Tuesday

Ryan is dressed like an idiot, Scott is trash, and the theme is Broadway. The forum poll is really split this week, which makes me happy, because normally it's just Bo and like one other person. Anyway, Scott sings "The Impossible Dream" (Man of La Mancha), which both his mother and Paula find to be completely accurate, and poignantly so, which is HILARIOUS. Even though this was the worst he has ever done, we are subjected to ten minutes of apeshit about how fucking amazing it was. But it wasn't, it was terrible, and I say that without prejudice and without regard to my total disgust and hatred of Scott: it was bad. There were bad sounds going in my earhole.

Singing "My Funny Valentine," which is less a musical number (Babes in Arms) and more of a…song…Rocker-Constantine confronts Theatre-Constantine, which is like Alien Vs. Predator in that no matter who wins there, we all lose. The faces, the stroke-out eyelid flutter, the mushmouth, it's all there, but his voice continues to improve. Except for the last note, which sounded like someone on an iron lung. All the judges make out with Constantine because he's so fucking magnetic.

Carrie sings "Hello, Young Lovers" from (The King and I) and...I don't get it. There's, like, no time signature? Or some kind of AutoCAD guy made it so complicated that it's smarter than me? Staying with the beat not only drives my brain crazy, but seems utterly beyond Carrie too, Ruxpinning it all to hell this week, and I can barely watch -- not like on a Constantine level with the fingers over my eyes, but there is wincing. The judges congratulate her on singing an incredibly boring song better than expected.

Vonzell sings "People" (Funny Girl), and it's highly enjoyable, of course, even though the schmaltz on that could lube an eighteen-wheeler and diva standards are the opposite of my cup of tea. It's somehow more believable coming from Vonzell, because I can totally see her driving her mail truck and just kind of thinking about people who need people, how lucky they are, stuff like that. Also awesome is Paula: "Barbra is Barbra, and Vonzell is now Vonzell." And Paula is now Horatio Sanz. The hell?

A-Fed dedicates this vomitous Tesh take on "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" (The Sound Of Music) to his hole and its determination, and it's horrible, with the snapping fingers and…what the fuck, Fedorov? The judges are right, that was hideous. You're still adorable, though, and I do love your voice, and I think somebody should buy you a puppy and a PS2. Or a nun to baby-sit you so you can start making better choices for yourself.

Nikko sings "One Hand, One Heart" (West Side Story), and it's a little itchier than normal, for him, but whatever. He starts out not so much in key, which is too bad because the song has these really awesome, like, haunting minors and weird intervals and it's beautiful but you have to sing it right. I was never allowed to see West Side Story when I was a kid because my mom thought Natalie Wood's bullshit accent was offensive. I didn't see that movie until I was like 20 and I agree about the accent, but not because it's racist, just because it's dumb. This boring memory brought to you by a very beautifully Nikko Smith performance about which I know not what to say.

Anwar sings "If Ever I Would Leave You" (Camelot), and he's better this week than he has been. Paula tells him he's technically the best singer, which is awesome, because it means four things at once and all of them are true. Maybe Paula is always talking in poems all the time and that's why she's hard to get. Anyway, he acquits himself well here. Then Cowell calls all Broadway people homos, starting with Anwar. I guess that's just him being pissy because musicals are yet another kind of music he hates.

Bo sings "Corner Of The Sky" (Pippin), which is…a lot of people thought he was going to have trouble with this theme, but it's like Carrie: any song can be a Bo Song, if you hold it right. It takes him like five phrases to get in tune, which is sad, but the total Captain and Tenille accompaniment is awesome. I need to find out more about this Pippin, I think. Does it always sound like that? Simon is kind of a little bitch about it, but the other guys love the whole thing. Me too. That was fun.

Nadia sings "As Long As He Needs Me," (Oliver!), which leads me to note for the first time in 27 years of life that Pippin and Oliver! are not the same thing. Which I just figured out this very second. But aren't they both about A-Fed in the big city, really? Stealing to survive and dodging artfully and…I really know nothing about anything. I'm like this empty pit of ignorance. Simon likes it better than the last few weeks, and then calls all Broadway fans homos again, this time starting with Seacrest. I'm glad Nadia's in the last spot, although it kind of reeks of desperation to keep her in the competition. Which is too bad, because she tried crowding Vonzell's box this week and that's dumb of her.

Altogether: the Carrie song threw off my circadian rhythms for good so now I'll be sleeping every third hour for seventeen minutes at a time, Bo Bice is unmistakably Bo, Simon thinks calling somebody queer is a put-down instead of a total compliment, and I will one day wed Nadia Turner and we will live in a huge house and Constantine will clean our pool and I will train our children to wait until he's balanced at the edge of the pool and then hurl insults and tuna salad at him from the second story. And when he cries, we will point and laugh, because pouting is for suckers.

Wednesday

Tonight's episode starts with Ryan welcoming us to "the show that will end another dream." Which is awesome and just shows what a thrill ride tonight's going to be.

Bo made up all the words of his song and the whole thing was a terrible effing idea, Carrie sang some kind of tempo-less freak-out, Vonzell was Vonzell all of a sudden and dimpled her gruntled self through a divalicious Vonzell experience, and Nikko was fantastic. Scott and Anthony were terrible, terrible, terrible, Anwar yelled his ass off, and Constantine was fucking filthy.

You know what freaks me out? Like, the only negative thing you can really say about Carrie Underwood is that she's unemotional and a scary robot. But if you said that to her, it wouldn't bother her? Because she wouldn't know what you mean.

The winning Tsunami Tsingle was "When You Tell Me That You Love Me." The other songs on the CD will be…the other Tsunami Tsingles. So this whole thing has been an exercise in futility, not to mention that they're singing the song again next week, which makes me sad. Philanthropy's nice and all, but this kind of thing is why I hate charity: the experience personally has been mostly hearing horrible songs sung with fake cheer and a hand sticking up in the air and now I have to hear it again. I'm implicated.

Then Fantasia's spaceship lands and she squats out of it in pants of such tightness as to make her scream her ass off and prowling and prancing and bobbing up and down like she needs to go to the bathroom or like she's going to lay an egg. Which is kind of what she does. And inside that egg? Is not "Baby Mama" like I was promised, but one or more songs about dreams coming true or something. I think she sings six songs because the song keeps changing instead of ending. I don't ever want it to.

There are parts where she just plants herself and shrieks. Just screams. Then she rambles at the Idols about how they need to act ugly. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.

Then some total bullshit. The pimpomercial is not intrinsically offensive, like it was last week: whilst singing that Nikka Costa that wouldn't go away, they put their hands up in the camera and turn into each other. It's cute, everybody but A-Fed looks good, they all sound like ass, but whatever. There's like one shot of the vehicle they're shilling in the whole thing, which is awesome because somebody got carried away with their concept and forgot why they got the job in the first place.

The bullshit is the faked-up, not-real screaming audience applause that happens when four of the nine contestants appear in the pimpomercial. There is ZERO crowd noise as the commercial starts, but then the second you see Carrie, Constantine, or Bo, or Scott or Nikko, the levels of the audience freak-out are amped like a hundred times. That's a nice send-off for Nikko, I guess. That's all I'm going to say about that, except to remind you that just because you hear applause does not mean people are clapping. Nobody actually cared that much whether Rachel got on the plane, either. You're not alone.

Then it's interesting because instead of saying all the safe people and dicking everybody around, Ryan just goes down the line: Nikko, you're in the bottom three. Vonzell, bottom three. Dumb. Dumb as all hell, but I get it.

When Anna called me to talk about the Fantasia Incident, and the results, I assumed Scott was eliminated, due to the fact that he now has literally nothing to recommend him whatsoever, she was like, "Nope." And I said, "A-Fed?" Nope. "Oh, God. Nadia?" No. And I swear to you that I went through all seven of them before I finally asked, "Who's left? Vonzell and…did I say Nikko?" And the moral of that story is that it's my actual job, my livelihood, to remember Vonzell and Nikko, and I couldn't do it, so how I can expect anything more from America?

The crowd freaks out and Ryan points out that it's their fault for not calling and voting. Scott's also in the bottom three. I wish he were on fire. Ryan asks Anthony and Bo why they aren't in the bottom three like they should be. Bo says musicals aren't his "gendre." Mine either, buddy. A-Fed rambles about how the doctors told him not to sing show tunes, and for once they were right. Randy and Ryan both secretly hate Scott but don't say it out loud, they just talk about how shocking it is that "two of the three of them" are on the Seal. Simon and Paula make no sense collectively or separately, and Randy dogs Ryan for bringing up how Simon is always right. Vonzell goes back to Suffragette City and then more commercials.

Nikko explains that he was out of his element, which isn't true because he did a great job and covered an R&B version of the song, and then Scott rambles at length about nothing in particular but I didn't really hear him because I was too busy beating my girlfriend. Asshole. There's Video Journey and then, thanks to Scott's bullshit ranting, we don't get to hear like a single note of the song, to which I was looking forward. I'm bummed but his talent is legitimate and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him. I would like it if he had a fashion line? Because I think his Little Old Man style of dressing could be the next big thing. In fact, I'm going to start dressing that way immediately. See you Sunday.