Idolatry

I was feverish, the first time—in bed under two down comforters and still shivering. It was midsummer; I had the flu. Too glassy-eyed and dizzy, too flat-out miserable for once in my life to read (although I’d piled a hopeful foot-high stack of books on my night table, right next to the bottle of Smart Water the doctor had recommended to combat the dehydration that left me feeling drunk every time I stood up, sat up, or closed my eyes) and sick to death of sleeping, I was flipping channels on the little bedside TV my husband watches sports on. I started with HBO—the several channels’ worth our cable company provides “as a courtesy” to the customers it overcharges anyway for just the one channel of HBO—and moved through Showtime (ditto), grumbling all the while about how it can be, how is it possible, that they broadcast movies twenty-four hours a day and yet never show anything I want to watch, before grimly beginning the round of the single digits: 4, 6, 8 . . . and stopped, stopped dead, at Channel 8, where a nervous-looking, bizarrely overdressed young woman was belting the hell out of a song from the forties—a fragment of a song, cut off after just a few bars and replaced by a clip of a young man, equally self-conscious, his tie untied in the style of Rat Pack-era Sinatra, stumbling through his song fragment. A talent show?

A talent show! I nearly clapped my hands in pleasure (no doubt I would have, if I’d had the energy—if I hadn’t been afraid that clapping, that pleasure, would have sent me over the edge, into the freefall of another dizzy spell) as I settled back on my pillows to watch. I love a talent show.

That first night, I was so transfixed I didn’t even think to call downstairs to my daughter, then nine years old—though if I’d stopped to think, as I did the next day, I would have realized that she’d be at least as interested as I. She’s a sucker for talent, too, and for pop songs of all kinds—not to mention the sort of human interest story I’d already sniffed out here. That first night, I just lay back on my pillows (a stack taller even than the stack of brand-new books I’d told myself I’d “use this time” to read after I’d been ordered to my bed), the two down comforters pulled up to my neck, and watched—with deep and growing pleasure—as the parade of awkward, unpolished, variously handsome young people, all of them groomed in an approximation of TV stardom (too much makeup, complicatedly styled and colored hair, wacky “glamorous” outfits that were clearly supposed to represent the look of the thirties and forties but didn’t quite), sang and fidgeted and then stood tense and panting as they listened to the judgments passed on them by a panel of music industry professionals who seemed only slightly less self-conscious than they did.

All the singers looked frightened. Even the ones who looked cocky also looked frightened. I understood why, too, after only a few minutes. This was the “results show,” broadcasting the highlights of the actual competition that had been on TV the night before—I groaned, as this became clear to me (how I wished I hadn’t missed it!)—but already I saw how it worked. The judges could say anything they wanted—they could be downright vicious if they felt like it (“That was just awful. Honestly, that was possibly the worst singing I have ever heard”) or utterly opaque (one judge, it seemed, did little more than sigh and shake his head and mutter the contestant’s name again and again)—and there was entertainment value in their pronouncements. A viewer could (and inevitably did) judge the judgments just as she judged the singing. The judges competed—with one another, with the singers—for attention; they were showing off.

But in fact what the show...