After Lee DeWyze was crowned American Idol instead of Crystal Bowersox, an amazing thing happened.\u00a0\u00a0I finally understood why Adam Lambert lost Idol.\u00a0 It\u00a0just took me a year to figure it out.\u00a0 Okay, so I'm a little slow.\u00a0 But judging from the\u00a0goobeldygob of irate stories and reviews that followed the competition, a whole bunch of folks are even slower than me.<\/p>\n
I'm slow, but I'm not the slowest.\u00a0 That's always a comfort.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last year, Adam Lambert was amazing on Idol and he lost.\u00a0\u00a0Okay, some of his post-Idol antics made me a wee bit glad that he lost.\u00a0 But still, the thought remained kicking around in my head until this season. How did Adam lose?\u00a0 How could he be that good, that far above the others, and still not win the whole thing?\u00a0<\/p>\n
This season turned out to be deja vu<\/em> all over again.\u00a0 There were all the others and then there was Mama Sox.\u00a0 Just like last year, the judges would periodically slide in a sly comment about her superiority.\u00a0 Once she was accused of being too certain that she'd win - a charge she protested heartily.\u00a0 On Tuesday her final songs outclassed Lee's so easily that she looked like a sure thing.\u00a0 But then again, so did Adam last year after his final competition performance.<\/p>\n But this year, my feelings were different.\u00a0 This year, I was hoping that Lee would pull it off, and I cheered when he did.\u00a0 Last year I just walked away from the finale bummed.\u00a0 You know what, Simon's last interviews made me think that he'd had the same transformation as little ole' me, little Mrs. Nobody from the Redneck Rivera.\u00a0 (Heck, if I was gonna have something in common with Cowell, couldn't it have been my bank balance?)<\/p>\n That's why it took this year to make me understand last year and to possibly predict next season.\u00a0 Now that I get it, I'll be able to watch the process happen and chart it in my\u00a0twisted little brain.\u00a0 What is it, you ask?\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n CINDERELLA DIDN'T START THE STORY GARBED FOR THE BALL AND OUR KIDS AREN'T BORN AS TEENAGERS.\u00a0 Adam and Crystal started the competition as world class singers.\u00a0 That's why they lost.<\/p>\n It doesn't happen every year and in the years when it doesn't the world class singer who started the show will wind up with the crown.\u00a0 But in the years when one of the contestants starts off the season as good, but not great and then starts to grow and change and freakin' emerge right before our eyes - that's the contestant to keep your eyeballs on.\u00a0 That's the one apt to steal the crown from the singer who started out destined to win.\u00a0<\/p>\n Great is only great.\u00a0 All you can do when you\u00a0hear somebody take that stage the first time and knock it out of the park is\u00a0to go, \"Wow.\u00a0 Great.\"\u00a0 There's nothing for me, as the viewer, to root for, to anticipate.\u00a0 But \"could be great\" is an entirely different ballgame.\u00a0 The contestant who's unsure of himself, who's a little shy, and walks out and sings well but doesn't claim the stage and the audience - that guy or gal has some growing to do.\u00a0\u00a0And he or she will do it right before the eyes of the audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Cinderella had walked into the story garbed for the ball, readers wouldn't have cared what happened to her.\u00a0\u00a0So the prince finds her and the slipper fits, so what?\u00a0 If our kids were born as teenagers, we wouldn't be all that involved with them.\u00a0 They'd just pop out as these annoying people who claimed to\u00a0be entitled to something from us by virtue of the fact that they existed.\u00a0 There's a reason that God sends the teenagers-to-be here as wee, little helpless ones who can't walk or talk.\u00a0 It's because God knows that the growing, the becoming, will\u00a0change us from watchers to participants.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last year I never got drawn into the Kris Allen camp.\u00a0 But this year was different.\u00a0 This year I started out as a firm Bowersox supporter.\u00a0 She was good, consistently good and sometimes great.\u00a0 She looked like a shoe-in.\u00a0 But then, Lee, the quiet, shy\u00a0dude who never sparkled much started singing better and better each week.\u00a0\u00a0The judges noticed and started urging him to believe\u00a0in himself, to believe it and and he could achieve it.\u00a0\u00a0Sure enough, little by little, Lee started to sparkle.<\/p>\n Mama Sox was never bad and I do think she out sang Lee at the finale.\u00a0 But Crystal was, unfortunately, always good and\u00a0that leaves very little\u00a0room for growth.\u00a0 But Lee had room to grow, room to shine.\u00a0 So when the judges told\u00a0Lee to believe in himself and he could be great, America started believing in Lee too.\u00a0 After all, America is a country founded on hope.<\/p>\n Today, in the darkest days many of us have ever known, when so many of us have lost\u00a0so much, the one thing we haven't lost is hope.\u00a0 We believe we can be great individually and we believe America can be great collectively.\u00a0 We could believe in all that and so we could cheer for the young man\u00a0who was growing and becoming right in front of our eyes.\u00a0 We need something to believe in and root for and Lee gave us that.<\/p>\n If American Idol were ONLY a talent competition, then the best singer should win.\u00a0 But if it were ONLY a talent show, then viewers wouldn't vote.\u00a0 The winner of American Idol is more than a singer.\u00a0 He or she is also, and perhaps most importantly, a symbol of the\u00a0country that believes that greatness is a growth process.<\/p>\n That's why Adam didn't win last year and it's why Crystal didn't win this year.\u00a0 Both were the best performers of their seasons, but they didn't - couldn't - give America what we needed before we'd give them the crown.\u00a0 This year Lee showed us growth.\u00a0 He showed us how a dreamer becomes the dream.\u00a0 He showed us what America is and bolstered our sagging faith\u00a0in our ability to grab our own brass ring.<\/p>\n Lee won because he risked more to\u00a0change and grow and achieve.\u00a0 And America rewards the risk-takers.\u00a0Our country was built on and exists because of young men and women donning uniforms\u00a0and risking it all to keep us free and safe and strong.\u00a0\u00a0 Lee wasn't wearing a uniform, but he was wearing his heart and his hopes and his dreams right on his sleeve.<\/p>\n DeWyze\u00a0was the American dreamer who still believed in the dream.\u00a0He reminded all of us that we still could - we still should - believe in it too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After Lee DeWyze was crowned American Idol instead of Crystal Bowersox, an amazing thing happened.\u00a0\u00a0I finally understood why Adam Lambert lost Idol.\u00a0 It\u00a0just took me a year to figure it out.\u00a0 Okay, so I'm a little slow.\u00a0 But judging from the\u00a0goobeldygob of irate stories and reviews that followed the competition, a whole bunch of folks ...continue reading \"Idol thoughts: Why Lee Won\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}