In honor of the passing of Heath Ledger, American Idol has decided to open tonight's episode with two old dudes in fishing hats with their arms around each other, welcoming us to the San Diego auditions. Man, I wish Ennis had stayed alive long enough to grow fat and old with Jack, too. Anyway, it's either accidentally sweet or accidentally creepy, which is how this show turns out sometimes. This...has been a really weird day.
The theme of Ryan's introductory voice-over is all about how American Idol went and spoiled the idyllic San Diego beaches and clear blue skies with its corporate awfulness. Which I guess makes Idol the Red Mango of SoCal. Then it's a lot of what you normally see -- crowd of enthusiastic freaks lining up for a chance to be ridiculed on TV.
First up: Tetiana Ostapowych, who is clearly a Good Audition, but whose staying power is, I think, limited because though she tries to mask it, there isn't a ton of heft behind her voice. She's either got breath control problems or else she's shortening up her phrasing too much, but whatever it is, I'm slightly underwhelmed. Simon is too, as he tells her she's not as good as she thinks she is, though he passes her on through. Once she exits screaming into the hallway, though, he proclaims: "Ob. Noxious." I don't know if I'd go that far, but she does like to prance around for the camera a lot.
Up is single father Perrie Cataldo. Take that, single-mom brigade! Perry's son, Avion, shares his daddy's unfortunate slicked-back ponytail, but I think he also caught a touch of the adorable from him as well. With the kid on his lap, Perrie carefully avoids telling Ryan the specifics of Avion's mom's passing away, only that she was in the "wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong people, doing the wrong things." So it wasn't lupus. Seriously, though, if you're of the belief that American Idol ultimately comes down to whose backstory can most successfully manipulate people into voting for you, then...well, you're probably a Diana DeGarmo fan, but also you gotta figure this guy's gonna take a whole army full of orphans to take him down. Inside with the judges, he sings "I'll Make Love To You," and I can't tell if he's super nervous or has a lot of vibrato or both. But he's got a real voice in there, and all the judges love him, so he's sailing on through to Hollywood. Ryan brings the kid in to cute things up for a bit, and I'd expect to see him in Hollywood too.
Michael Johns is from Australia by way of Los Angeles, and he sings one of those Otis Redding songs that wasn't made famous by the Black Crows. It flirts with being overwrought, particularly for someone who looks like he should be in a movie about surfing, but Simon likes it. The "white soul singer" thing, as he calls it, certainly works, so why not send him to Hollywood? He's so dorkily happy about it in the hallway, too, so I guess I like him now.
And after three good auditions in a row, the show is kind of screaming for some trainwrecks, so bring on the first Montage O' Suck: some strange-sounding Sherman Oaks resident making Eastern Orthodox noises. Then there's this 19-year-old who looks like one of Vanessa's boyfriends from The Cosby Show who screeches annoyingly. And Mikalah Gordon crossed with Topanga from Boy Meets World does...something terribly wrong. Yikes.
Speaking of wrong, here's Valerie Reyes. She is apparently under the impression that last season's Antonella and Amanda were totally awesome (which: how could she possibly get that impression given all the attention the show didn't pay them?) because she acts exactly like them but with an extra dollop of crazed Mariah Carey vocal dysmorphia on top of that. Valerie thinks she sounds exactly like Mariah, to the point where she can be walking down the street, singing along to her iPod, and people will think it's Mariah singing when it's actually her! And then those people will walk away and laugh their asses off because if Regina George tells you that skirt you're wearing is totally cute, you bet your ass she thinks it's the ugliest thing she's ever seen. Also, for the schadenfreude fan in all of us, Ryan gets Val to admit that she loves watching the audition rounds on this show the best because she gets to laugh at all the awful singers. To which group she does not include herself. On to the audition! Simon compares it to "Mariah Carey's CD, left out in the sun for a year," and I am having a hard time improving upon that. It's like if you kept all the bullshitty stuff Mariah does but took away the good voice underneath it all? You'd get Valerie. Randy lies to her that she has a decent tone if she'd only get rid of all the bells and whistles (not true), and Paula clearly hates her, so it's three "no" votes. Out in the hallway, it dawns upon Val that she's now one of those auditions, and you get the sense that if she knew that ahead of time, she'd at least have worn some fucked-up costume. Speaking of which...
A guy in a poncho singing to a mime (the law of averages said we'd end up at this point eventually) leads to a Montage O' Costumes during which Ryan actually says that showing up to auditions with some retarded gimmick is sure to "backfire." Aw, okay nobody tell Ryan about how more than half of these people are just trying to get on TV as the freaks. His innocence is almost charming. So here are Monique and Christopher. Monique sounds almost exactly like Serena Williams, while Christopher is her spindly gay companion who (I'm guessing) gets all his frustrations out through dance. Simon mocks out Monique's schizo fashion sense, and Monique announces her intentions to sing "Whitney Houston's 'I Believe In Miracles.'" Simon: "And you think you can sing that song?" Joe R: "Dude, she can't even say what that song's really called." It sounds like an entire village of Carmen Rasmusens all cried out in great pain and were suddenly silenced. Monique then does the thing that annoys me most about the shitty auditioners: when the judges tell her "no," she just starts singing something else. That shit makes you look either a) crazy, b) like an asshole, or c) like a crazy asshole. And then she starts crying about everything she's been through -- oh, wrong season to try to play that card, hon -- and goes bawling out into the hall. Her friend Christopher, by the way, gives pretty much the same audition: shitty singing and an inability to shut the fuck up when he's told "no." Randy, by the way, is fantastically bitchy towards him once he realizes this kid's acting like a dick. Like, I know understand what Randy would look like as a drag queen, snapping his finger all, "Out of tune, bitch!" Anyway, both Monique and Christopher end up cursing the judges and flipping them off out in the hallway, because nobody's ever done that before.
A Montage O' People Who Love Various Judges (complete with Ryan's obligatory bewilderment that people actually like Simon), brings us to Samantha Musa, who thinks Simon's "really, really hot." Ryan, of course, plays it like he's totally offended. Samantha calls him on it, all, "Stop being bitter, short stuff, I still like you too." Samantha's sister is with her, and she may like Simon even more than Sam does, and when Sam goes in to audition, she shoots a paper airplane (!) inside the room, begging to be allowed inside too. The paper also says that Simon's on Sister of Sam's list of people who she wants to meet, along with Oprah and (as Simon reads it) "OH-buh-mah." The girls are like, "Barack Obama, you adorable British freak." So Sister of Sam gets to judge the audition from Simon's lap, and everybody's kind of cute about it. I don't know how Simon manages to do it, but he avoids "creepy old man" status every time, in situations where anyone else would be making my skin crawl. Dude, if Donald Trump conducted the boardroom with Jennie Finch on his lap, I might never stop dry-heaving, but this is kind of...charming. I don't know. Samantha's audition -- "Until You Come Back To Me" -- is good, kind of Kat McPhee-ish, but I feel like these kinds of auditions are a dime a dozen. She deserves to go to Hollywood, and she does, but I really hope she's going to kick it up a level once she's there. The sisters double-team Simon (with hugs, perverts) while Randy and Ryan freak out about all the attention they're not getting. Paula would do the same, but the guy on the Captain Morgan bottle has been winking at her all day, she she's feeling pretty good about herself.
Day Two, according to Seacrest, brought heat stroke along with it. So that'll be the default explanation for some of what follows. Like Blake Boshnack, who was on the show two years ago when he came in dressed up like the Statue of Liberty and Simon awesomely kicked him out after half a note. This year he's dressed like a normal person, the better to allow his weird personality to shine through. He's auditioned ten times and has brought along his doppelganger/mother, who manages to be the bigger Idol freak of the two. Inside the audition room, we see the judges read the call sheet and realize that Blake's the Lady Liberty freak. Blake is of the mind that dressing up like that and making a joke of himself took a lot of "chutzpah," which is kind of predictable. "It takes balls to be this socially maladjusted," is a sentiment that's brought us things both annoying (Napoleon Dynamite) and wonderful (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), after all. Blake's "Stand By Me" makes you understand why he auditioned in the first place -- his voice could pass for decent in the right context, though that context isn't this show -- but maybe after ten rejections he'd get the point. The judges say no, but Simon is at least appreciative that Blake came as a person rather than a costume this time. His family's pretty cool out in the hallway, good-naturedly laughing about it, and Blake pledges to the home audience that he'll be wasting his time and money on this doomed endeavor summer as well.
Rod Stewart, for whatever mysterious reason, provides the soundtrack for the Montage O' Suck, which includes Sarah Long, who's been in all the promos as being as bad as William Hung. She's not, and she gets about seven seconds of airtime total, so I really hope you didn't skip The Biggest Loser just to see that. So all this crappiness leads us to Alberto Hurtado, who...oh man, I can't deal with this tonight. I'm already 80% sure that Alberto is some local radio station prank, but even if he's not a local-media-supported practical joke, he's kind of a joke on the human race itself. As a character, none of his affectations hold together. He's a dude with a blissed-out girly voice; his face looks like Chyna's but his hair is straight from the Diana Ross collection; he's all "namaste" in the way he speaks, but he also favors Native American eagle imagery, paper fans (he's made giant ones to hand to the judges), figurines of Spanish dancers, unpainted plastic fingernails, and holding flowers in between his toes. If this guy were in any way attractive, he'd already have starred in three Pedro Almodovar movies. Inside the audition room, we find out he's written his own song (of course he did), and with an entire color wheel before him in terms of what to focus on, Simon zeroes in on the fact that the song is depressing. Yeah, it's the song that's depressing in this situation. There's some foolishness about trying to find the happy part of the song, and then three blessed "no" votes later and it's over. And on his way out, some random lady who looks like if Patty Hearst and Wendy Pepper were cross-bred in a lab gives him props for his talent on multiple levels, one of which is "floral." Alberto's "got it going on" in the floral department.
This cute, dreadlocked guy named Aaron is a big ol' freak in the singing department, and despite Paula's fucking with him (she asks for ten seconds of something else before Simon tells her to shut up) he doesn't make it. I don't know why that leads us to David Archuleta, who is sixteen, looks exactly like the adorable little brother you may not even have, and used to have paralyzed vocal chords. Oh, great, another gay teenage orphan I'm going to have to adopt. So, yeah, vocal paralysis. It's no trachea scar, but it'll do. You can tell even from David's speaking voice that there's still some residual after-effects of his former affliction, and I honestly thought it'd effect his singing too, but apparently it doesn't. He's not a professional singer -- not right for this competition at its highest levels -- but he's a good singer. He'd be great in his high school's musical production. He's not going to be the American Idol, though, and I will be pissed if the producers make him the Sanjaya this season, because: don't do that to one of my gay teen orphans. I'm glad he's going to Hollywood, because that will be a great experience for him, but I'm praying it stops there. He sings "Waiting On The World To Change," for the record, and Randy (who's been really awesome this season so far, and I am not usually a fan; due credit to the facial hair, I suppose) quite lovably sings the background parts. He votes "yes," then Paula, in lieu of an actual vote, expresses her desire to squish David like a teddy bear. Simon: "So that's a no from Paula, but a yes from me. You're going to Hollywood!" It's a nice moment for everyone. Now don't go and ruin it, show.
Last up is Carly Smithson, Irish by birth but currently hailing from San Diego, who runs a tattoo shop with her husband, who has tattoos all over his face like a monster but who, says Carly, didn't want to accompany her to the auditions because he thought he might scare people away from her. Which seems totally sweet, and they're lovely together from what we see, but I have to wonder what's the point of big, scary face tattoos if you don't want to frighten people. You know? Carly auditioned back in Season 5 -- getting thousand-, million-, and trillion-percent "yes" votes from the judges -- but problems with her visa meant she had to drop out. Also, because she had to tour Europe with her band, The Cranberries. She auditions this time with "I'm Every Woman," and it's a good audition with a poorly chosen song. She's got this great husky thing going on in the back of her voice which is getting swallowed up by this white-girl-soul thing. Simon says she doesn't sound as good as two years ago, which scares the shit out of her, but he never really follows up on that (that we see). She gets three "yes" votes and is on to Hollywood. I'm hoping to see something surprising out of her once she gets there. She and her scary/cute boyfriend are scary and cute and she cries for a while about second chances and she pledges to work really hard and I could really root for her, so fucking BRING IT, Dublin.
Thirty-one, including Carly, made it through from San Diego, though if they weren't as good or interesting as the ones we saw tonight I can't imagine them going further. This was a modest-to-underwhelming group. Perhaps there we'll have better luck in South Carolina tomorrow.