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Ahh, finally. Last night was the final round of auditions on this, our tenth adventure on the groaning Idol merry-go-round. Shanti. It was fitting that the last city was San Francisco, a place of thin sun and cool, crisp hope, but also of strange and looming mountains, of underfoot tremors, of, as Tony Kushner taught us, great millennial brokenness and yearning. It's the perfect place for Idol's blend of triumph and tragedy, though last night they focused a bit more heavily on the tragedy.

We began light enough. A strange string instrument trilled, an instrument maybe only made one time in some muddy shtetl years and years go, an Eastern instrument, made of cat skin and gypsy tears. It twanged a few queer notes and then out popped a tiny Ukrainian creature in a pink jumpsuit, pixie haircut framing a tiny Princess of the Goblins face. She was wonderful! She spoke in a strange kind of syntax and had a tiny balsa wood stick of a husband waiting for her, dressed in nerdy clothes and holding her bright pink backpack. She was basically a character in a Gary Shteyngart novel come to life, leaping vividly out of the page and into our tattered hearts. She did a curious dance for the judges and said a few chirpy things in her tinkly patois and then she sang and, aw nuts, she wasn't very good. So the judges said no and her little goblin face crumbled and the balsa wood man outside said a few mumbled words to Ryan and they were off, the odd little pair, our little Rumpelstiltskinette friend saying "I am the most beautiful thing they have ever seen. Even when they are crying." Just think about that for a moment! The implication being that we see beautiful things when we are crying. Tell me someone not from the Ukraine and not wearing a pink jumpsuit could ever come up with that. I just don't think they could.

Then they moved pretty quickly into a slew of good people. We saw a bunch of bland pretty girls go through. There was a girl whose sob story was that she and her family were really rich in Colombia and lived in a dream house on top of a mountain but then the FARC rebels war happened and they decided to leave and her dad cried. I mean, I'm sure the Colombian armed conflict was really hard and scary to witness and all that, but it was kiiiind of a stretch to make this the girl's big sob story, as she left the country when she was eight and had grown up to be as pretty and bubbly an American girl as you can meet in these sour times. So hers just didn't really register as a story of overcoming adversity. But whatever, she sang well enough and was very, very pretty, so the old Aerosmith moss-witch was very pleased and J.Lo begrudgingly said yes and that was that. Somehow the rich pretty girl succeeded in America.

We saw a coupla dudes go through. There was a guy who had been in a terrible car accident a year or so prior and it was a miracle he could walk and whatnot. So he came in and sang and it was good and he had pretty eyes so J.Lo smiled and the old cinder-witch waved her knobbly cane and the lights flickered and the table rattled slightly and out by the Ferry Building the big brown seagulls squawked and took to the air. The witch had said her piece. There was also a cute little guy named Junebug who wore Coke-bottle glasses and was a karaoke host at a dive bar and had a sprightliness about him that was fun and refreshing. He also sang like a strip mall angel, like the hero of a José Rivera musical if José Rivera wrote a musical. There was a kind of tinny, tacky, plastic brilliance about him and his cartoony look. He might be made of Bakelite. I hope he goes far.

Then we were blessed with my favorite soul of the evening, a strange girl from Virginia who has moved to San Francisco to spread her wings only to have her house burn down. Boo. But oh well. She had a wonderful, trembling, backwoods Billie quality to her voice, the kind of voice you immediately want to sing all the songs on the soundtrack for a quirky (in a good way) little Appalachian period piece movie. I mean, she could have fit very well into the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Just a kind of oaky, dirt and leaves, box turtle and dandelion tuft, crick and river voice that near guarantees her a lifetime of guest appearances on A Prairie Home Companion. Is she right for the show? No, probably not. But who cares. Plus her personality is so winsome and Southern. There's a little bit of magic in her and I think she might be, just might be a ghost. The kind of "my daughter was playing that guitar the night she died in a fire, thirty years ago..." kind of ghost. Which would be great! I wouldn't mind a ghost contestant one bit. I'm not prejudiced.

The last fellow of the evening was The Voice and The Story they'd teased all night. What could it be, we wondered? Would there be some guy whose whole family was wiped out in a train accident but who still sings like the Diva Plavalaguna from The Fifth Element? We hoped! We really, really hoped. Ryan whimpered and gasped about it to us the whole episode long until we were just balls of anxiety, waiting and fitfully pawing at our faces, red and blotchy, so eager were we to see this most masterful final audition of the 10th season audition mania. And then, finally, the moment arrived. And it was... oh. Some 21-year-old kid whose dad died of drugs and also the kid has Tourette's and mild Aspberger's. And the kid has a kid. Yeah, the gentle-seeming boy has a girlfriend and a little baby and they live in a painted brick storage closet down by the power lines and he really needs this to lift up his spirits. He was helped along in that endeavor by his girlfriend, who wrote inspirational notes on sticky-notes and put them up all over the storage unit. Ehhhhhh. I wasn't that into the story. It involved a lot of mournful piano music and blubbery tear-faces and it was just not as compelling as I, or they, wanted it to be. Sorry Nermal. You are cute and nice and all that, but I'm just not that into you. I'm also not that into his supposedly Amazing Voice, which was just a loud rehash of some of the worst parts of Adam Lambert, without any control or modesty. He wailed and screamed, and that was about it. I suspect he'll do well.

And then that was it! That's all the auditioning we'll see for now. Tonight is the beginning of Hollywood Week, that fraught and frenzied not-actual-week of people moaning and screaming and keening, kicking and bucking against the limits and barriers of their lives, trying desperately to reach that glowing city they see lying far out beyond their own fences. So that is exciting. This toboggan is picking up speed and there seems to be no stopping us now.

And look. Do you see them there, sitting snug in the crook of a low-hanging crescent moon? It's our Ukrainian dream girl and her Smoky Mountains friend. And they're playing us a song, floating above the Bay, the blue bridge and the orange bridge yawning peacefully over the water. Plink-plink-plink they go, warbling with their pretty cat voices, singing old country tunes and folk tunes and tunes that haven't yet been invented. There they are. Maybe not winners, but certainly, for a moment, stars.