Small Town American Idol

Do you enjoy listening to the wail of three fire trucks for 30 minutes? Do you love following a rotund woman in a green and purple floral pattern moo-moo around a circle for over an hour in hopes of winning a chocolate pie with a lake of meringue on top of it? Have you ever wanted to ram a deliciously grilled hot dog up your nose and into your brainpan? Maybe you should attend more local festivals in the South.

To the outside observer it would seem that the people in Tennessee will make a festival around just about anything. Mostly we enjoy celebrating food like soybeans, strawberries, tomatoes, and ramps (little green onions) but sometimes we like to branch out by hosting actual events like the World’s Biggest Fish Fry or the World’s Largest Coon Hunt. Nearly every town in Tennessee has some sort of annual festival/jamboree/gathering whose proceeds go to their local firefighters/community center/corrupt politician.

Some of you readers might be thinking to yourself Why do I really give a crap about a Tiny Green Onion Festival or How large is the World’s Largest Coon or What has this got to do with my fetish for putting meat products up my nose.

I attended a festival on Saturday in my hometown of Henry,TN called Pioneer Days (even though there is no pioneer theme what-so-ever since they stopped holding the faux gun fights and it is only a one day event) to participate in the karaoke contest that my mother signed me up for. Having plenty of experience singing karaoke in seedy bars and underground Yakuza nightclubs I believed that I had a pretty good shot of winning the $300 pot. That was before I got to the event and discovered that one of the judges was the owner of a local bar where the karaoke DJ works and where most of my fellow contestants (who sing the same three songs every Friday night at said bar) are regulars. The other two judges were a woman country singer that I’ve never heard of and a ‘gayish’ male country singer that had to kill seven moose to get his hair to the correct degree of cool pointiness.

(The difference between ‘gayish’ and ‘metrosexual’ is that a metrosexual is someone who is straight but takes as much time in front of a mirror as a woman getting ready in the mornings and a gayish person is someone who may be straight but is trying really hard to act gay by saying things like “Oh, my gosh” seven times in ten minutes and commenting on how “fabulous” the women crowded around him are dressed.)

Now, I’m going to stop for a moment to point out two things that did not register with my brain at the time when I agreed to this venture. One…I am at a town festival in the South. Two…I am usually drinking when I sing karaoke. These have a bearing because as I sit down to wait for my name to drawn out of a box I realize that I am about to listen to a lot of bad singers butcher country songs and that I wouldn’t be able to drown out this experience with copious amounts of booze. Here’s the progression of the afternoon…

1:15- Find my sister (who my mother also signed up) and head to the registration tent.
1:17- Meet the judges and realize that I am wasting my mother’s $5 entry fee.
1:45- Notice that a lot of the contestants are regulars at the bar that the judge owns and realize that I am wasting my mother’s $5 entry fee.
2:00- Competition starts off with “Okie from Muskogee” and I think that maybe it won’t be so bad.
2:33- Four more country songs and I realize that beer was invented for these types of social gatherings.
2:55- Three more country songs have been “sung” and I am thinking about wandering into traffic.
3:07- My sister, April, is called to stage and she performs the first non-country song of the day, an excellent rendition of Melissa Etheridge’s “Come to My Window.”
3:15- It starts to sprinkle rain as the girl after my sister finishes the second Patsy Cline song of the day. The karaoke equipment is quickly covered and the competition comes to a halt.
3:18- The rain stops and the competition continues. The sky stays overcast so I occupy my mind by envisioning death by electrocution for every one who gets up and sings country.
3:27- It starts raining again right in the middle of an adolescent’s squeaky version of a Rascal Flatts song (which is pretty close to the original) and competition is put on hold again.
3:42- Some people decide to put a tent over the stage so that competition can commence. My dreams of watching a fellow contestant juiced with electricity withers.3:47- Competition begins again (with the squeaky kid getting a mulligan) as the rain slows.
3:51- Another country song…
3:56- Another country song…
4:01- Please God, bring the lightening.
4:06- Okay…I’ll take a stroke. Send me a stroke.
4:11- The rain stops and the sun comes out. Out of need for movement I get up and walk to the concession stand to get my dad a hot dog. On the way back I hear the fourth Judds song begin and start pondering the mechanics of the force and angle needed to get a cooked tube of meat all the way up my nostril passage and through my cerebral cortex.
4:12- I see the stage and realize that the woman singing (who is not doing too bad) has been lied to by someone. Apparently somebody told her that this was American Idol because she is wearing a tight rhinestone shirt, shorts that have a mailing address in her colon, and powder blue cowboy boots. Things are shaking that shouldn’t shake. People in the crowd are averting their eyes for fear of spontaneous oral and rectal leakage. I look to the sky to keep from becoming permanently flaccid. There is no God.
4:14- The most horrible thing I have ever witnessed steps off the stage and dad finishes his hot dog, oblivious to the fact that John Carpenter’s pièce de résistance just took a year off the lives of everyone in the crowd who, like a massive 87 car pile-up on the freeway, couldn’t look away.
4:22- The DJ calls my name.
4:23- The opening cords to “Roadhouse Blues” blasts the crowd out of the “country lull” that they have been. I pretend to manipulate the harmonica along to the song. People are smiling and the judges look like they are awake again.
4:27- The last guitar ditty of The Doors’ song dies away. I have used the gravel-wrapped-in-velvet singing style of Morrison to bring the crowd back to life.
4:28- Another country song…
4:32- I give up.
5:04- The last contestant is finished. I have somehow mentally checked out and missed the last of the contestants. All I remember is staring at a cloud that resembled Peter Boyle and singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in my head.
5:15- The five finalists are chosen and sent to the stage to sing one more song. I am not one of them. All five of the finalists are women. Who sang a country song. My faith in humanity is now nil when someone picks an okay version of Carrie Underwood over a good (I was sober so it wasn’t spectacular) version of The Doors.
5:19- I am in my truck heading for home.

Maybe I am biased about my performance. Four of the finalists did really good…for singing country songs (the last got in on cuteness alone). In my mind, country is the easiest of all the musical genres to sing. The melodies are never really complex, there is hardly ever any variation in the actual music, and the range really doesn’t matter as long as you put “twang” in your voice. There are some exceptions to prove the rule…but you never see those exceptions performed at karaoke. I wish my friend Rob had been there to channel Bon Scott or my other friend John to woo the crowd with a little Paul Simon. But alas, variety was not the order of the day.

I didn’t stay for the finals because it would have basically been five women trying to out-Wynona each other.

And the concession stand had run out of hot dogs.