SHE HAD A DREAM

SHE HAD A DREAM 

Of those 100 million plus You Tube hits over the last ten days, at least twenty are from me. I just can't get enough of her. Every time I watch it, I wind up crying. A friend recently told my wife that she had a husband who wears his heart on his sleeve. 

This time, however, it was lodged firmly in my throat. 

We live in a world where appearance is reality. Or at least close enough to reality that it can by no means be safely ignored. We also live in a world of conventional wisdom. If a frumpy "plus size" woman pushing 50 has not fulfilled her "dream" of becoming a professional singer, chances are . . . 

She can't sing. 

We all knew that when she walked onto the stage. A slow, somewhat uncomfortable walk that we thought said "I have never been here before and do not expect to be back any time soon." Then she started answering questions. 

And really convinced us her fifteen minutes of fame would either be funny for us . . . or embarrassing for her . . . or (we hoped) both. 

Simon started with softballs. "What's your name, darling?" (He would never have tried that "darling" bit on Amanda; she would have clocked him). "Susan Boyle," she said, safely enough. "And where are you from?" "Blightman, near Bathgate, in West Lothian," she replied. That's a "big town," said Simon smoothly. Her puzzled look said "not really." 

And then she stopped. For more than a moment. And we knew again she was cooked. TV pros don't stop. Silence is deadly. Pregnant pauses are decidedly for amateurs. We had an amateur and we knew it. She scratched her head. Which no one else on TV does either. Because their hair is very made up. Which was not her problem. Because her hair was barely made up. 

"It's more a collection of . . ." 

And then she stopped again. To find a word, for heaven's sake. Doesn't she understand she is on TV? We knew she didn't.

". . . villages, don't ya think?" 

Simon doesn't get paid to think. At least not about the size of West Lothian "villages." So he plowed on. 

 "And how old are you Susan?" "I am 47," she said. Simon's eyes opened . . . wide. He couldn't say what he was thinking. Which was that she must be kiddin'.

 She wasn't. 

"And that's just one side of me," she added, suggestively rolling her decidedly non-Madonna like hips. Pierce frowned at the unvarnished tackiness of it all. Simon muttered a disgusted "Wow" sotto voce to Amanda. Even in Europe, this was still a family show. So tackiness approaches raunchiness only at a distance. Simon moved on. 

Deftly. 

"OK. What's the dream?" he asked. 

"I'm tryin' to be a professional singer," said she. And then the camera panned to a woman in the audience. Whose look said either "Yikes" or "C'mon" depending on the continent. Simon moved in for the proverbial kill. "And why hasn't it worked out so far, Susan?" "I've not been given the chance before, but here's hoping it'll change" said Susan. We didn't believe her. And when she told us she wanted to be as successful as Elaine Paige, a theatrical superstar, we all laughed. 

Piers had had enough. "What are you going to sing tonight?" he asked, just to get it over with. "I'm going to sing I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables," she said, just to let us know how bad what was coming would be. "Big song," said Simon. Pies chuckled. Amanda just stared. 

Then Susan Boyle sang. 

And right about that time, to quote Forrest Gump, "God showed up." 

She didn't just sing. She overwhelmed. She was perfect. The audience was on its feet. Simon was simply fooled and couldn't wash that "I've been had" smile off his face. Amanda was in shock, and Piers later admitted as much. In the evaluations which followed, Amanda apologized for all us "cynics," calling the performance "the biggest wake up call ever." Piers confessed that when she had said she wanted to be "like Elaine Paige, everyone was laughing at you." 

"No one is laughing now," he added. 

Except God. 

Who always knew she could sing. 

Even when we were certain that this frumpy, slighty overweight, 50ish, not ready for prime time, spinster, with a silly dream, from a village in West Lothian . . . 

Couldn't.

SOUNDS OF SILENCE

SOUNDS OF SILENCE 

I have not written a blogpost in almost two months. 

A cousin in Colorado wondered if all was well. She was used to receiving my monthly (or, during the recent election, weekly) missives and thought something might be wrong. I told here everything was fine and filled her in on some family news. 

Another friend mentioned that he too had gone to the blog recently and had seen nothing since early February. He was worried that I would "lose my audience." With his finger on the pulse of 21st century internet based media, he issued a dire warning. "If you want to get hits, you have to do it all the time. Good bloggers blog every day. And theirs are shorter than yours." Translated for my 20th century literary based mind, "get hits" is a synonym for having been "read," and "good bloggers" are those who, tautologically speaking, "get hits." On his view, reading appears to be more or less beside the point. A "hit", I have learned, is anyone who accesses the blog, whether or not they actually read it. Shorter appears to be better because it merely increases the chances that some of the "hitters", as it were, will also turn out to be readers. 

What's a neophyte blogger to do? 

I told my cousin I had not written anything lately because I was still trying to get a bead on what is going on in the economy. Said I: "The whole banking plan is very complicated and I am not quite sure I understand it yet." Said she (tongue firmly planted in cheek): "You mean you actually want to understand what is happening before you write about it?" 

But this is not a laughing matter. 

Bloggers (and others) are weighing in en masse on the Obama-Geithner plan to create a public-private partnership to begin purchasing the so-called toxic assets, largely mortgage backed securities which are not trading anymore (and thus can't really be priced) along with those killer credit default swaps and options that piled leverage on top of the way overly leveraged mortgage backed securities. No one really knows whether the plan will work (except Paul Krugman, who -- for reasons I do not understand -- pretty much says it won't, and Tim Geithner, who -- for reasons I very much understand -- does not promise it will but is officially reduced to the position that it has to). 

I don't know either. 

And so have been reduced to silence. 

Which is another word for "thinking". 

Along with the other "weigher-inners", I could break my studied silence and take a position. As far as I can tell, that would not really require "weighing in" on the actual economic effects of the plan. Instead, I would just need to make some aphoristically cute atmospheric point. Like . . . 

Why is the President doing a town hall meeting in California when he should be 24/7 on the banking plan? Or . . .

Why is the President talking about universal health care, or universal pre-k, or -- frankly -- universal anything, when the universe's entire foundation (aka the banking system) is not functioning? Or . . . 

Why didn't Geithner or Obama know about those AIG bonuses, and anyway how will we stop them, which has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the banking plan will actually work but otherwise satisfies a "weigher-inner's" felt urge to say something that appears to be related even if it isn't? Or . . . 

What's the point of passing a back to the '70s larded by liberals budget that raises taxes and refuses to delay on going green and a whole host of Democratic platform planks which will just balloon the deficit, when we are already committed to ballooning the deficit to bail out the bankers and hedge funders (and, just for edge and moral superiority, those AIG bonus babies)? 

Or I could just say nothing. 

And keep thinking. 

I won't get any "hits" this way. 

But my cousin in Colorado still loves me.