The Archuleta Event

Fate is a rollercoaster of improbabilities that twists through vistas of the unlikely and the mundane and the absurd before depositing you in the middle of an American Idol concert.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, that’s where I found myself this weekend, in a narrow plastic seat in front of a row of pre-teen girls, all equipped with screams that could slice through a person like chainsaws through butter. And there was much to scream about. David Cook, Syesha, Michael Johns — they were all there, and they all had to be greeted, sustained, and sent off with a more or less continuous assault of glass-shattering, ear-murdering scream.

And that was before the Archuleta event, which happened near the end of the evening. You could hear them preparing back there, limbering their vocal chords, downing energy drinks, kneading their throats. This was the main event. This was The One Who Must be Screamed At. Everything else was just a warmup.

And then he was there, rising out of the stage behind a piano, singing. Or I think he was singing. His mouth was moving, certainly, and his fingers were dancing across the keys, but all I heard was this hellish din, a million needles of sound piercing my skull and then my brain and then my soul, blotting out the world.

I did notice something odd, though, in the midst of all this torment. When Archuleta stopped singing and started talking, the screaming subsided, and seemed to attach itself to the cadences of whatever he was saying. So he’d say something like “Oh gosh it’s so cool to be here,” or “Golly gee how could so many awesome people be here to see me?,” or something along those lines, and at the end of every phrase the screams would burst forth, and shatter me to my knees, and then subside just in time for him to mouth the next goodhearted, inconsequential palliative. Really, most of the time, you couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the screamers didn’t seem to notice:

But that’s pure speculation. I’m sure he was saying very nice things. Plus, the torment definitely wasn’t eternal. It only lasted a couple of hours. So that was nice.