My Weekend Crush

If you somehow haven’t yet watched the video of Susan Boyle that has been making the rounds all week, I want you to stop reading right now and click play. My words can wait and I don’t want to spoil the experience for you. I mean it: watch, then read. OK, are you done? Are you crying? I totally did. I’ve watched it more than a dozen times now and each time it makes me smile from a deep and involuntary place in my heart. It’s not just her talent, which is considerable, but her dream that makes watching this clip of her “Britain’s Got Talent” audition so viscerally moving. Our ability to dream, to strive, to hope against hopes for a seemingly impossible goal is one of both our most magnificent and at times most tragic traits as humans.

When we look at Susan Boyle, we have instant expectations. She is a 47-year-old unemployed, unmarried, unkissed Scottish woman who lives alone with her cat Pebbles. Her bushy eyebrows, her frizzy hair, her double chin. She sure doesn’t look like a superstar. So when she says, quite earnestly, that her dream is “to be a professional singer” the audience laughs. We laugh. She is too old, too frumpy, too everything to possibly make it. We’re almost embarrassed for her. Poor dear and her big dreams. But then, then come those first few sublime notes. And then no one is laughing, just cheering.

The package is not the person. Talent doesn’t have to look a certain way, it just is. Society has conditioned us to believe that only the pretty, the perfect, the polished can rise to the top. We’ve fooled ourselves into thinking our eyes can tell us what our brains should discover. So we dismiss a person like middle-aged, pleasantly-plump, decidedly-unhip Susan Boyle almost automatically. We are a judgmental lot, us humans. But that she has become a full-blown internet sensation with 17 million views and counting of the original YouTube clip is a testament to one of our better human traits: our love for the underdog.

Of course, the cynics are already out. As the newspaper features and television appearances began to pile up (hello, even Oprah has come calling), so do the naysayers. She is not that great. She is a fraud. Seriously, what’s the big deal? I find it interesting that a lot of the critics seem to be men. Now this is just a theory, but I think maybe women react more emotionally to her story. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure she has countless male champions. But as women, we live everyday with constant, almost crushing judgment based on our looks. It’s in the cat calls you hear while walking down the sidewalk and the up-and-down you get while stepping to any counter. It’s at work, at the store, in the pub, even looking back at us from our own mirrors. So Susan reminds us that our abilities and our appearance really have nothing to do with each other.

She is also a reminder that we all of us deserve a shot to shine. Her plight is like so many of ours. “I’ve never been given a chance before but here’s hoping it will change.” It’s never foolish to dream. It’s only foolish to not give people a chance to live that dream. Thank you, Susan Boyle. Dream big, world. Happy weekend, all.