something precious. I'm going to drink some coffee or something.

Oh! No need. Lisa Tucker is in the house! Lisa Tucker (16, Anaheim) is the star of a movie we now get to watch, entitled Lisa Tucker Blows Your Brain Out With Love, and it's all about a girl named, coincidentally, Lisa Tucker, who is super-great, was a joy to her parents and anyone who met her from birth, who is loved by her parents. She has a gorgeous mother, and is really sweet and entirely too self-possessed and well-spoken for such a youngster. She sings "One Moment In Time" by Whitney Houston, a role model on whom we could all once agree. This deep smoky voice comes blowing out, accompanied by a National Anthemic echo, the first time this season, as though merely by singing she has freaked out the concept of acoustics. Luckily, she's good enough that nobody minds. Simon is flabbergasted, admitting that he "loathes" 16-year-olds on principle, but that she's the best one they've ever had. She graciously thanks him. Randy and Paula are equally blown away, although less eloquent about it, and they give her a "thousand percent yes." Simon refers to her as "sailing through to the round," and outside, Ryan is clearly and legitimately happy for her -- she downplays the critique and he corrects her to her parents proudly: "The best 16-year-old. Ever!" He loves her.

Patrick Fletcher blows my mind with his geographic skills, drawing a map of the United States from memory. I can't even find Austin on a map of Texas. We keep seeing Patrick's face in the crowd and shots of auditioners, but never his audition. He has a lantern jaw and generally looks like those Superman and Batman cartoons. Like Nissan made a boy. This hot gymnastics enthusiast tries to teach Ryan to do some kind of flip in the air, and then a creepy boy does a creepy dance. We meet Amanda Berg (17, Northglenn CO), who very seriously explains the gymnastics move she herself invented, the "Banana," which she describes as a "Worm" that went awry on her once. Basically it looks like those rolling Escher bugs. She tells the judges that in ten years, she aspires to be Whitney Houston, and everybody needs to have a dream, but you should be more specific. She sings through her nose and looks really uncomfortable, shaking and pivoting back and forth about twice a second as she sings. It's nerve-wracking, but she seems nice. She's singing about how you "Can't Fight The Moonlight," but it seems clear she's fighting something. She has a country look. She gives herself a six out of ten, Simon subtracts five and a half for her, and really: how awesome would it be if she broke out the Banana right now?

Brett "Ace" Young (24, L.A.) is the spitting image of one Scott Petersen. He was raised in Boulder, and music is his life, and he is a good-looking kid. He sings some boring Westlife song and is immensely breathy and annoying and he has one million teeth. He's much better looking when he's not singing. Singing, he's annoying. Randy believes that he is a "really, really good singer," and "one of the best in the auditions so far." Randy makes reference to the difficulty of keeping a controlled connection between "chest voice" and "falsetto." Now, either Randy literally has no idea what he is talking about, or we didn't see that happen in the audition. I'm willing to concede that the latter is the case. I like Randy, and I generally agree with much of what he says, and it's rare that he speaks this specifically, but I don't think he's trying to impress us or anything. Simon tells Ace that it is more about his personality than his voice, and I agree, and Paula says "as a woman," something something something, it's pointless and is not related to her as a woman so much as it is to her as a horndog. Simon gives him a yes, but with a "very very very small 'y.'" Ace gets through, everybody claps, his arms are a foot around.

Rochelle Elaine Dye (25, Kansas City KS) has one hundred family members, all wearing t-shirts about how great she is. She tells a long story including not one but several evictions, some family members, depression, and a loss of all hope. Luckily, even on the verge of getting her cousin evicted, she and one hundred family members managed to scrape together not only airfare but money for matching t-shirts. That's the spirit of a winner right there. She sings "Chain Of Fools" and has a very pretty voice, gives a good performance -- even wearing a denim shrug -- and you can hear the nerves, but she's good enough that you can ignore them too. Randy claps along with her and Paula wiggles around. (To be fair, it doesn't seem related to the song itself, but she's clearly excited.) Simon says she's "great, great" and he can't "fault that voice" and that he liked it a lot. Randy says it's the best they've heard so far this season, and Simon agrees. She gets a 100% yes, and Ryan and the family go crazy, and then Ryan is physically knocked over by one hundred thrilled family members full of love and excitement.

Trollish rocker, trollish rocker, hottie with a beard, hungry tattoos, totally trollish rocker, The Bravery hair, hot surfer, creepy mullet, Yeah Yeah Yeahs wannabe in not-conceptually ugly clothes, nasty rocker, blonde frat guy, incomprehensible cheering, gross hair, gross hair, very cute guy with purple hair ("Bored by me? I'm bored by you!"), troll guy who gets through, scary vampire guy singing that trashy song about "love lies bleeding in my hands," awesome hipster screaming weirdly and shaking his head around all about chickens, skinny creepy suicide girl, not-so-skinny corseted suicide girl, gross dyed red hair with lots of bracelets, Elvira's niece somehow again, Cousin It pushing 40, a woman with a tattoo on her face.

Naomi Guse (26, Denver), a boring redhead, takes a breath and sings "I Wanna Be Sedated" as though she already has been, and then Jacob Garcia (27, Greenwood Village CO) attempts to do Bo things with his crutches, singing an awful rendition of "Jump, Jive & Wail," which bothers me on all levels simultaneously, and the wonderful purple-haired young man sings really scary devil singing like he's screeching in reverse, like Slayer, and I love it, and am not bored by it at all, and this rocker lesbian says that real rockers don't have to do anything but [Shit? Piss?] on the stage and puke. There's a dreamy poseur and yet another stupid hipster, and then Ryan embarrasses himself in a way which involves throwing the horns.

Chris Daughtry (25, McLeansville NC) is so earnest that it gives me gout. He works at an auto dealership, has been inspired by Bo Bice to rock out on television ("If he can do it, then I should show what I have"), performs with a Christian rock band, and married the mother of a 7- and 5-year-old. She is pretty, and clearly loves him very, very much. She gets misty talking about how much her child groom has given up to be with her, as though he has wild oats, and they love each other very much and it is both sweet and touching and boring as hell. She's better-looking than he is. He's this generic hottie with no characteristics. There's nothing wrong with his face, and certainly not his body, but he's just this shaved-head guy with stupid facial hair. Car dealership guy. He could rob a bank and never get caught. If you didn't see this, what you just pictured is correct. If you did, I defy you to picture him in your mind right now.

He sings "The Letter," an original choice and one sure to distance him from Bo in the judges' minds, but to his credit he sings it all in his own crazy way. He gets the echo treatment, and he really has excellent pitch and control of his voice. He could blow Ace out of the water, that's for sure. Too bad Ace is a lock compared to him -- too much like Bo. I'll be surprised if he makes it past Hollywood. Paula likes how much of his own style he "infused," and Randy calls it "kind of forced" but good, but Simon says it felt "rushed" and is bothered by Chris's bland lack of charisma. The reason I think maybe he's a sleeper hottie is that these guys sometimes grow on you like Joey Potter, like you realize they're good-looking but only after you've looked at them for a month or two and then they get all Eponine on your ass and you kiss them and then everything goes to shit. Simon still says no, so they keep talking, and Simon puts his finger on it, which is that with all the staring during the singing, there was no room for emotion, and he's exactly right: there was zero emotion in the performance, beyond the feeling of nervousness. Just good singing. ["I think he did really well considering that he was visibly about to barf, volcanically, the entire time." -- Sars] And I think this is why the lack of charisma, actually. He comes out of the room with the paper hidden in his hat, which I do hate, and everybody cheers. Get used to seeing him sing for awhile, and then lose.

Heather Cox (21, Jonesville NC) sings "You Raised Me Up" competently. Angela Garcia (25, Hobbs NM, holla!) has the braces happening; her hair is the same color as her face, not to mention icky, sparse, and crispy; and her outfit is...confusing. But I couldn't hate her for any of that, no. Then she starts singing "Rush, Rush." Needless to say it's crappy; how could it not be? She's not terrible, but she's miles from good. Of course Simon says it's "better than the original," and Paula attacks him yet again, this time with a pen. Not many people know this, but it was the chronic pain that got her thrown out of the Central Intelligence Agency. She could kill him twenty ways with that thing.

Erik Mena (23, Monterey Park CA) seems nice. He talks in a charming way, and his body is very huggy, what we called a "sweater guy" in college, and he seems to mean well. Sadly, though, he looks like a toucher. Like a person who will touch you when you're not ready for it, like on the subway or at a grocery store, or like you shouldn't let him babysit. That may or may not be his fault, and I hope it's not true, but them's the breaks. He is also a horrible singer, singing "The Way You Look Tonight" with a weird accent and some strange tea ceremony movements and a general inward-turning lack of presence. He trails off and he and Simon stare at each other for a million years while Western movie face-off music plays, and he refuses to leave or think, and finally asks, "Should I go?" and Simon nods and winks not unkindly.

There are a bunch of weird cowboys that talk strangely, like Idaho Mormons, like a religious sect that only trades and mates in its own small area. They are there in support of Garet Johnson (18, Veteran WY), who is...immensely uncomfortable at all times. Talking to Ryan, talking to anybody, you keep thinking he's going to cover his face and get it together, but he never does. We learn that he sings to a turkey. A particular one. To be honest, I only understand about 30% of what he says. He's like one of those feral children who had to invent being human from scratch. He is adorable, and I like him, but he's got a ton of disadvantages coming in. He's wearing Wranglers and boots and a hat and the whole thing, and he spends like five minutes trying to come up with the name of the song he's going to sing. He knows it's by Elton John, but that's like all he knows. He has a squeaky little voice and is incredibly squirmy and squirrelly. He's painfully nervous and just keeps mentioning that he only sings to a turkey. Finally they're like, "Just sing it." And a freaky different voice comes out of him -- and gets the echo -- a deep, powerful voice that's clearly wonderful, if momentarily fucked by nerves. Simon levels with him that there's "a good voice in there somewhere," and they string him along for a while about how he is too poor for voice lessons, forcing him to admit to his poverty over and over, and Randy brings up a really good idea that would never occur to me, which is: church. Garet admits that this is the first time he's ever tried singing in front of a non-turkey human being. Paula tells him how proud she is of him; they bug him some more about how poor he is, and ask if he's ever been on a plane. He geeks out majorly and admits that he has not. Randy gives him a yes because he's incredibly likeable, and they let him through, causing him to freak out and shriek and act weird and stumble around. I've never seen someone like this before. He's like a clone. He's completely new.

Nineteen people made it through on day one in Denver, including: a screaming black girl, a man with shark teeth, a pretty girl with lots of hair, a very tired blonde, a super-tall guy in a black hat, a crying girl and a screaming one, a guy who's in the Dog Pound, Jada Pinkett Smith, Horatio Sanz, a boring white girl, a girl in a fedora, and a cute blonde.

Shit. Figures it would be the home stretch. Meet Nick "Flawless" McCord (25, Athens GA) who starts telling lies immediately: "People call me 'Flawless.'" No, they don't. "I felt like if I had one of the sooth song I might as well go ahead and call my something my my name something that it should be named which is very appropriate which thereforth is Flawless was developed out of my mind." If you haven't caught on to what is up here, I will tell you that he has five outfits with him, all of which are pajamas with clam diggers, all of which have matching hats, all of which were made from a very simple pattern by his mother, to which he refers as both "comfortable" and..."lingering." He calls himself an "artrapitterpeneur," and says that he cleans houses. Then he picks his nose. His business is called Paradise Cleaning, and the slogan goes something a little bit like: "You come home with your home and house looking and smelling like paradise." He does not have as many teeth as you might expect of a 25-year-old. He looks like every jail documentary you've ever seen. He is of diminished mental capacity. Isn't that funny?

Also meet Ben Hausbach (24, Pompano Beach FL), who opens with this: "I don't know where I should be right now, but I do know I can sing! La la la!" Ben introduces us to one of his many patents, the Cosmic Coaster, which is designed to dump your drink in your lap through the power of magnets. Ben would like somebody to beat him at chess, because it has been a good long while since that happened. This is so sucky, this is like...if they think this is what is wonderful about Adam Pratt, fuck them. This is not wonderful. This is horrible. This is just stupid people and chromosome mishaps and crazy people, and it's not fair. Ben and Flawless meet and shake hands, just like Adam and Dirk did, and it's like...Adam and Dirk : Ben and Flawless :: Stand By Me : a John Waters movie of your choice. Ben tells us his intelligence intimidates people, then they talk like morons for a while, and Flawless's "slogan" is discussed at length ("It's kind of a tongue-twister, because I wanted it that way") and Ben says he's a triple threat: singer, actor, inventor. Fuck this. I'm not on a high horse about it, I just cannot believe right now that this is what America wants to look at. Hilarious retards and the hilarious mentally ill. Again.

This is depressing. Flawless needs teeth, and cannot tell Randy for sure how old he is, because it changes every year. He will be singing "Your Song," one of my personal favorites, because of course he is; I'm surprised he's not singing "Rush, Rush." He breathes for a while, and then makes up both the lyrics and the melody, repeating over and over words from the song, choosing them at random, as Simon stares into space and plays with his lip, Paula looks tired, and finally it's over and Randy laughs. Simon dicks around that possibly a different outfit would have helped, but then admits that it was the worst they heard in Denver.

Ben Hausbach enters and shows them the Cosmic Coaster, and Paula teaches him the word "prototype" and wonders if it will look more "cosmic" later, which for some reason cracks me up. Ben sings "If I Only Had A Brain," and Paula sings along. Would you believe me if I told you that was the punchline? Ben sings like Kermit the Frog and Paula starts dancing around, waving her pen like a maestro, and he reprimands her for phasing out before he got to "the good part" and Simon starts talking shit about the singing, the coaster, et cetera, then calls him "hopeless." Ben says that they haven't given him a chance "to evolve," which cracks them up. Simon's hair looks like hell. They dismiss Ben and Paula apologizes that at least he's "engaging," and he asks her if she wants to get engaged. She does not. Both guys give raving, dull interviews and it's finally over.

April Walsh (27, Laguna Niguel CA) enters in a kicky red and black dress with a red flower in her hair and sings "It's Oh So Quiet," and it's quite dramatic. She has no problem with projection, and a lot of character. I think theatre would love to have her. There are movements, and she makes hysterical faces, and the judges kind of giggle, and afterwards she admits how much fun singing that song turned out to be. Simon offers that if somebody in a restaurant started that shit up, you'd tell them to shut it right down, and he's right, but I beg you to tell me the song of which this is not true. Other girls get through, including the girl with creepy dyed red hair, a girl in capris, and a girl with a complicated necklace, but not many guys, including the very gracious hot gymnastics guy from the beginning of Denver.

Okay, here's the part I didn't want to talk about, and then we're done. Zachary Travis (18, Denver) is wearing a girl's top from Wet Seal, straight-leg jeans, high heels, about a 12-inch waist, bad acne scars, hair like a drama girl, and a white belt. Lord knows I don't like to diagnose, but this is a lot of XXY signage to be looking at, which usually comes with a bunch of dysmorphic bullshit that gets you beat down, and usually causes your parents to turn into assholes. This is very much an obstacle that we should respect, because yeah, wear your love like heaven and all that, but knowing the difference between reaching for utopia and thinking you live there is what will save you from getting your ass killed.

Wearing girl's clothes, while still demanding to be called a boy, puts the onus on every single person you run into, and it's not only an unfair demand, but a stupid one. Relying on thinking you can complain later about your rights, and everyone else's ignorance, doesn't mean a damn thing if you're in a ditch somewhere. Prior restraint doesn't apply to social relationships, and it's asking a lot of the world at large to suddenly evolve just for your self-expression. If you have nine out of ten gender signifiers happening, it's not that I'm an idiot for filling in the blanks, and it's not because I'm "prejudiced" or hateful in some way; it's because you haven't done your semiotics homework. Which should be like your purpose in life. This is the whole Second Wave/Third Wave feminism argument all over again: I would love it if you created the rules of the society in which we live, and maybe one day you will, but it hasn't happened yet, and pretending that it has so that you can bitch later is only hurting yourself. If you're going to be a gender pioneer, at least have the attitude to go with it. But we're getting ahead of things.

He's tall enough, and skinny enough, with enough muscle mass -- kid's packing some guns -- that maybe these kind of clothes are his only hope, but still, we're talking about actively choosing the most feminine gear possible, which makes this an identity issue, and you have to fight for those like a motherfucker.

Randy opens with the usual question, "Tell us something interesting about yourself." Simon's like, "Really?" Zachary offers that he is a "very talented person" and that "people" often "confuse [him] for a girl," which makes him "just laugh [his] butt off." He describes various bathroom incidents of confusion, and smiles hugely. Randy: "Wow. So what are you going to sing?" Zachary will be singing a Whitney Houston song called "Queen Of The Night." Randy: "Wow. Okay." Zachary then sings this song, and nobody can really look at the stage, because it's hard to look when somebody showing you all their stuff at once. The singing is terrible, the moves are bizarre. When he's done, Randy notes the "interesting lyrics" of the song, and Simon simply calls the whole thing "atrocious" and "confused." Zachary thinks he did "awesome." Paula loves his self-confidence -- and at this point, so did I -- but explains the "reality," which is that "the voice isn't up to par." When Paula Abdul feels moved to explain reality to you, that's a sign.

The Boy George version of "The Crying Game" starts to play, and it's for nasty reasons, but if you've seen the movie, it's not entirely inappropriate. Mom's white lipstick says, "He's eccentric, very...he puts it out there for anybody to see, and [is] totally fine with anybody's reaction." He comes out crying and is hugged by Mom, Grandma, and his girlfriend or social worker. Walking away, and this is where he loses me, he gives the following camera speech: "American Idol fits America, and America is prejudiced and racist and...I think it's totally prejudiced to not accept someone because someone's a boy, and they're singing girl songs, and they don't fit the song, and the vocal range of the girl...I think that's total prejudice. I'm surprised that Paula said I suck...and Randy was just trying to make it all right...fuck America...I guess they can't handle it. It just shows their own ignorance, and stuff, and...I don't know."

One: Simon Cowell is not American, but he is a capitalist, and you are not on the demand curve at any point right now. Also, you cannot sing. Two: America is prejudiced and racist, and that's awful, but neither of those have to do with this situation, except in the most distant way, and frankly, linking them to everyone else's inability to take part in your drama is a little bit insulting to people without options. Three: Singing a "girl" song was not the problem, and neither was transposing the song for your voice. You cannot sing, no matter in what key the song might be. Four: Even if that were true, that is not "prejudice." It is "music." Five: Paula did not say you suck, she said you rule, but have a bad voice. Which you do, and which you do. Six: Randy was treading a very fine line of being condescending, and was being a good bloke, but he was no more interested in you than Simon was. Seven: Saying "Fuck America" is incredibly stupid, and will get you beat up. Yes, America is not ready for you. But you, my friend, don't seem to be ready for America, so it's a stalemate. Eight: there's institutionalized ignorance, racism and homophobia and non-standard gender issues, and they're related, but you seem to think that this is related to your bad singing. It's not. That's a fight for another day. Today, you lost mostly because you couldn't sing, frankly. And trust me, I want you to be very, very happy, and seeing the path you're on scares the hell out of me, but I also know that being this resistant to the fact of other people is a good way to make yourself crazy and very, very unhappy.

You can own the room and get respect for yourself, but this guerilla-attack "What do you mean? Of course I'm a guy! You should know that despite my many, many efforts to persuade you of the contrary!" crap is not going to fly, because for you to be happy, you need to accept not only yourself, but everybody else too. It's this vague appeal to "everybody sucks in the entire country except me" defense that killed my sympathy, because 18 is too old for that shit. There comes a point where the various spheres of baggage, identity and gender, and sexuality and clothing and the rest of it, though they overlap over a good deal of the map, do not cover the map. It's too easy to apply this poorly thought-out complaint to absolutely everything: bad grades? Prejudice. Tax audit? Prejudice. Car accident? Prejudice. And yeah, a lot of times this will play into it, I'm not blind to that. But there's an easy fix, or at least a way to soften the blow. You can be yourself and play the game at the same time, at no cost to your soul. It's not an all-or-nothing game, but it is one that demands you participate in some way. Choose happiness, please. It's your duty to yourself, as a living person.

So 18 total made it through day two, not counting your humble recapper: a cute blonde chick, a cabbage-patching guy in a track suit, a cute laughing girl, April Walsh dancing around, a somewhat creepy guy with lots of fleur-de-lis crawling up his shirt, a girl with very asymmetrical hair, a blonde black girl, one of the trollish rocker guys, a chucker in a hat, a girl whose dress and hair and skin are all the same nondescript color, a screaming blonde girl, a girl from before with a necklace, a girl in a stupid red hat, a bouncing girl in a big belt, and crappy indie movie queen Dominique Swain. week: Joe R. takes you to Greensboro, NC, and somewhere else we don't know about yet.