Tonight I am grateful for two things: Human Target and the fact that so many strange people apparently live in and around Los Angeles. It was one of the more entertaining audition episodes that we've seen this season and it probably helped that it was a tidy 60 minutes.
The first day of auditions was guest judged by punk rawk divorcee Avril Lavigne, who will always be, to me, the dum-dum who didn't know how to pronounce David Bowie's name. I've never been a big fan of hers—her whole schtick seemed so contrived and something about her teeth always made her seem a little extra mean or something. Fangy. Oh well, I'm sure her life is very complic8ed.
Our first weirdo of the night was Neil Goldstein, who really didn't look like a Neil Goldstein. He did look like Dwight Shrute though, so imagine if Dwight was named "Neil Goldstein" and see how that sits with you. Again, I think this is a case of a kind of weird guy really willing to play it up for TV. I don't doubt that that was his real hair and silk shirt and vest, but no person would agree to draw a lipstick heart on a mirror on TV who wasn't willing to make fun of himself. There were a bunch of other dorky oddballs too: a kid named Jesse Chang singing "Kung Fu Fighting," which was just embarrassing, and a guy named Damian who did martial arts in his black socks. Shudder.
The Adam Lambert element really came out tonight for worse and for worse. A.J. Mendoza was one of the many lookalikes (read: idiotic hair) who claimed to have received good input from Adam himself, although he sang with all of Adam's screechiness and none of his melody or charm. My favorite part though was how smug he looked as he sang, like he had the judges in the palm of his hand. The judges summarily dismissed him but the best part was his salty, snippy black friend who demanded, right at the camera "What the fuck is this shit?" after A.J. didn't make it. I wish I had that guy on hand whenever somebody slighted me.