Susan Braden, a veteran voice coach in Roanoke, sent me her thoughts on the premiere last night. I'll include comments from Susan from time to time, to add a little street cred to this thing.

(In case you missed it, we recently interviewed Susan for a story in the Extra section. You can read it here.)

From Susan:
OUCH! referring to most who made the show as well as the graphic violence of Benjamin's "Don't Cha" and frontal hair wax job. More graphic than "The 40 Year Old Virgin." Yikes! Other crazies included Paul, who wrote a love song for Paula called "Stalker" -- with my favorite line from the evening in his lyric -- "If she were a bathtub I'd caulk her!"

Overall, I think mandatory drug testing has become necessary, especially to weed out those like Alexis (glitter trash) and Christina (Princess Leia). They tried for the sympathy cases: Temptress, the football-playing female with the obesity gene; Angela Martin (whose child has Rett Syndrome), even though she's moving on to Hollywood, I agree with Simon that she needs to "de-weddingize" her performance; Ali Yuka (?) from Egypt who said the Bee Gees made him feel special.

But the winner of "your friends must not be true friends if they told you you could sing" category was James Lewis, who attempted to sing the spiritual "Go Down Moses," but swallowed what tone he could muster and kept his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth when he opened it. Pitch seemed to be irrelevant also. Sorry, James. Find new friends.

Here are the ones to watch: Chris Watson, who needed a better song; Kristy Lee Cook, who sold her horse to get to the audition but sings with a nice "country" sound for a trained cage fighter - and she's cute, to boot; Angela Martin (see above); and Brooke White, the "sincere" nanny from California who needs to control the long wavy hair and ditch the horizontal stripes, no matter how skinny she is.

A lot of people needed coffee. Most needed to get a grip. Thanks, Philadelphia, for the laughs.

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