The mouse that roared.
In case you've been in a cave for the past week or so, please check out the wildly-viral video of an apparent-underdog who soared.
She's 47 years old, frumpy, unemployed, appears a bit scattered, and lives with a cat named Pebbles.
Susan Boyle is all of us.
And she soars.
ronnie
Labels: cool women
posted by ronnie at
8:39 p.m.
3 Comments:
I can't believe the number of different directions from which I've received links to this within the past day, nor the number of different countries! Probably the most surprising was from my friend and colleague, Paul, who was raving about it while we were transitioning from his class to mine in the planetarium yesterday.
Paul never recommends anything on the internet. Paul is in his early 60's, an old-school Republican from Pennsylvania (thoroughly disenchanted with the creeps who have hijacked his party, by the way), and is the least likely person I know to "fall for" any pop hit-of-the-day.
He was damn' near drooling about this.
And I don't blame him, not at all.
The only parallel astonishment I can recall -- one in which the voice came from a package that was extraordinarily, completely unlikely -- was one I experienced in a little concert in a lecture hall at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970's. A great friend of mine twisted my arm, hard, to go hear a young woman folksinger who he thought would be great someday. When she walked onstage, all maybe 4-foot-nine of her and twig-thin, and when she shyly introduced herself in a reedy, tiny speaking voice, I thought "Man, this is a waste of time."
And then she opened her mouth and sang... and blew the damn' doors off the hall with her power and emotion. Holy crap, I thought, this can't be coming from that mouth and body, can it? I'm still astonished, to this day.
That tiny woman was Nanci Griffith. Let's hope that Susan Boyle has a similar trajectory if she wants it.
Much as I am loathe to say it, it appears that we have Ashton Kutcher to thank/blame for this, together with Twitter. Here's the sequence of events.
Kutcher, who currently has over a million followers on Twitter (I'm not one of them btw) tweeted about this amazing performance on Britain's Got Talent that "just made my night." (This is way ahead of his usual posts which range from photos of Mrs. Kutcher's bikini clad ass [very nice btw], and musing on whether wiping up your spit with a napkin and Fantastic diminishes you're manhood somehow). That was last Sunday.
His followers retweeted this, which is how I saw it (I got it from the TV critic at the Chicago Tribune, Maureen Ryan). Because embedding had been disabled for the YouTube clip you had to clip the link and go to the YouTube page. This generated hits as well as more people linking to it. At that point it became news and the mainstream media picked it up.
And that's how you create a media phenomenon in 2009!
So Ashton Kutcher is responsible for something besides the stupid trend of 20-somethings wearing unnecessary scarves indoors? Well, that (and Mrs. Kutcher's bikini'd bottom) is something, I guess.
ronnie
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