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2003-05-22 Concerning American Idol: I think that Clay should have won. My reasons are threefold. Firstly, I always root for the gayest contestant. This made last season difficult, because Justin Guarini was as gay as a Number Six pencil, but Kelly Clarkson was so butch it hurt. Secondly, I am not at all convinced that Ruben can speak the English language. Thirdly, he sweats like a pitcher of lemonade in August, and that is not a characteristic I look for in my American Idols. The results, however, were pulp and pit compared to The Happening. What was The Happening, you ask? Ladies and gentlemen, I offer you this: last night Clay sang a few lines of the classic Lionel Richie song “Hello”. (Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?) Why is that A Happening, you ask? Because Lionel decided to make a music video, that’s why. When Lionel Richie and his creative team sat down and tried to think of a story that would do justice to this classic love song, a story that would thrill women to the depths of their snatches, they came up with this: a blind woman (blind women were so hot in the 80s, remember? Marlee Matlin and…yeah) gropes Lionel Richie's face all over, feels it up, if you will, and then makes a sculpture of said face, relying only upon her sense memory and her intense love for Lionel Richie (she didn’t know he was black, of course, or their love Could Not Be, but he knew that their love Could Not Be anyway, because she was blind) to guide her fingertips. At the end of the video, the camera zooms in on the sculpture, which was just terrible enough so you know it wasn’t sculpted by a blind person, just a young artist who shouldn’t be encouraged. And so my fancy ran wild for the rest of the show. I imagined the video with Clay cast in the central role, and wondered what the blind woman would make of his hair (she didn’t do a bang-up job with Lionel’s, if you remember; it looked as if his scalp were peeling away in large, oval scales) and his wacky eyes. Then I imagined the video with Ruben cast in the central role, and decided that that was also a love that Could Not Be, because in order to sculpt him she would have to steal extra clay from other art students, and this would get her kicked out of art school. And after a while I started to cry, because I realized I had been taking Lionel Richie and his “Hello” video for granted all these years, and so I decided that the next time someone asked me what I was thankful for, I would answer: “Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ video.”
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