"She crumbled in
my chubby little hand"

Dear American Idol Deciders of Things,

I know it was probably a hallucination or something on her part, since you're denying you ever called her, but please let Courtney Love be on the show. Do not fire Paula. Everyone (and by "everyone" I mean me) loves Paula, and the show would be a hollow, sad husk of its former self if you stupidly took her from us. Here's what you do: Simply make Courtney Love the official fourth judge. Then it's boy-girl-boy-girl on the table. She can sit on the other side of Randy. Think about how excellent that would be. And you'd have the built-in insurance policy of her rock-cred-DNA-infused daughter subbing for her if she ever got "exhausted." And you'd be helping out a celebrity in need too, because Courtney Love requires more and more fame to keep on breathing. She can't go backward or she dies, much like that bus in Speed. So you'd be helping to save a life.

Sincerely in Music, Dave

Now I also need to discuss the important topic of dessert. Dreyers makes American Idol-flavored ice cream. This is a real thing. I was just in the supermarket with the guy who is my life partner (or, as any Focus on the Family member worth his tithe would call him, my "homosexual sex partner"), and we found them there, not yet freezer-burned with neglect. I forget the flavors already, but they all had stupid music-themed names like Queen of Soul Chocolate Fudge or something like that. In a better, richer world the flavors would be Crushed Dreams-n-Cookies, Caramel Hopelessness Swirl, "Die a Thousand Humiliating Public Deaths on TV" Shame Nuggets, and "The Hotness" Crunch. It's a drag that I don't get to name stuff more often.

Tuesday's show begins with Seacrest hanging out in Birmingham, Ala., with a bazillion losers all convinced that they're going to be friends with Panic! at the Disco someday. Anecdotal evidence, however, is sort of on their side. Birmingham is the home of Ruben Studdard, Bo Bice, and Taylor Hicks, after all. So maybe something magical really does float around in the air molecules there.

Now, in keeping with my recently inaugurated tradition of dealing with the audition episodes in nonchronological order, I'm just going to divide them up into the Yeses and the Nos. The Yeses will be listed first (those are the people who get handed a pee-yellow slip of You-Go-to-Hollywood paper by a production assistant who never gets more than a sliver of a glimpse of screen time; that's not fair, really, and I believe that instead of the show studiously avoiding them and editing them out, they should all be kept in a giant cardboard box by the door--no, the other door--and that box should be painted black and there should be a hole cut out of it and when someone gets sent on to the next round, then an anonymous hand should just stick out of the hole, clutching that "golden ticket"). The Nos, who represent the worst of the nutjobbish worst, bring up the rear.

The first memorable bit of on-screen Alabama-ness comes in the form of a white girl in curlers. She thinks she's here to audition for Mama's Family: The Musical. Cut to a toothless fat man holding grimy pillows and yelling "Yeaaaaaahhhhh!" The Alabama Board of Tourism just committed mass suicide. 30 Rock's Judah Friedlander appears on camera wearing a baseball cap that says "Mayor" on it. Oh, wait--sorry, no, that's Birmingham's actual mayor. Next up is a young Latino gentleman who seems to believe he's going to start a one-man zoot suit riot in an ensemble that, with the help of my TiVo's pause function, appears to be covered in sweat stains and cat hair. The judges show up in stretch limos. Now, is it just my antifame prejudice and weak-willed environmentalist leanings, or shouldn't all celebrities who opt for fuel-sucking stretch limos be strung up and beaten to a pulp? I'm right, right? I think I'm right.

The Yes People:

1. The Baby Girl. She's this weird-ass-voiced chick who's seen The Wizard of Oz too many times and has begun to imitate Dorothy Gale as though Dorothy Gale were 4 years old. Then she growls out "A House Is Not a Home." Now, I don't know about your house and/or home, but in min, Sandra Bernhard worship is sort of a thing, which means that suddenly everyone in the room sings in unison, "But a chair is not a HOUSE!" If you haven't seen or heard Without You I'm Nothing, you won't get that or care (and really, what's wrong with you if you haven't?), but if you have, then you know what I'm talking about. I promise that will be the only hermetically sealed bit of this recap.

2. The Teen Aretha. She's good, which means there's nothing to say about her yet. If she progresses to the final 24, I'm pretty sure I'll find something annoying about her.

3. The Dawg Whisperer. He's this guy who sings "Rock With You" and almost gets sent home, but who then calls Randy "Dawg." And that's all Randy needs to be convinced that this guy is awesome. I plan to remember this should I never meet the man in person. I will hypnotize him into buying me dinner.

4. The Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Sweepstakes. She's 17, and when Simon says, "Tell us something interesting about you," she launches into a story about her paralyzed father who "shot hisself." The full explanation: "His wife was cheatin' on him, which was my stepmama n' he caught her in th' act and it wuzn't the first time so he shot her and he shot hisself and now I live with my gramma to help take care a' him. It's OK."

My favorite part of this horrifying story is that she grins after she finishes telling it. Somewhere in a fancy five-star hotel on a promotional tour for her new CD, Kelli Pickler is dining on calamari being spoon-fed to her by a personal assistant and she's muttering slyly, "Well-played, Elly May, well-played."

But I do need to say something about this new, improved Picklerette with extra tragedy sprinkles on top. An attempted homicide/suicide (news of the stepmama's fate was left out somehow) is not something "interesting." Interesting is "I speak five languages." This story is a future truth-enhanced memoir, not an anecdote about a quirky personal trait or hobby. But whatever. I just hope that the producers of the greatest TV movie ever, Life Is Not a Fairy Tale: The Fantasia Barrino Story, are taking notes and preparing a development deal for this plucky young heroine. The judges send her through to Hollywood, and she promises to be "a hard worker," something she's already used to, I'm sure, on account of nobody in her house being able to lift things.

5. The Guy Who's in on the Joke. He's chunky and he's got a mop of curly hair. He says he sees Christina Aguilera when he looks in the mirror and that he wants to make David Hasselhoff cry. He sings all right and they send him through. It'll be interesting to see if he can keep on mocking the proceedings and commenting on the show if he makes it through to the final rounds. It was only a matter of time before a self-aware person with a decent voice found their way here. Favorite line: "I looked at Paula and she crumbled in my chubby little hand."

The No People:

1. Won't Take No for an Answer Girl. She's studying to be a dental tech. She sings "Unchained Melody" while her friends wait outside. She sucks. Seacrest asks her friends, who all have their ears at the door, what they're hearing. What they're all hearing is the sound of a future dental technician, but one of them says, "The notes I wanted to hear." This can only mean that she's as tone-deaf as the girl auditioning or that she hates her friend and is rooting for her to fail. She's told no but keeps on singing. It's the latest thing, all this filibustering. I go back and forth on how I feel about it.

2. The Big Pink. She's a large girl in a meshy pink tube dress of lumpy fatness. And no, fat readers, "fat" is not an insult, it's simply an adjective. I'm fat too, so save your angry letters. She's not the world's worst singer, but she's bad. Nice matching mesh pink glove, though.

3. Hi, I'm Margaret. This 50-year-old woman is wearing bright yellow feathers and is even fatter than The Big Pink. She has a yellow ribbon around her ankle, presumably for the troops, and her contestant number is on a big pouch of fat that's hidden by the yellow-feathered tent she's got on. When confronted about her age she says she's 26. Hi, I'm Margaret cannot sing but she's happily nuts. I keep expecting her to shout out non sequiturs like, "I drink gravy!"

4. The Book of Ruth Twins. They are a super-long-haired girl and her super-long-haired mother, obviously both from a modestly attired rural religious community, a fact either edited out of the final cut or not noticed by anyone. The daughter sings like she's singing in church, and she's not horrible. But they kick her to the curb anyway. On the way out Randy calls their hair "hot," which I guarantee is not the look they were going for. Bad Randy. The girl cries and her sweet preacher-man dad holds her and whispers, "There's no losers," proving that, most evangelical evidence to the contrary, just because you're a butter-churning Anabaptist doesn't mean you can't be nice.

5. The Total Package Girl. That's what she calls herself, "the total package." I love the total package people because they never are. And she gets her own song title wrong. She sings Deborah Cox's "Nobody's Supposed to Be Here" and calls it "How Did You Get Here?" My partner, who knows the song, turns to me and says, "What's that she's singing?"

6. Team Nichole. Nichole has friends and family with her and they're all wearing matching T-shirts that say "Team Nichole" on them. She was a pageant baby like Diana DeGarmo (and I just spelled that kid's last name incorrectly but I'm too lazy to go look it up) and tells the story of how when she was in a preschool pageant her mother told her she had no talent, something thousands of other parents of thousands of other auditioners failed miserably at communicating to their croaking-frog children. Anyway, the best part is that when she talks about her mother saying this to her, Team Nichole is on camera seated right behind her and they all start silently, hands-over-mouth laughing behind her back. Team Nichole, let's be friends.

7. Brandy. Not the Brandy who just got charged with vehicular manslaughter. A new Brandy. A Brandy we can all get behind and support. She's shown laughing in clip after clip. She's a fun girl who says she has an "excrordinary [sic] voice." Then she sings "Like a Virgin" and is crazy-awful. She thinks the floor is causing her to sound bad. Yes, the floor. So she kicks off her shoes and sings on the carpet and sounds worse. They tell her to get lost and she launches into a tirade that includes the following sentences: "That's your loss... You don't know talent when you see it... Paula's better'n y'all anyway... My singin' was fine," etc.

For some reason Simon and Randy exit the audition room while Brandy is telling Seacrest what douche bags they both are. She gets into it with Randy, telling him to get his "fat ass back on in there." This is awesome, but what's more awesome is when Simon tries to reenter the audition room and the "Other Door" gag backfires on him. (For new readers, "Other Door" is the amazingly wonderful new thing they do where one of the doors stays locked to make exit even more humiliating and upsetting for auditioners who just got shit-canned. They try to leave, they can't, and Simon says, "Other door." It's given me a new reason to love this show.) Brandy yells, "You can't even go in the right door!" Seacrest cracks up. The whole world loves Brandy now. Or they should. If Courtney Love can't be the fourth judge, I want a rotating trio of Brandy, Janita "Very Sexy" from last week, and "The Hotness." Any one of those three women would be much more interesting than Carole Bayer Sager.

OK, on to Wednesday night's show...

They're back in Los Angeles, a place where the expression "You're going to Hollywood!" means that I get in my car and drive east for about three minutes on Fountain. Then I'm in Silver Lake. For the auditioners, it will involve a short freeway drive from Pasadena. Olivia Newton-John is the guest judge. She's still really pretty. Aging in a way that seems appropriate. Nice one, ONJ.

The Yes People:

1. Breathy Hot Girl. Simon says she's great, which is his way of saying, "Nice tits."

2. Cute African-American Guy With Nice Arms. He used to be Christina Aguilera's backup singer. He makes Paula and ONJ sigh in unison.

3. Gayish Guy From Last Season. ONJ tells him he has "a real sweetness" about him. Translation: sugar in the tank. And if anyone should know, it's a woman who starred in Xanadu.

The No People:

1. The Sex Panther. He says "I got fire equalingk three men." Yes, he makes that hard "k" sound at the end of "ing" words. I don't know why. He strips off his shirt to show off his sexy body, announcing that he is an athlete. And now I know that should the day come that I get to be on TV for any reason more important than being trapped by the cameras in a Christmas party scene on Kathy Griffin: My Life on The D-List, I will have carte blanche to take off my shirt. My body is sexier than this guy's, and I have a pony keg for a gut. The Sex Panther snarls and growls and is wearing torso makeup, including Nomi Malone-inspired nipple rouge. All the better to decimate Andrew Carver with, I assume. By the way, I really did have like three seconds of camera time on that show. I'm the fat shaved-head guy in the gray jacket and tie who goes "Haw haw haw" when K.G. talks shit about Patricia Heaton. Look for me in reruns on Bravo!

2. Sholandric the Entertainer. He worships Julio Iglesias. I think he might have a crush on Julio too, since he can't seem to say the name without licking his lips.

3. The Guy in the Banana Suit. He sings "It's peanut butter jelly time!" over and over. I would have said yes to him. I think the judges lack vision sometimes.

4. The Golddigger Junior. This girl's mother was one of Dean Martin's Golddiggers and that means she's obviously a Hollywood Legacy waiting to happen. I love her because she's clearly never been told no in her life. She gets rejected because she's awful and then launches into a crying fit, yelling "PLEASE!" over and over. Even brings Golddigger Mom into the room to plead her case for her. Gets on her knees and cries more. It's great. I hope it never ends. I could watch this for hours. She begs, "This opportunity! It means the world to me!" She knows in her heart that she is the only person in the Rose Bowl at that moment for whom this opportunity means the world. The only one who really understands the Dean Martin-ish possibilities. This goes on for quite a while until Paula finds the magic words for both mother and daughter and tells them they're beautiful. Suddenly the girl stops crying and both she and her mother smile and exit. Nice one, Paula.

5. The Taylor Hicks of Southeast Asia. Her name is Phuong, which Simon stupidly pronounces "Pong." She wears a gross brown perforated hat and affects numerous Taylor Hicks tics. But she is not and never will be The Boogie. As she exits, tinkly piano music begins playing what I like to call "Disappointment's Theme." My friend Gary, sprawled on my couch, begins making up lyrics for this bit of incidental music, all of which involve explaining Phuong's future move to a sad apartment in Alhambra.

6. The Widower Sherman. He's an old guy who explains that his "lady love" just died of cancer. Simon, who cannot fake empathy on any level, says "Wow, Sherman" to this revelation. Sherman has a petition to be allowed to audition. He sings "Cop Killer." OK, not really. He sings Khia's "My Neck My Back." OK, again, not really. He sings "You Belong to Me," making Paula and ONJ cry.

7. The People Who Are Going to Have Crazy Porn Sex When They Get Home. They're a couple from Compton. He's got a grill. She says she likes "that flavor." They French each other in public. The girl, named Cavett, says, "American Idol, you're looking at the next couple, me and Darold, that will be getting married... finalists." Neither of them makes it through, but they don't care. They've got each other. Cavett comes on to Simon. When Darold hears about this he gets a look on his face that's like, "Aw, yeah, I got a me a freak."

8. Some Crazy Guy Named Eric Mueller. I know a guy named Eric Mueller and he's not this guy. This Eric Mueller sings a stupid Hilary Duff song all high-pitched and stuck-pig-squealy, gayish hands on gayish hips. It turns out that he's taught himself to sing with Paula and Randy's Sing Like the Stars!! DVD. When Simon discovers this he becomes maniacally gleeful. Friend Gary, still sprawled on couch, says, "His face just turned into electricity." The three judges chase each other around the hotel lobby. No, seriously, they do this.

Extra stuff: At one point during one of the nights' episodes, I forget which one, Paula has to leave to go back to Los Angeles for a "family obligation." I believe this to be true, but I think I'm the only one. Even my friend Aaron (Friend Gary's boyfriend, just in case you're keeping track of all the Me Details in these recaps) has a dad back in Indiana who wants to know if I know "what's really happening." So to you, Walter, a.k.a. Aaron's Dad, I must say that I got nothin'. But if I run into Paula in Barney's, I will gaze into her eyes to check for any signs of dilation or redness.