James DurbinLast night, I blogged the performances show with Heejun Han. Okay, I didn’t really, but he was pretty funny on Twitter last night, so I just pretended I did.
I thought the show was pretty strong with really, only one weak point. And that weak point is little Hollie Cavanaugh. Here was my top and bottom two from last night:
Top 2
1. Jessica Sanchez
2. Elise Testone
2. Colton Dixon (sorry, I couldn’t decide)
Bottom 2
1. Hollie Cavanaugh
2. Phillip Phillips
The top 7 start the show performing Pink’s Raise Your Glass. It was kind of a disaster. Even my Droopy Elise wearing some sort terrible green hat that didn’t match the rest of her outfit couldn’t save it.
Ryno brings up Hollie and Jessica to center stage. Hollie has to be shaking in her boots. He puts Hollie on the right side of the stage. And Jessica goes to the left side.
James Durbin comes out sounding like Adam Lambert and looking like UFC fighter Josh Koscheck with a blown out blond look. Sadly, there was no Hulk Hogan this time.
Elise and Phillip are in center stage. Jimmy thinks they both will be in the bottom three. Phillip joins Hollie and Elise joins Jessica. Ryno better not throw us a curveball here.
Half of Jennifer Hudson is out singing Act Like A Woman, Think Like A Man. It’s kind of a boring performance for her, but Ne-Yo comes out and cleans up. That dude is just good. I’m still looking for Jennifer’s second half. With heels, she’s nearly a head taller than my man. I wonder if David Otunga is in the audience with his bow tie and coffee mug?
And yes, Jennifer Hudson is skinny.
Ryno brings up Colton and Joshua and Jimmy says he’s in on both. Joshua goes with Jessica and Elise. Colton goes with Hollie and Phillip. Skylar is the only one left. And she’s the first one who is safe. Ryno swerved us. He stuck Skylar with Colton, Phillip and Hollie, who are the other safe folks. My poor Elise. My poor, poor, Elise. This saddens me.
Steven thinks they’ll use their save card this week. Um, Steven, you just ruined the suspense buddy. Joshua is safe. Jessica looks absolutely destroyed. Elise is safe! Holy cow. Jessica is so going to be saved.
In maybe the best moment in Idol history, the judges come up and save Jessica before she gets into half of the first verse of her song and she just looks shocked. She has no idea what is going on. But the best part is that J. Lo shows us a side angle of that badonk and man, that lady will always have it.
(Fast forward to about 1:57)
You know what this means next week though. Two people are going home. And since America was drunk last night, we could see two really strong singers go home.
Hollie doesn’t deserve to be on this show! Come on! Seacrest out!
Last night was 80s night on American Idol and most of the contestants did well. The judges went out of their way to let the people know that Hollie wasn’t good. I compared her to a child pageant winner on Popblerd, so I didn’t really like her as much either.
Here were my top and bottom 2 from last night:
Top 2
1. Joshua
2. Colton
Bottom 2
1. Hollie
2. Phillip
The show starts with Ryno Seacrest introducing Jenny Lo’s new video. I don’t care for the song that much, but as you’d expect, she looks absolutely amazing in the video. And look at that daggone one-piece. Yikes.
Joshua is sick and says he may black out. Ryno brings Joshua and Jessica to the middle of the stage. Joshua is safe as is Jessica. They were gimmes.
Some UK group named The Wanted is on stage. What is this, X Factor? At least, they’re trying to bring boy bands back. I’m all for boy bands coming back.
Ryno continues to bring them up in their duet pairs from last night. It’s Colton and Skyler’s turn to come to the middle. Before telling anyone they are in the bottom two, Ryno brings up Hollie and DeAndre as well. Deandre is in the bottom three. Colton is safe. Hollie is in the bottom three and Skylar is safe. That means either Phillip or my girl Droopy Dog, I mean Elise is in the bottom three. I have a bad feeling for my girl.
Before we get to see who is the last person in the bottom three, we get a Kellie Pickler and her song, Where’s Tammy Wynette. I think she’s trying to look like a sexier version of Carrie. Too bad she doesn’t sound like Carrie.
My girl is in the bottom three. Ryno tells Hollie that she’s safe. It’s down to Deandre and Elise. Elise is safe and Deandre is up for elimination. I think Jenny Lo may try and talk the boys into keeping Deandre, but the fact of the matter is, he’s going to be there again soon. No male singer has won this show singing mostly in a light voice or a falsetto, and I don’t expect that to happen now.
Jenny Lo tried to save Deandre, but she was vetoed. Deandre is going home sweet home. I think that they would only save Joshua, Jessica, Skylar, Phillip, and Colton if they were voted to be eliminated. Elise and Hollie better sing their asses off.
A few weeks back on this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, contestant Dida Ritz blew me (and Natalie Cole) away with her lip sync performance of Cole’s 1974 debut hit “This Will Be.” She projected youthful glitz and boundless joy, and she even sorta looked like a twenty-something Natalie Cole in a metallic gold disco-inspired get-up. Her performance was enough to save her from an early elimination and it earned her a good deal of respect from her drag sisters. Prior to that (and ever since), she’d been fairly undistinguished.
Start Your Engines!As much as I was rooting for Dida, she just never rose to Ru’s weekly challenges, largely coasting along happily while benefiting from the bigger mistakes of arguably better queens (see also: Willam Belli’s surprise elimination for “breaking the [as yet unspecified] rules”). With the competition down to the final five, Dida’s shortcomings – her stunning lack of imagination, her not-big-enough hair, her not-very-special runway outfits, and her woefully unmoisturized (“gray”) knees – were only amplified by the general polish of the remaining queens.
She was especially weak in last week’s challenge, a drag presidential debate (oh yes, a drag presidential debate) moderated by RuPaul with additional questions from guest judge, The Onion sex columnist Dan “It Gets Better” Savage. When Savage posed a hard-hitting question to Ritz (“How would you redecorate the White House?”), Dida tossed what Savage would later call a “word salad” that involved using Ralph Lauren’s name in vain, like a hundred times. All the while, you could hear the girl’s gray knees knocking behind the podium. It was a little hard to watch, and it was no surprise that she landed in the bottom two.
The bigger surprise was that Latrice Royale landed there with her, this despite delivering one of the most potent one-liners of the night regarding the ugliness of Phi Phi O’Hara, who, in playing some sort of Sarah Palin/G.C.B. hybrid, had just referred to Dida and Latrice as “The Help”. (Because, you see, they’re all black and stuff. You know. Funny, right?) Last week’s lip-sync was to Gladys Knight & the Pips’ “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination”, and though Dida made a good go of it, her wild energy didn’t go well with the song’s soulful simmer. Latrice got it. True, she had the added advantage of looking like someone who sounds like Gladys Knight (Dida had the same advantage with that Natalie Cole song). More importantly, she gave her performance space to grow, starting off still and strong and eventually building to the fervor of a revival tent preacher.
All Dida could do, after dropping her skirt mere seconds into the song, was rip her wig off at the end – the last resort of the desperate-for-attention queen. Game over. The winner could not have been clearer and La Ritz received her long overdue “Sashay Away”.
Latrice Is Having All Our Babies, or “Straight Men Can’t Tuck”
That fierce performance from Latrice turns out to have been merely the warm-up for what was truly the greatest Lip-Sync for Your Life in all the show’s four seasons.
At the end of last week’s episode after the final four were revealed, Ru announced that she would be bringing back a previously eliminated queen of her judging panel’s choosing. At the beginning of this week’s episode we learn that Santino Rice (Project Runway Season 2 non-winner) and (90s dance pop refugee) Michelle Visage had chosen diminutive Puerto Rican Kenya Michaels to return for a second chance. Kenya’s main advantage all along had been that she presents as a girl – a really short, really cute, really girly girl – even out of drag. There is simply, absolutely no mistaking her for a man. But her inability to surmount the language barrier (and her inability to turn her language issues into a genuine schtick – see Yara Sofia from Season 3) kept her from ever presenting a serious threat in the competition.
Nevertheless, Kenya started the episode strong, winning the mini-challenge (but really, how hard could dressing a teddy bear in drag – for charity! – be?). But the main challenge was a doozie. A twist on last year’s challenge of turning older gay men into “drag mamas”, this week’s challenge had the queen-testants transforming daddies – “daddies”, in the case, meaning men who have actually reproduced biologically at least once, maybe twice, or maybe six times – into drag sisters. Hilarity ensues, right? But wait! As if RuPaul Charles were a sort of alternate universe infomercial Ron Popeil: there’s more! For the runway, the queens (including the newly dragged dads) would present as pregnant! With Beyonce-style (oooh, I didn’t go there) phony baby bumps!
But wait! There’s even more! Before doing the with-child runway walk, each pair would do a stage performance together! A burlesque! Now, how much would you pay?
While the evil Phi Phi O’Hara was blessed with a dad who came to win, Kenya (who, as a reward for winning the mini-challenge, got to play matchmaker between the queens and dads) chose for herself the dad with the “prettiest” face, who also turned out to be the biggest wet blanket of the bunch. Their pregnant runway was so unintentionally depressing, I laughed until I cried. The freshly redeemed Kenya found herself up for re-elimination.
Latrice was also, once again in the bottom two, having transformed the totally game but not terribly graceful father of six Leland into more of a drag BFF than a drag sister (yes, “family resemblance” was one of the judge’s criteria for this challenge). While, of all the remaining queens, Latrice is my clear favorite, I was sorta thrilled to see her back in the bottom two. Her lip sync on last week’s show was the best of this season, aside from Dida’s “This Will Be” (which seems more and more like a fluke at this point). How would she and Kenya fare with…
“(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman”. Aretha. Again, this is a song that hardly makes a competition between Latrice Royale – a regal black woman of ample build and bedazzled face – and lil’ Miss Kenya seem fair. Again, Latrice friggin’ looks like someone who sings like Aretha. (Indeed, Latrice is often given to leading the girls in a rousing gospel chorus of “Jesus is a biscuit!”) She wouldn’t have needed to do much to convince us.
Regardless, she worked the song over, “singing” Aretha’s words (well, Carole King’s words) to her baby bump, then addressing the heavens with what can only be described as the proverbial glow of a mother-to-be. Latrice stood solidly center stage and never stopped earning her spotlight, even as little Kenya performed wild jumps, pirouettes, and splits all around her – like some kind of giant methed-out fruit fly – desperately trying to upstage the un-upstageable.
Latrice had memorably praised Dida Ritz’s great take on “This Will Be” as “high drag”, but the drag on this show has never been higher than what Latrice delivered this week. She was glorious, and her “Natural Woman” was incredibly touching and sweet (her challenge partner, sweet, straight Leland, father of 6, said it gave him goosebumps!), but it was also very sweetly funny, because you absolutely believed that this very large man (who’s been to prison, remember) was a very pregnant woman. Really amazing stuff. Fast forward to about 38:30 in the video below to see it:
Latrice Royale
I’m ready to crown Ms. Royale this season’s winner based solely on that performance, but there are a couple of epic challenges left before RuPaul places that tiara. Even if Latrice lands in the bottom two next week, I can’t imagine any of the remaining queens beating her in the Lip Sync round.
Phi Phi O’Hara
Urgh. I hate her. A nasty, scheming queen who wears her insecurities like glittery sequins, who oversells her own abilities, and loudly underestimates the talents and smarts of those around her. There are some villains you root for (see Willam Belli). And then there’s sad, ugly, smug, awful little Phi Phi.
Chad Michaels
She’s a professional! Clearly the most polished of the bunch, Chad Michaels is most notable for having committed violent crimes against his face in order to look more like Cher. I didn’t take her very seriously in the beginning because of that. Her primary strength is her polish, her professionalism and her consistency. But it’s all those things that would make her the most boring choice for this season’s winner.
Sharon Needles
If, at the beginning of the show, before a second of it had aired, you’d asked me who would be first eliminated, Sharon would have been my guess. But she has consistently surprised me with both her dry, mordant sense of humor and b-horror flick runway looks. Although she has stayed true to her genre, she’s also shown a wide range of it, and out of drag, she’s proven to be a smart, strong, sensitive, entirely decent person with a very big heart. She may be a monster, but girl’s got feelings, yo.
In last week’s Drag Presidential debate, she brought a kind of Michelle Bachmann realness – all business, purposeful and righteous in a sober pantsuit as she expounded on the virtues of not only marriage equality but divorce equality, and asserted that “this country is in dire need of a sex change, and I’m just the drag queen to perform such an operation.” She played up her cynicism as a family value, but in her summation speech, she delivered a raw mini-autobiography to stand in solidarity with all the small-town, working class freaks and outcasts of America.
But can she out lip-sync Latrice? I’d like to see her try.
