Desperately seeking Susan Boyle

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Saturn for the past week, you already know who Susan Boyle is. But let me run it by you one more time. On the first episode of the reality show Britain’s Got Talent on April 11, a 47-year-old unemployed church worker with bushy eyebrows and hair that looks like it hasn’t been combed for a week walks onstage in a cream dress. What follows is a bit of an interview where she gyrates her hips in a suggestive manner, getting a look of disgust from one of the judges, Piers Morgan, and a lot of snickering from the live audience.

Then she opens her mouth to sing.

What comes out is a voice so beautiful, so unexpectedly classy, you’d think God himself spent an inordinate amount of time designing her pipes and when it came to the outer shell, he said, “Oops, sorry, I’m running a little late” and beat it to create a million other people with average looks and average voices.

Simon Cowell raises his eyebrows in shock — you can see the realization literally descending on his face — Amanda Holden’s jaw drops, and Piers Morgan begins clapping and laughing as if saying, “She fooled us, didn’t she?”

Yes, she did. She also reminded people the lesson they’ve been taught by their mothers since they were children: don’t judge others on the strength of their looks (or better yet, don’t judge at all).

Boyle showed that talent, in whatever form, always manages to shine through. It may be a tough road — like it was for her, who, it was revealed in the media frenzy that followed, had been auditioning unsuccessfully for stage plays. British tabs desperately sought out the Scottish woman who comes from a little town “that’s a collection of…villages” and two days after the show aired in Britain, Easter Monday, the interest had crossed the Atlantic to American mainstream media — and became viral online.

It’s poetic that Boyle chose to sing I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables. The lyrics are moving and the melody, well, dreamy. “I dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living. I dreamed that love would never die, I dreamed that God would be forgiving. Then I was young and unafraid, and dreams were made and used and wasted. There was no ransom to be paid, no song unsung, no wine untasted.”

She is singing only the third line when the audience gets up on its feet and goes wild with applause.

Amanda Holden sums it up so well when she says, “We were all being very cynical and that’s the biggest wakeup call ever.” She is, of course, referring to Boyle’s appearance and how easily she was dismissed as a joke.

People were probably expecting a William Hung kind of a performance, but what they got instead was the female equivalent of Paul Potts — the show’s 2007 contestant and eventual champion — who looked as unassuming as his job (car phone salesman) until he sang Nessun Dorma, one of the best loved and most famous arias in opera.

It’s always interesting to note Simon Cowell’s expression when he’s confronted with talent coming from the left field. With Potts, he was chewing a pen and he suddenly looked up, with Boyle…well, he had a look that’s a cross between unexpected love and happiness.

Like he was hit by a bus.

Nobody was surprised when it was first revealed that the spinster from West Lothian has never been kissed — and now she’s been invited to guest on Oprah and Demi Moore has admitted she is a big fan (she supposedly got teary-eyed as she watched with husband Ashton).

Strangely, everybody’s warning Boyle not to get a makeover, the way American reality stars do to such extreme. Even as Diane Sawyer interviewed her on Good Morning America, Boyle said it was something she still has to think about.  

When I first saw the video on the night of Easter Sunday, Youtube had already registered 2.7 million views. Five days later it had reached 30 million.

To my mind there are two kinds of virals floating around the collective online consciousness — the first are mainstream media with totally unplanned results (like Potts and Boyle) and uploaded by viewers who simply enjoyed them. The second are those that are staged and produced for the Internet, and often it is how people react to this performance that is more interesting.

Both are wildly entertaining. At home, I often find myself watching Youtube when I can’t sleep, eating a bag of popcorn, and before I know it, it’s 4 a.m. and I have seen all the Berlitz commercials and “Real Men of Genius” ads of Bud Light.

Then there are the “performance art” videos — I put quotes because I’m not sure what they are. Two of my favorites are staged in train stations. The first is at the NYC Grand Central Station where 207 people — earlier briefed at Bryant Park by ImprovEverywhere — freeze on cue and don’t move for five minutes.

Two hundred seven human statues in a busy train station! Of course, people were confused and found it amusing and weird, as if they were trapped in an episode of Twilight Zone.

“Maybe it’s an acting class,” one person wondered as he goes through the frozen people — one of them about to drink from a cup, one tying his shoe, one waving a banana. At the end of five minutes, the frozen participants simply went on their way, and the travelers broke into applause.

Video hits so far? Sixteen million. 

A new viral — discovered on March 23 — occurs in Belgium, at Antwerp’s central station. So far, it has generated 4.1 million views and 1,192 blog posts. The setup is this: People are milling around the station when Julie Andrews’ Do Re Mi plays over the PA. A group of girls runs around in circles, until the circle gets bigger and pretty soon more than a hundred people are dancing to The Sound of Music tune.

Not all virals are meant to entertain, of course. Some are disturbing, some are nothing more than vain attempts to get recognized, and often, for the wrong reasons. Take the opening credits of the old show Different Strokes (retitled Disturbing Strokes) now set to ominous music. The video shows the two black boys playing basketball and their new adoptive white father picks them up in his town car, and brings them to his tony apartment building. They are smiling, they are laughing — they are a family now. But with the new music, the white father looks like a pedophile and the two innocent boys look like they’re going to walk into a dark future.

Videos make for a good medium to argue your case — no matter what it is. In 2007, a hysterical gay teen appealed to the public to leave Britney Spears alone. Eighteen million downloads later, Time magazine named it the biggest viral of the year. The magazine, though, was still split on why it was popular —  whether the public agreed with Chris Crocker’s rage over media’s assault on Spears or “that anonymous drama queens are just as entertaining as pop-star train wrecks.”

In the same year, “Pearl,” the two-year-old landlord bitch of comedian Will Ferrell made the rounds on our laptops. When you combine a cute girl, baby talk, a lot of cussing, and an underdog played by Ferrell, the results are hilarious. Number of views? More than 50 million. 

And who can forget the Thriller video of prisoners at Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center? One thousand five hundred men in jumpsuits dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which begs the question: was it a morning exercise or punishment? God knows.

Of course, Youtube can also bite you in the ass. Like it did Dan Rather, the respected journalist who totally forgot what a class act he used to be when he called Katie Couric’s broadcast as “dumbing it down and tarting it up.” It would be two or more years before Katie would finally get the public’s respect — thanks to an interview with Sarah Palin, who lost all public respect. And what of Rather, whom Couric succeeded? The standup comedian Harry Shearer found an old video of Rather “obsessing over how to dress for a rooftop broadcast — coat on or off, collar up or down? — making the veteran reporter look both dumb and tarty.”

My husband R.’s favorite videos have got to be Kobe Bryant’s stunts — first he jumps over a car in his Nikes, then he jumps over a pool filled with snakes with the crew of MTV’s Jackass, the latter made even more funny with the participation of a midget. Then again, any Jackass clip is bound to make you laugh or puke in disgust . 

Also getting a lot of hits now is a video of a Domino’s Pizza crew who stuffs cheese up his nose before putting it in a sandwich, and CNN’s reporter Susan Roesgen at a Chicago Tea Party coverage, who just can’t take the hisses anymore and, visibly upset, says the crowd is anti-CNN and the protest promoted by right-wing Fox Network.

One of the best videos I have ever seen is Oren Labie’s Her Morning Elegance — a stop-motion video featuring a woman in her bed — doing all sorts of activities with only pillows, blankets and socks and scarves to show movement. So far, 7.4 million views and almost 10,000 comments.

Just this morning, I discovered a new video that got me laughing hysterically. Called Good Cop, Naked Cop, it’s a parody of the interrogation technique of police officers. Suspect refuses to answer questions, so Good Cop leaves the room. Enter Naked Cop (a very white, overweight naked dude). Suspect still refuses to reveal the perp’s name. Naked Cop begins to jog, Suspect looks like he’s about to hurl. Naked Cop does a headstand…and finally, he takes a Thigh Master and pulls a chair in front of the suspect…until he gets suspect to blurt out a name.

If there is any justice in the world, this would be the next viral video.

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E-mail the author at tanyalara@yahoo.com.