Oh Those Pop Stars...

Have you noticed? That American Idol Mayhem business has started up again. I suppose it must have started a few weeks ago. I've heard rumors of a guy singing "Pants on the floor." I've caught sound bytes about Paula Abdul leaving and Ellen Degeneres joining and Simon leaving, et al.

You already knew all of this, didn't you?

It never ends, this stream of drama. About 95% of the time I tune it out. (I flip on E TV when I'm REALLLLLLLY bored, just to feel my brain cells die.)

Sure, I've bought some of the albums that have issued forth from the American Idol spawn: Kelly Clarkson, Jordin Sparks (gasp!), Daughtry and David Cook. I've enjoyed listening to them. But the point is that I'm a disloyal, disengaged and otherwise disinterested viewer of American Idol. In other words: I don't care. (Double gasp!)

There is a story. There is a reason why. Do you care to know? Probably not.
Okay here goes:

The show started, I believe, summer of 2001. I mean, it had to have started then because I hadn't heard of it before then. Summer of 2001 was the summer I started working on Cruise ships. Fun, fun, fun! Working (and playing) 12-22 hour days leaves little time for dedicated television watching, not to mention the fact that we only got a few channels via satellite TV. (CNN, TNT Latin America! You try watching "El Tiburon" [aka Jaws] five million times before bed at 4am, and tell me if you wouldn't just rather the TV be turned off!)

And then it happened. I'll never forget it. There I was on deck 12, Sports Deck, hanging out with the chilluns in the Club HAL clubhouse. I wore my day uniform of khaki shorts, white sneakers and a blue-striped, constantly over-starched, stiff uniform shirt. I had a fabulous tan. (Which really means that I was twelve shades of red darker than the pink I am now. And this is all very important to the point of this story. Okay, maybe not.)

 

Gotta love the shirts

A little girl around the age of ten pranced across the grotesquely loud purple, orange and blue carpet and up to me. She wore glitter lip gloss and had hair that had been braided and beaded in one of our Caribbean stops (at ridiculous cost, monetarily and time-wise, considering it takes about an hour and we were only in port for an average of six hours per stop). I'm sure that if Hannah Montana had been around at that point, she would have been wearing a Hannah T-shirt. A gaggle of other little girls who were her BFFs (who she had only met three days before on the cruise and would undoubtedly never talk to again after the cruise.) stood behind her and giggled. She said to me "OH MY GOSH! Did you hear about American Idol? I just cannot believe what happened to Justin!!" She was trying to be all buddy-buddy with the teen youth counselor. (Kids were split up into groups according to age - she was a "tween," I worked with the teens. THANK GOODNESS. I find teenagers much easier to deal with and entirely more reasonable than little kids and tweens. Feel free to disagree with me.)

I just stared at her a bit before asking what the heck this "American Idol" was. She immediately launched into a bout of over-exaggerated adolescent disbelief that I had no clue what she was talking about.

Because, like, everyone knew what American Idol was! Hellllooooo!

I was immediately disinterested in the show. Call me crazy, but tween mania turns me off to crazy, over-hyped pop stars and pointless television shows.

I left the ugly carpeted room and those hormone-raging pre-adolescent girls a few minutes later to go and play volleyball outside on the sports deck with my much-more-reasonable teenagers, soaking up the Caribbean sun and sea.

What is the point to this rant, you ask? My point is that I like traveling. And I don't like being pulled out of my travel-reverie by marketing. And I think over-hyped TV shows are dumb. And tweens are ridiculous (I can say this without bias because, well, I was one once). And cruise-ship decorations are generally heinous. And American Idol reminds me of all of those things, every season. Feel free to make your own point at your convenience.