I don't remember who told me about Susan Boyle but I, like some hundreds of millions of other people, have gone to You Tube several times for the experience of watching the single, (formerly) frowsy, 48-year-old woman blast "I Dreamed a Dream".
It was an apt choice of songs for such an unlikely star to be born singing because the music business isn't kind to women who aren't sculpted by Mattel. I love watching the eye-rolls from the women in the audience -- women who aren't related to Barbie any more than Ms. Boyle is. I love the dropped jaws. I love the standing ovation. I love it that she's touring the U.S. in November.
Because I don't watch television very much, it was Hulu that introduced me to the notion that the United States also has talent. The first episode I saw featured Kari Callen, age 43, who also spoke of never having been in a relationship, of her need to prove that if her harelip makes it hard for people to look at her, she can inspire them to listen to her. Her song choice was also spot-on: "There's a Place for Us," a ballad about being taken by the hand to a place of forgiveness, acceptance and purpose. She blew the judges onto their feet but didn't make it to the quarter finals, which I haven't recovered from.
Apparently, a lot of other watchers haven't recovered from the decision either, because the You Tube comments run less to discussing her performance than to speaking directly to Ms. Callen in Seattle, urging her not to give up.
The series is going into the final countdowns now and I wonder if Piers Morgan's prediction that single-mother, 46-year-old, zaftig soul diva Emily David may well win the million dollars at stake. "Never mind all these young acts you've seen out of the back," Morgan said in a tacit admission that in some things, age and experience ("Five long years I thought you were my man") add body, figuratively and literally, to a performance.
America's/Britain's Got Talent is important for how it humbles us as an audience and our expectations of female performers. It would be a grave mistake to think that Boyle, Calen or David's difficult lives and bodies don't contribute to their gifts. Being or looking different gives a woman time to fractionate her pain and learn to live with and use it -- "I'm gonna take all I can take," "Chain of Fools" announces with self-irony. Most of the odd-bodies of the world don't have secret clarion voices but they have talents and depths they have learned from the house arrest of their looks. Maybe that fact is finally starting to leak out.
