Reaching Out to the Stars (10 page)

Chapter 9

Three Years Later: Out with the Old & In with the New

It’s been three years since my last attempt to somehow connect with my idol and since then a lot has happened in my life. In 2006, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who we named Faith Leahnetta. Leahnetta was my grandmother’s name. Now with two little ones, there need not be any wondering about how busy life has been.

I had attended a Christmas show in 2005 at the Orpheum Theater in Boston which I almost missed due to another difficult pregnancy. As I looked forward to my up close and personal performances by my still famed favorite, I struggled to get there. I choked down a soft pretzel to stop the nausea as I waited in line for my Collectible Christmas ornament and my program.

The show was very different from the last Christmas show that we attended. It was more like a play that was supposedly scripted with the help of my idol. It started off with a grumpy old lady who had lost the Christmas spirit and it was a little boy who was her neighbor who ended up bringing the joy back into her life. All the songs revolved around the plot. It was really cute but I still preferred the last year’s show over this one. My idol seemed more of a part of a cast and even though I did get to look at him and hear his unbelievable voice, he did not interact at all with the audience until the end of the show. I felt like it was not as personal as his other shows. The show also started an hour late due to technical difficulties but I made it through and still enjoyed every minute of it.

It seemed as if it took a long time for the release of his new CD. I had read something about him not being happy with it and then removing songs from it, leaving four originals and the rest being covers. At this time, my idol was the victim of some controversy that had taken place on Live with Regis and Kelly and rumors were flying around that he was gay. There was no tour that year and it seemed as if he was fading for a while. As he finally released his CD in fall of 2006, in order to promote his CD, he started to make himself a little more public again. I was disappointed that there was no tour and no actual Christmas tour but Bryce and I were able to catch a Christmas show in Hartford, one of the few selected cities that he would be performing in that year.

I enjoyed the show as the atmosphere was great and there was a lot of humor in the show. My idol openly joked about the media previous to the show and it was quite funny. Shame on you, Kelly Ripa.

In 2007, I attended another Christmas concert at Mohegan Sun. Bryce and I took the trip with my mom and dad. Bryce and my dad enjoyed the casino and my mom and I went to the show. Although the performance was good, he seemed to be somewhat out of steam. He did not interact much with his fans but most of the hour and a half stood in one spot behind the microphone and just sang. This seemed very out of character for him considering I had seen him several times before. This was a quite different experience. After the show, I had heard that he was somewhat under the weather. It probably took everything out of him just to go out there under the lights and put his full effort into the singing part, which is never a disappointment. His encore was unbelievable. I remember getting goose bumps from the power in his voice as he sang the song “All Is Well.”

This was the last show I had attended before my idol surrendered to Broadway. As I would have loved to see him on Broadway, New York City was not in the playing cards for a mother of two.

In 2008, I was excited to find out during a new season of American Idol that he was releasing a new CD. This was surprising because there had been no mention of it and I would never have expected him to be working on a new CD while he was on Broadway. Naturally, I bought it the day it was released but I was beginning to feel that the excitement was not there like it used to be. It was like when you are in a new relationship and everything seems so exciting and new, but then as you get used to each other the excitement wears off a little. At first I thought it was because I was just tired physically from raising two children, but then started to realize that for a while now, what once seemed to be a crazy obsession was becoming more of a distant thing of the past.

I remember going for a drive in the car with Bryce, Ethan and Faith, just for a ride to nowhere, something that we do frequently. As my kids thoroughly enjoy music and are used to listening to what I listen to in the car day after day, Ethan always requests to hear “Falling,” which is undoubtedly his favorite. Lately, it always requires me to take out the CD that I am currently enjoying.

As the four of us were driving, he proceeded to ask for the same song per usual. As I took out the CD I looked at Bryce and said, “I think I’m all Clayed out.” There are no words to describe the look on Bryce’s face when those words came from my mouth but he did say that he thought that, “Jesus was going to fall out of the sky.” The truth is I think J.C. did fall from the sky, but not that one.

I always tuned into American Idol since season two. Season four won me as a true fan to a new born country star, Carrie Underwood, who I saw at Foxwoods in August 2008. I am always excited to go to a concert, as long as I am a fan of the music. I love everything from the hype to the atmosphere to the actual performance. Carrie was blessed with an unbelievable voice and I am envious of her. She is also, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful women in country music.

Seasons three and six left me somewhat disappointed although I still had some favorites from season five such as Chris Daughtry and Kellie Pickler.

Although I would always continue to be a true fan of Clay Aiken, my most admired idol, I began to accept that the excitement and enthusiasm of my fandom, once strongly possessed and sought after for the last five years, had finally been grounded….and then something happened.

Chapter 10

American Idol (Season 7)

As a new year surfaced, so did a new season of American Idol. I found myself watching week after week, looking forward to every Tuesday and Wednesday, carefully planning my schedule around shows because it would be a tragedy if I missed it. This season held the most talent that I had ever seen. I watched quietly, trying to hide my newest secret. Without words and large efforts to cover any expressions, I tried to stay subtle.

Some of my thoughts and feelings were both very similar but also very different from my past infatuation with season two runner up, Clay Aiken.

One of the major differences was that I was actually more embarrassed because three months into the show, I realized that my most recent crush was for a twenty-one year old and wondered if that was wrong, being thirteen years older. Being a thirty-four year old mother of two and having no more than an innocent crush on someone I knew I would never even come close to meeting, I was still feeling this weird guilt.

I started to think back on the high school student who had the crush on me that I said seemed icky. As I realized that there was an eleven year difference between this student and me, I found myself thinking in a whole different light. I then started to feel extremely guilty. I did think there was a big difference between a seventeen year old and a twenty-one year old but I felt the need to get things off my chest. I needed to hear from someone else that I wasn’t some weirdo. I picked up the phone and called Maria.

As I began to try to bring up the subject, I almost automatically felt uneasy about talking with her and confiding in her. We had drifted a little since her divorce. She had a new love interest, whom she had been dating for two years, and I still had not met him. I feared that our friendship had started to go in two different directions. I was desperately looking for someone to make me feel better about what was going on in my head. As she was going through a different time in her life, I felt that we were in different places and that we no longer had the same things in common. Her tone made me feel like she did not really want to be bothered talking about something so beneath her.

When I started to talk about the new season of American Idol, a show which she initially got me interested and involved in, she immediately turned the conversation in a different direction with her quick response of, “I don’t really watch that any more because Brad doesn’t watch it.” I truly believe that she boycotted the show midway through season four when the love of her life, Constantine Maroulis, was voted off prematurely. Now that I think about it, I remember how steaming mad she was. She did say she was never watching the show again.

As I knew I was on my own with this one, I then started to try to justify things myself and came up with ten reasons why what was going on in my head was okay:

Need I say more? After all, age is just a number.

Where normal everyday people would get looked at with disapproval for this, celebrities easily get away with dating outside of their generation with no questions asked.

As each week passed, I began downloading the newest song to a CD. I figured that if he did not get a recording contract that I would at least be able to have a CD with as many songs as I could get until he got voted off the show. I must have trashed at least six CDs by the end of it all. I guess that I could have just waited until it was the end for him and downloaded them all together, but that was not even an option because I looked forward to having that new song to add to the group to listen to in the car that following week. My new idol made it to the number four spot, allowing my final CD to contain twelve songs, twelve bucks well spent on iTunes.

I also went onto the American Idol website and downloaded some pictures so that I could make my own personal CD cover and label. I put a picture of my new favorite on my cell phone as a screen saver. I tried to get Bryce to download one of his songs from the show as a ring tone but none of them were available. At the end of it all, I somehow ended up being a member of laughaholics, some funnies that somehow get texted to my phone every day. I cannot seem to get rid of it.

It had been five years since I had attended an American Idol concert. Although I had been tuning in every year, as I said, I was never really interested enough to actually get myself to buy tickets for a show. Then, American Idols Live was to be held at The DCU Center.

When it came the morning for tickets to go on sale, I had been away from the computer and realized the night after, oh shit… the tickets. I ran downstairs hoping that I could still get good seats, which was a very unrealistic thought. There were only crappy seats left and I was determined to get the best seats I possibly could without spending a crazy amount of money. I went to some ticket broker sites online. To get decent seats, it was one hundred forty five dollars a ticket, more than twice the original face value. I felt that if I was going to spend sixty eight dollars for crappy seats, I didn’t mind spending one hundred and forty five for decent ones. In the end, it cost close to four hundred dollars after shipping and convenience fees. So yes, I did spend a crazy amount of money, and yes, this is absolutely ridiculous, but oh, so worth it in the end.

The night before the show, I found out that one of our best friend’s parents, Marilyn and Gerome, had VIP seats and backstage passes because they were acquainted with one of the idol favorites, Michael Johns. I knew that I had no chance of meeting my idol because you can’t transfer passes, but I was hopeful for an autograph.