Sunday April 26, 2009
Susan Boyle lives the Cinderella dream
Sometimes I feel a need to write about the implications of distant events, like piracy off Somalia, the plane hijacking in Montego Bay, or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\’s speech at the Racism Summit.
And sometimes just I feel a need to write from the heart.
Over 100 million people have watched that YouTube seven-minute video of Susan Boyle singing on the Britain\’s Got Talent show. I was one of them.
As I watched Susan Boyle come out onto the stage, my heart sank.
Perhaps the show\’s producers manipulated the audience reaction. Almost certainly, they cut and spliced audience reactions for effect – that\’s what the technology is for, isn\’t it?
No matter – I knew my own reactions. My heart sank because I was afraid Susan Boyle was going to be embarrassed. No, humiliated.
There she was, a plain, dumpy, middle-aged woman. She looked painfully out of place. She wasn\’t sexy. She wasn\’t beautiful. She wasn\’t even – judged by her initial banter with the judges – witty or smart.
Misleading impressions
And then she started to sing.
And oh my God I was in tears. I couldn\’t see the picture on my screen any more. I could only hear that glorious voice soaring into “Dream a dream” from Les Miserables. I could only hear the audience, even the judges, rise to their feet and roar.
The Beatles got screams when they first burst into American awareness on the old Ed Sullivan show. I never understood what that high-pitched squeal of adulation was meant to express. Welcome? Lust? Mob psychology?
This was different. It was more like a collective gasp of awe, an involuntary explosion of wonder.
Psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo analyzed the phenomenon in the on-line journal Huffington Post.
Palumbo suggests that we see ourselves in Susan Boyle.
“As everyone knows by now,” Palumbo wrote, she was “greeted with derision when she first took the stage… Looking matronly in her somewhat frumpy dress and unkempt hair, he appearance elicited smug, condescending, and even cruel smirks, smiles, and chuckles… What right did she have to share the stage with all those young, pretty, talented people?”
“Then Susan opened her mouth and sang. And her voice was so powerful, so achingly beautiful, that even the usually heartless Simon Cowell was blown away…”
We realized that our initial judgement of her was wrong. Cruel. Heartless.
Cinderella lives!
I suspect that we\’re captivated by Susan Boyle for the same reason we love the story of Cinderella. The despised and rejected lowly one is raised up; the high and haughty get their comeuppance.
We see ourselves in Cinderella, because have all, at some time, felt overlooked, ignored, underestimated. And we imagine what we could do, if we just had the chance.
Susan Boyle got that chance – for all of us.
Unfortunately, we fail to read Cinderella as a literary rebuke to our societal expectations. We dream that we too will find a fairy godmother – perhaps in the form of a lottery ticket – who will transform our lives and free us from drudgery. But we don\’t recognize how regularly we dismiss others simply because they wear frumpy clothes. Or have unruly hair. Or have teeth that never encountered an orthodontist.
So we believe that the scruffy transient slumped in the doorway has nothing to teach us about life. That the crook serving time for corporate fraud has no redeeming qualities. That gay, that Muslim, that woman, that pirate – all deserve contempt.
To matter, you\’re supposed to be young, slim, and beautiful. If you are, it doesn\’t matter if you can\’t sing on key or articulate an intelligent thought. You qualify as a star. Or at least, as a potential star.
Unfortunately, most versions of the Cinderella story portray the evil sisters as fat and ugly. Certainly, Disney did.
I suspect they were more likely to resemble the beautiful people who appear on talent shows. After all, they could afford personal hairdressers, designer dresses, plastic surgeons, voice coaches… To the social eye, Cinderella was the frumpy one.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
But Dennis Palumbo wasn\’t satisfied with Susan Boyle\’s happy ending. Suppose, he asked, that Susan Boyle couldn\’t sing after all?
Would that justify the shallowness, the cruelty, of the audience\’s initial derision?
“The unspoken message of this whole episode,” he wrote, “is that since Susan Boyle has a wonderful talent, we were wrong to judge her, based on her looks and demeanour. [But] if she couldn\’t sing so well, were we correct to judge her on that basis?”
So maybe the transient in the doorway doesn\’t have earth-shaking insights to offer. Maybe the Iranian crackpot is deluded. Does that justify treating him – or the pirate, the gay, the woman, the corporate crook – as valueless?
“Let\’s not be too quick to congratulate ourselves for taking her to our hearts,” Palumbo concluded. “We should have done that anyway, before Susan Boyle sang a single note.”
Susan Boyle fascinates us, because she embodies our dreams, and exposes our prejudices.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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