Paging Dr. Kubler-Ross

Sanjaya's performances are a bit like death: You need a lot of time and distance before you can reflect on and write about them coherently.

I still don't know that my belief in a common rationality has completed all five stages of grief, but I do want to make Joyce happy. So.

The scene: An imaginary disco ball twirls somewhere over an electric blue stage.

The singer: A young man with wild dark ringlets and a soupcon of carefully groomed facial hair, wearing a grey sport jacket over... a shiny gold undershirt? Anyhow. He's perched on a stool. "Besame," he sings, gazing deeply and dirtily into the camera, his eyes fringed with a sociopathic gleam. "Besame mucho."

For once in my life, I was glad not to know any Spanish (though I later looked up the lyrics and was appropriately sickened). Simon called Sanjaya's pitiless exercise in audience discomfiture "not horrible." But Sanjaya wasn't looking at Simon. He was looking at us. And I think we, the viewing audience, know exactly how horrible it was.

One highlight: Jennifer Lopez, in far more clothing than I have ever seen her wear in a professional context, doling out surprisingly perspicacious advice to our happy few. (BTW, you may still be Jenny from the block, but do you also still like pink frosted lipstick? I think the answer is yes!) "Totally down to earth and just the coolest person ever," Jordin blubbered. Well. As much as I hesitate to employ this device again: Yes and no, Jordin. Yes and no.

But J. Lo did nail Blake, telling him that we'd all rather sit inside our toilet bowls with tin buckets over our heads and a carrot stuck up each nostril than listen to one more of his zombie-ass, empty-minded covers (maybe I'm paraphrasing). Blake, alas, had no heart to which to take Jennifer's advice, and resembled nothing so much as a mildly disgruntled Fisher Price doll as he Ambien'd his way through some execrable Top-40 Marc Anthony concoction. A Fisher Price doll wearing...a fly-fishing hat? I couldn't really tell. Afterward, Paula (once again more or less writhing in perimenopausal heat) gushed, "It just captured who you are and the essence of who you are."

Exactly.

--AMBER