Idol Wannabes: Let It Be Me!
Under the hard, yellow light of a street lamp in front of New York's Jacob Javits Center, a teenage girl wearing jeans, an orange hooded sweatshirt, ballet shoes and large headphones, bounds across a black strip of asphalt, leaps through the air and spins four pirouettes.
It's nearly 2 a.m.
About 50 feet away, three more girls, droopy-eyed with sloppy pony-tails, huddle under a sleeping bag and belt out a few harmonized bars of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." One breaks the last note to groan, "Oh, my voice is, like, totally gone."
On the same stretch of sidewalk are hundreds of prone human forms, fast asleep on the city pavement.
And they all want to be the next "American Idol."
The New York City auditions for the new round of Fox's popular reality TV show, which has spawned pop chart toppers Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard and Clay Aiken, are set to run all day Monday. But many of these pop-star hopefuls have already been in line for more than 36 hours.
In front of the building, lines of metal fencing (the kind used to hem in concert crowds or roller coaster riders) stand more than 10 rows deep, holding scores of sleepers, dressed in baggy jeans, trendy sneakers, mesh tops and do-rags.
The long lines are testament not only to the show's success with U.S. viewers, but also proof of an updated twist on the American dream has been effectively crafted and sold to the mass market.
The message: Dreams can come true on prime-time television, whether you have talent or not, as long as you can persuade millions in the TV audience to pick up a cell phone and "text" a vote.
Most of the aspiring starlets outside the Javits Center seem to think if they can survive a tongue-lashing from judge Simon Cowell, fame is just around the corner.
According to guards, only 10,000 singers will receive the orange wristbands guaranteeing an audition slot. And by 11:30 Sunday night, about 12,000 would-be contestants had shown up.
Shemel Kelly, 21, came in from Long Island early Saturday morning and waited for the line to open at noon. In the predawn hours of Monday morning, Kelly was wide awake, riffing on an R&B melody outside a row of 30 portable toilets. The long line, he says, is worth the chance to win a record deal, however slim the chances, or stiff the competition.
"This is my life dream. I want to be a singer. There's a lot of talent out here, so it's gonna be hard," Kelly said. He hadn't settled on an audition song. "It's going to be something simple that I know back-to-back so I don't get nervous," he said.
Along the rows of kicked-off sneakers, domed camp tents and dozens of empty water bottles, Esther Lee, 23, a classically trained vocal performance student from Marlboro, Md., sits in a fold-out canvas camping chair. She's here, she says, to get a foot in the door. She drove in Sunday and joined the line around 6 p.m., and after hearing that judges would look unkindly on audition covers of Alicia Keyes tunes, quickly abandoned her plan to sing the Grammy-winning song, "Fallin."
"I heard a lot of people practicing and all they did was riff," she says. Singing a few notes and doing the vocal equivalent of a slide guitar to demonstrate. "I'm not going to do that, I'm going to do something cool. Something old like Frank Sinatra's 'Fly Me To The Moon.'"
According to "Idol" rules and regulations, contestants must be between 16-24 years of age, but the crowd was dotted with plenty of mature faces: the parents.
Three mothers who met while standing watch over their sleeping children covered yawns to say they were happy to support their kids and didn't mind the all-night stake-out.
Lisa Russian of Bristol, Pa., brought her son, Tony Santiago, 18.
"I've been waiting for something like this to happen since he was born," she said. "When I was pregnant, I met a psychic. She touched my stomach and said, 'You're going to have a boy and he's going to love music.'"
Charlene Curry came prepared for the all-nighter with her 16-year-old daughter. She brought a full first-aid kit and plenty of food. "All food that won't give [my daughter] mucus. That's what she said. They can't sing with mucus."
The next "Idol" series will debut in January 2004. Auditions already have been held in Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta. The last round will take place Sept. 30 in Honolulu.
By Lauren Johnston