A Heartfelt Goodbye to Simon Cowell

At the onset of the American Idol season, we offered our tips about how to deal with Simon Cowell's departure from the show. Now, as the finale's laser cannons cool and the fifteen metric tons of confetti dumped on the Nokia Theaters revelers is being vacuumed up, it's finally time to say farewell.

Goodbye, Simon Cowell.

We know that in about 15 short months, you will return to the airwaves with a nearly identical television show, one where you will offer your typically frank -- sometimes outrageously so! -- assessment of the musical abilities of the oft-talent-deficient, but this still feels like a profound loss. There is already a deep, suppurating hole in our heart, one that can never be plugged by any combination of Randy, Kara and Ellen, nor by imaginary percentages of appreciation running all the way up to the "eleventy million billion percent yes" level, nor by competitive scale-singing, nor by terrible puns about trains or bananas. That's just the way it is.

You were our everything. And now you are gone.

Thank you for the many seasons of amusing yourself by whispering evil spells into the ear of Paula Abdul, your television soulmate, which drove her clinically insane before an audience of 30 million people. Watching her eyes roll back into her skull as she issued forth nonsensical strings of words (meant to evoke a positive appraisal of a contestant's butchery of yet another out-of-reach Mariah Carey song) was always wildly entertaining, if sometimes distressing. To this day, Abdul believes that she is a magic butterfly who lives inside an enchanted music box made of angel bones. And that is your delicious doing.

While we're on the subject, thank you for opening that music box and allowing her to flutter before you one last time to show us that she's doing just fine, thank you, and to provide the dose of sweet loopiness that was so sorely lacking this season. Hers was a quite moving, lucid performance, and one that did not end, as we feared it might when first she appeared on stage, with a fifteen-minute rendition of "Opposites Attract" finally curtailed by burly men wielding tasers and giant butterfly nets.

Thank you for the unflinching honesty in the face of deluded feel-goodism, as your withering appraisals following bizarre pats on the back from your fellow panelists confirmed that we, too, had heard sounds not unlike the drowning of a sack full of marmots where a rendition of "The Greatest Love of All" should have been, and that we were not, in fact, losing our damn minds.

Thank you for the sweaters, stretched taut over ballooning pecs yearning to free themselves from their cashmere prison. Oh, the sweaters! We will miss them so.

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