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.
Thank you for the lascivious glances cast at comely female contestants; your leer was our leer, and your unsubtle biting down upon a bendy straw as your eyes scanned upward from pedicured toes to pneumatic cleavage was always a sure ticket to Hollywood, mediocre vocal be damned. The Bikini Girls of the world owe you a cut of their nightclub promotional fees, and shoutouts from garish MySpace pages playing deafening loops of original songs involving an obvious reference to their brief, boner-enabled Idol tenure.
Thank you for feigning playful sexual chemistry with Ellen DeGeneres, whom we all know is not your type, nor you hers, and whom you know has absolutely no chance of saving the show you've doomed by your departure. While not as charged as your exchanges with Ryan Seacrest (really, what could be, other than a pillow fight in Ryan's feather-walled tickle-dungeon), these light moments were nonetheless enjoyable for reasons we don't completely understand. (Possibly because we lost interest in the contestants about six weeks in.)
Thank you for going along to get along this season, for not physically leaving the judges' table long after your enthusiasm had departed, because you at 50 percent is still far better than a flailing Randy, an overmatched Ellen, or a guesting Shania giving their all.
And lastly, thank you from releasing us from the obligation of watching Idol next year. Sure, we'll check it out once or twice, maybe try to guess how much cocaine Jamie Foxx needs to endure a two-day Indianapolis cattle call: a child's sand-bucket's worth, or a plastic keg-bucketful. But that's it. Our loyalty is to you.
Goodbye, Simon Cowell. We'll miss you.