Freddie's dead

So Mandisa’s gone. And I was both right and wrong about something related to her dismissal. I was wrong about her use of the word “lifestyle” being code for “I hate faggots.” She gave an interview to this very Web site after the getting her pink slip, saying that she could never hate anyone, and that “lifestyle” was about her own lifestyle of eating a lot of stuff. But I was right about it too, because, of course, she’s not down with the queers at all. It says we’re bad in something she kept calling “The Bible.” Yeah, whatever. Me and shellfish. Don’t let the door hit you.

Ryan strolls out wearing a monochrome suit and V-neck sweater combo, a twinset for men. Or maybe it’s a catsuit underneath. It’s hard to tell. It gets a bad review from other folks in my house, but I’m kind of into it. Ryan’s stylist is totally shooting for a more sophisticated him. I’m just glad he’s done with the West Hollywood fashionable male look. Let Ace keep it.

Fantasia is in the audience tonight, seated right behind Paula. When the camera angle is right it looks like she’s growing out of Paula’s right shoulder like in that movie with Rosey Grier and Ray Milland. I love Fantasia. Soul-gospel screaming is my favorite type of screaming, in a big tie with ugly-no-wave-destructo-rock screaming. Because I live in the land of the free I never have to choose. And that’s why America is awesome. But anyway, Fantasia. She’s incredible. I especially love that “Babymama” song. After she won she went on a promotional tour for some brand of jeans she was endorsing, and my friend Dave Cobb and I went to the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square Mall on a Saturday morning to see her sing one song in the Macy’s juniors’ department. It was us, 200 8-year-old African-American girls, and a smattering of DL thugs. Then we saw Spinderella in the Aveda store. That was a good day.

Tonight the kids will be tormented by the songs of Queen, the biggest homo rock band ever, right after Judas Priest. It’s as though the producers are daring the contestants to sing these songs. Notoriously difficult, famously studio-wed songs. The surviving members of the contestant pool spend the week working with the surviving members of the band. Thankfully the Queen dudes look their age: old. Especially with all that big poufy rock hair throwing their sagging flesh into sharp relief. This is still better than having to feel sad about Kenny Rogers and Barry Manilow and their obvious attempts to de-wrinklify themselves.

Bucky’s up first with “Fat Bottomed Girls.” It’s nothing special really. But I dig Bucky. You know that if he gets the ax, he’ll just grin through it all, go home, make some moonshine, and get Boss Hogg to chase him around town. The song ends, and they cut to his wife. Is it really wise to cut to a man’s wife after he sings “Fat Bottomed Girls?” Then Ryan asks him how he thinks he did. Bucky says, absolutely innocently, “Freddie Mercury ain’t nobody you wanna jump up behind.”

Now I’ve got to break something down for you gays. The day of the obvious sexual innuendo being considered naughty or witty or comedic has come and gone. You’ll never make it to The Big Show with double-entendre quips about balls, dropping the soap, wieners, or anything else like that. In my house, when the neon-lit, lowest-common-denominator gay joke is hovering in the air waiting for someone to swat it, and someone does swat it, we say, “You were just on Queer as Folk.” More specifically, you were being Peter Paige or Sharon Gless.

So Ryan says something like, “You can say that again!” Of course.

Ace is next, wearing more accessories than ever before. Big wooden beads. Feathers. I keep looking for the JT LeRoy (sorry, I mean Laura Albert) raccoon penis bone necklace. I bet he has one. He’s wearing leather pants too. Courting the man-on-man vote with them. Ace says, about his wrongheaded song choice, “We Will Rock You,” that “You want to put your own flavor on the song so it sounds like Ace doing Queen.”

Thanks for all the third person, Ace. Dave White loves that shit.

Cut to the guys in Queen, hating Ace while Ace instructs them how to arrange the song so that Ace doesn’t sound like a complete dumb-ass when Ace tries to sing “We Will Rock You.”

“I don’t think we’re going to play your arrangement,” says Brian May. Ace, lacking intuitive social skills, bulldozes onward. Ace advises the band to be aggressive. “We’ll try and do something. OK?” sighs Brian May with a raised eyebrow and a can-you-effing-believe-this-wanker exaggerated eye-blink.

But here’s where Ace is not as guilty as the show would have you believe. It’s edited to seem like Ace continued to press the band to do it the Ace way. May says, “That I can’t do. Not to my own song.” He’s justified in saying this, but it’s clear that he said it before, in the same breath as the first statement, but it’s been chopped up and separated as though it were another discrete moment, just to extend the awkward entertainment value. This is not Ace’s doing. I can’t believe I’m defending Ace at all right now.

Then Ace sings. Rebuffed by the band, Ace still sings the song Ace’s way: horribly. Ace lolls the words around in Ace’s mouth and sort of lets them slide out, doing his best to slow the band down. Then Ace grabs the mike stand and does this weird, crouching march that Ace believes makes Ace look like a badass rocker when in fact it makes Ace look like a weird crouching marcher. The big, big song swallows Ace alive, possibly putting another scar on Ace’s chest. It has also scarred Dave White.

Cut to former Monkee Mickey Dolenz, wearing Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” hat. Then cut to the judges, who deliver the death blow to Ace. Paula actually uses the word “bastardized” to describe Ace’s attempts to “fix” the song. After all three of them tell Ace that Ace sucked it, Ace says, “I think I rocked. I had fun.” Then Ace appeals to the audience, “Did you have fun?”

History Lesson Time: Justin Guarini tried that move in season 1. I remember when he did it. See how well it worked for Justin Guarini, Ace?

Pick Pickler is ready to turn “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a song she probably thought Constantine wrote—because he probably told her he wrote it and she believed it, because the big rumor now is that they’re a “thing”—into her own very special episode of Faith Hill: In a Metal Mood. “I know that I have big shoes to fill,” says Pick Pickler. Again, referring to Constantine. Then she comes out on the stage in Frankenhooker boots and Joan-Jett-circa-1987 black leather jacket and delivers the weirdest, dumbest, Forrest-Gumpest version of this song ever. But…I…like…it?

I do. I like it. Sorry VoteForTheWorst.com, tonight I love Pick Pickler. I love her and her amazing gumption. Just for this moment. Not for all time. Promise. Even Simon agrees with me. He says that on paper it shouldn’t have worked. But it did.

That’s when Pickler says, “On paper? What?” And suddenly I’m over the love moment. I’m back to wanting to send her to Sylvan Learning Center with Gedeon McKinney. Now, I’m being for real here, Ms. Pickler. Look at your game, girl. Stop being dumb. Keep the adorable Southern accent but read a frigging book. I sound a little Texan-y from time to time myself, but you know what? I read. I know things. And it’s OK for you to know things too. Wipe that “y’all’s vocabulary words are too crazy for me” look off your makeup-caked face and listen. Knock off being an irredeemable dunce. It’s not sexy. It’s not cute. It’s not sweet. It’s disheartening. “[Simon] has the weirdest terminology,” she continues. Yes, Pick, it’s the terminology of a person who paid attention in school. You are doing no one any favors. Not yourself and not the little girls in this country who look up to you now, and they do look up to you now, God help them. So stop it. It’s making me sad.