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'Oh, to be a boy' on 'American Idol'
Deseret News (Salt Lake City), May 6, 2008 by Scott D. Pierce Deseret News
Given that three of the four remaining finalists on "American Idol" are male, logic might suggest that the only remaining female contestant would be safe when the vote is tallied this week.
Of course, as we've seen in all seven "Idol" seasons, logic doesn't rule the voting. Or much of anything else that goes on with the show.
And the most recently eliminated finalist, Brooke White, indicated somewhat inadvertently that there's a good chance the final three will be David Archuleta, Jason Castro and David Cook, with Syesha Mercado bidding them and the rest of America farewell on Wednesday night.
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"Well, you know what? The boys are awfully popular this year," White told critics in a conference call. "And I know that because their fan mail came in great, humongous stacks.
"And us girls got, like, three a day," she said with a laugh.
(Before anybody starts claiming that White is bitter and jealous, she said all of this without the slightest tinge of either bitterness or jealousy.)
This is not, of course, a clear indication of how the voting will go tonight. Archuleta, Castro, Cook and Mercado haven't even performed yet, and one of them could be particularly good or particularly bad.
And you never know what the judges are going to say, given that what they have to say sometimes seems to have no real relationship to what America has just seen and heard.
(And, in the case of Paula Abdul, what she says sometimes seems to have no real relationship to anything on the planet Earth.)
But the viewers who send fan mail are the same group most likely to vote -- teenage girls, in large part. And the remaining three male contestants all have more than their share of teenage girl fans.
"The boys are very talented and very charming," White said. "And, oh, to be a boy this year! It probably would have been helpful."
Not that she's conceding that the male finalists have been better than the female contestants this season.
"They're great, but so are the girls," White said.
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White's husband, David Ray, apparently really was trying the whole Samson thing while she was on the show.
He really did refuse to get his hair cut, somehow believing that this would bring her luck.
"Yes, it's true," White said.
But now that she's been eliminated, some of her husband's hair will be eliminated, too.
"Dave, when are you planning on cutting your hair?" White asked her hubby as critics breathlessly waited on the other end of phone lines.
(OK, maybe not so breathlessly.)
"He just said, 'Whenever you get around to it.' So, I'll be the one cutting it, but I'm just not sure when that's going to happen," White said with a laugh. "We'll have to pencil it in somewhere. It'll probably have to be at 3 o'clock in the morning sometime."
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On TV this morning: White is scheduled to be a guest on today's installment of "The Morning Show With Mike and Juliet" (9 a.m., Ch. 13).
The ex-"Idol" finalist is slated to both perform and be interviewed.
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When White's obituary is written -- many decades from now -- it will probably make mention of the fact that she was the "American Idol" contestant who forgot the lyrics and had to start over.
But before that night two weeks ago when she struggled, lyrics had not been difficult for her.
"No, actually, I have not had any problem with the lyrics up until 'You Must Love Me,"' White said. "And, all of a sudden, it freaked me out. And I started thinking, 'Oh my gosh, what if this happens again?' It just kind of plays head games."
Which is why she wrote the word "palm" on her palm last week before singing "I Am ... I Said" -- to remind her of the part of the song where she sings, "palm trees grow."
(She didn't actually have "lyrics" on her hand, as indicated by host Ryan Seacrest. Does one word even qualify as "lyric"?)
"When I was singing the song in my rehearsal, I kind of felt as if 'palm tree' was not sticking in my brain. So even just the practice of writing it down on my hand helped me remember it," she said. "I didn't even look at it because it was on the underneath side of my hand, but whatever you can use.
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Is Cook original? My 17-year-old daughter -- to whom I must defer on matters of what the kids think is cool these days -- finds it amusing/annoying that the "Idol" judges keep telling David Cook he's original.
"To me, he just seems like a guy who's in any of the groups I like," she said. "He's just a poser."
Apparently, "poser" is a really, really bad thing to be. And I'm not sure that "cool" is a cool term anymore.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com
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