Country crock

First things first. Seacrest has stopped shaving. This comes hot on the heels of his other incredibly newsworthy event of the week, being photographed canoodling with Teri Hatcher. And it’s been a while since I set up the Types of Gay paradigm so I think it’s time to refresh your memory:

Type 1 Gay: You live in the 1920s and you’re cheerful.
Type 2 Gay: You are something stupid (golf, a cap covered in political buttons, most folk music).
Type 3 Gay: You’re a man who dates women but you still get manicures and your eyebrows shaped.
Type 4 Gay: You’re not even reading this because you’re at the bathhouse on a weekday morning.

Dating a female cast member of Desperate Housewives = Type 2 and Type 3. Possibly Type 4.

But it’s the facial hair that’s really got me curious. It simultaneously makes him look fatter (something he could stand to be), more masculine (ditto) and, ironically, also more Type 4.

Clarity comes with this week’s music legend–coach: Kenny Rogers, the King Daddy Bear of ’80s smoove country-politan songs like “Lady” and “Islands in the Stream.” Maybe Seacrest is getting hirsute to win Kenny’s favor, a bid to become his cub if the Hatcher romance doesn’t fly.

Then we see new improved 2006 Kenny. Why can’t old people just get old anymore? Seriously, why? Wrinkles are not a moral failing. And it’s supergross and disturbing when people go off and have tons of mutilation procedures on their faces. Gone is the widow’s peak/receding hairline/poofy Kenny hair of old. Now he’s bedhead-y and tousled, like the Abominable Snowman on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And the face…there’s just no good reason for this sort of thing.

On to the sangin’…

Taylor Hicks meets Kenny and manages to restrain himself from jumping into the chorus of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” In fact, Taylor seems downright muzzled this week. Is he sick? Depressed? Adrift in the country genre? Confused by Kenny’s new face? And it doesn’t help that Kenny decides to bust Mr. Soul Patrol’s balls right on camera and tell America that Hicks’s approach to the song “felt weak.” And that’s before the poor gork even starts singing. Things don’t improve when he does, though. They toss a Hobbit fiddle player on the stage to spice things up, but it feels like desperation, nowhere near the excitement level of the saxophonist from a couple weeks ago. I never thought I’d say this, but GIVE ME BACK SPAZZY TAYLOR HICKS, PLEASE. I get enough boredom with McPhee.

Commercial break: The new X-Men movie is coming soon, and Ian McKellen’s character talks about being a mutant and how people want to “cure” him. Does that mean Mandisa is in the movie? This commercial makes it look like the gayest installment yet, so naturally the gay director of the first two cut a trail. This one comes courtesy of barfy hack director Brett Ratner. Can’t wait.

Speaking of Mandisa, she’s up next, singing “Any Man of Mine.” According to the few lyrics I could understand coming from her breathless, babbling mouth, any man of Mandisa’s is going to tell her that the dress she’s too big for looks sexy on her anyway. What would Trinny and Susannah of What Not to Wear say about that sort of thing? This song has 10,000 words in it, and Mandisa is huffing and puffing to get them all out before the band stops playing. If I were a cynic, I might be inclined to think that country week was a ploy to get rid of her because she’s way out of her element here. Meanwhile, Kenny has nothing bad to say about Mandisa. You just know she got him in a headlock and “witnessed” to him at some point during the week. That’s what conservative evangelicals call it when they badger people about Jesus.