Unless you've been napping in a sensory deprivation tank buried a mile beneath the earth's surface for the last ten or so hours, by now you know that Jordin Sparks (just 17, as we were reminded every 30 seconds of this past season) is this year's American Idol, a conclusion so foregone that runner-up Blake Lewis put in an application to run the mechanical bull at Saddle Ranch mere minutes after the finalists were announced last week. Indeed, the only real questions left unanswered before the bloated two-hour finale began were: What sexagenarian-and-up singers would call in favors to perform in front of a television audience of tens of millions of teenage girls? (Answer: Tony Bennett, Bette Midler, Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, a hologram of Fat Elvis, and the ghost of James Brown.) And: What washed-up celebrity would be this year's David Hasselhoff, caught weeping while lost in a transcendent moment in which all melts away but him, the singer who has reached down deep inside him and caressed his very soul, and Idol's all-seeing, audience-scanning cameras? The answer to this query comes after the jump, at precisely 3:44 of Midler's moving performance of that one song she does:
