'Idol' worship
At the end of the show, a stunned Haley Sattazahn stood alone with her mother in the center of the arena floor. The 10-year-old girl with the dirty blond hair and summer tan was turning over in her hands a gray skullcap that only moments before had been - are you ready for this? - on Ace Young's head!!!
"I can barely breathe," Haley said, gasping for air. After a moment, she told the story of how she had stood on her chair, leapt into the air and caught the cap that Young - who finished 7th on American Idol this year - had thrown into the mad swarm on the floor. She fell off the chair, but like a seasoned ballplayer colliding with the fence to catch a home run ball, Haley kept a tight grip on her prize.
"Oh my God, I'm still shaking," she said. The Adamstown, Pa., native had come to the Giant Center near Hersheypark for a recent American Idols Live show. She was among friends: Idol addicts in attendance included a woman who streaked her hair gray in homage to Taylor Hicks and others who stood in line to kiss the life-size cardboard cutouts of their favorite Idols on display in the lobby.
On the road for the past two weeks, the tour will bring American Idol winner Hicks and eight other finalists from the hit TV show to Washington Friday night.
The tour is called American Idols Live, but live was a better description of the Hershey crowd - more than 10,000 raucous, shrieking fans - than the newly born stars they had come from as far as Kentucky to see. The finalists who performed seemed at times more leaden and robotic than the on-screen amateurs television viewers had grown to love.
That's the odd thing about Idol: The contestants win us over during auditions in January, when they're awkward, unvarnished and real. As the season progresses into May, the finalists become better groomed, better dressed, better spoken. And by the time they tour in the summer, they're well-polished pop stars, with a schtick and a look imprinted upon them.
While performing competent but unremarkable renditions of their signature songs at Giant Center, the Idols hewed closely to an obvious script of stage patter rife with "My dreams have come true," "Is everybody having a good time?" and little else. Even the charmingly spastic Hicks, this year's champ, appeared inert, holding a guitar that seemed more like an anchor.
Still, for the top-ranked TV show's enormous fan base, the live performance delivered on its promise: a chance to witness in person the stars its members have spent countless evenings watching. The performances may have been wooden, but the concert affirmed television as the most powerful medium on earth. The Idols are famous - and their fans are here - not because they're good singers but because they're on TV.
"Television, from very early on, made itself an avenue to instant celebrity," said Leo Braudy, a professor of cultural history at the University of Southern California and author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. He said TV is a highly democratic medium, but that also means the celebrities are disposable.
"These are our doppelgangers up there," Braudy said. "These are the people who lived the Cinderella story, so we can still believe in the Cinderella story."
There will be new Cinderellas next year. Until then, this crop will do.
"It's great to see them all again," said Robin Schade, 42, of Mechanicsburg, Pa., before the Hershey show. "You get to see them every week and then it's all over."
It's no accident, then, that the concert is carefully constructed to resemble the TV show. The concert opened as the TV show opens: With the hypnotic American Idol theme music blaring and the show logo spinning on giant video monitors above the stage. The crowd roared and the stage was bathed in blue light, just like on TV.
The 'cute' factor
Trotted out in roughly the order they were booted off the TV series, each Idol took the stage for a three- or four-song set. Fans professed admiration for the singing talents of their favorite Idols but admitted that's not the only reason they paid upward of $100 per ticket. Ten-year-old Alyssa Oktela, from Lancaster, Pa., said she came to see Chris Daughtry, the well-muscled, bald hard rocker.
"He's a really good singer," she said. But her mother, Tracy Oktela, knew the truth.
"He's cute," she explained, giggling like her daughter. "He's hot."
Given the demographics of the crowd - mostly female and ranging in age from pre-adolescent to middle-aged - it's not surprising that the boys from Idol got a better reception than the girls. "Marry Me, Chris," said one sign. "We Love U Chris," said another. And still another: "Ace, have Chris call me."
Ace - he of the curly brown locks and perpetual grin - had plenty of his own admirers, though, and when he took off his jacket during "Father Figure" to reveal a tight red T-shirt, the shrieks in the arena must have awoken every dog in
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