The Buzzz June 2009

My introduction to Susan Boyle's angelic voice came, as it did for so many others, via a link to the YouTube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

That arrived inside an e-mail message on the Monday following her April 11 appearance on an "American Idol" kind of show that had run on British TV. Although the e-mail was clearly "Off Topic" for the list-serv, not one person on the e-mail list complained! And every single one of us has felt enriched by experiencing Susan Boyle's triumph at the Britain's Got Talent competition ever since! Most of us, I'm sure, sent that link on to friends and family, which accounts for the more than 39 million hits at YouTube already, and saved the link in our "Favorites List for a future day when we know we'll need a spiritual lift!

Why the excitement? Why has the middle-aged woman described by the person who sent me the link as "looking like Mrs. Doubtfire,"with the seemingly incongruously angelic voice touched so many people, and sparked dinner-table and water-cooler conversations all over the country and the world? She truly does have a voice like an angel. And "I Dream A Dream" from "Les Miserables," the song she chose to sing is beautiful, the kind of thing that tugs at the heartstrings of even the most cynical among us. But, that's not all.

I think it's because every single one of us who has ever had a moment of self doubt about the way we look, or sound, or come across, rejoices when we watch the video. We feel as though we are rejoicing right along with Ms. Boyle as we celebrate her courage and her talent, and her triumph; and any misgivings about her appearance, her life in a remote and unsophisticated village in Scotland, her mostly stay-at-home existence of giving care to another simply fall away because her talent erases them all!

When Susan Boyle shows up on stage, many of us, especially those of us who have coped with our own disabilities and dealt with the hurtful words and attitudes of unthinking classmates or malicious bullies, feel an instant empathy with her. She is not beautiful. Her answers to the questions the panel asks are neither sparkling nor sophisticated. It's obvious to those of us who are way too attuned to being misjudged, prejudged, and expected to fail that what is about to happen will make us cringe. We hold our collective breath and clench our fists in anxious anticipation of what we know is about to happen. We are prepared to feel sorry for Ms. Boyle, and, in turn, to feel sorry for ourselves for all the times when someone made fun of us - for tripping, or saying the wrong thing, or getting a horrible grade, or missing the ball, or spilling ketchup on the front of our shirt, or embarrassing a mother or a father or a sibling or an instantly former best friend. When Susan sings that gorgeous song and the audience bursts straight away into jubilant astonished applause, and the judges are nearly speechless with amazement, we are overcome with relief, and vindication, and jubilation, and feeling just as ecstatic as Susan, herself, must have felt at that moment!

Susan's very public triumph seems almost like our own personal triumph, especially for those of us who have worried that our disabilities set us too far apart from what is normal, or that others would define us by our dis-abilities, instead of all the talents and abilities that are a truer definition of the women and men we actually are.

It turns out that our moms were right: You really can't judge a book by its cover!

And, it turns out that what we know, deep down, about love and charity and fairness and hope is also right: We shouldn't judge one another on the shallow, mostly meaningless, and ephemeral outward appearances that can falsely identify another human being as worthy, or not, of our approval. It's character and courage and humanity and talent that matter. It is so good that Susan Boyle has helped us to re-learn those important truths all over again.

It turns out that even a person from the humblest of circumstances, a person who was bullied and cruelly teased when she was in school, a person who struggled all of her life with a learning disability, a person who doesn't resemble a movie star and who hasn't had many opportunities to attract adoring fans (except at Sunday mass and in her village's karaoke bar), a person who has never had a romantic relationship and has never been kissed, a person like Susan Boyle can rise above the low expectations and rolling eyes and restless ennui of people expecting little from someone outside their conception of young and beautiful and able-bodied and desirable, to amaze and inspire and become instantly, astoundingly, desirably, universally admired and appreciated. And, that makes everyone of us who consider our appearance, our age, our abilities, or our skills to be less than extraordinary feel great!

Susan Boyle's achievement and her reaffirmation for each of us of the truths we, sadly, so easily forget as a culture and as individuals are treasures we can keep close at hand on days when a teacher makes us feel stupid, or a store clerk acts as if we're invisible, when we miss the bus and the paratransit van is 90 minutes late, or the employer we were counting on tells us that he is giving the job to someone else, and when the cares of the world and our apprehensions about them make it really, really hard to get out of bed.

Most of us have somewhere in mind a list of the people who inspire us. We turn to them when life is treating us badly and draw strength from what we know of their courage and determination and character. Over the last several weeks, I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," and Abraham Lincoln who overcame a childhood of poverty and deprivation to become a great and compassionate president has joined the group of people from whom I will continue to draw inspiration. Others on my list are Mohammed ali who sacrificed fame and fortune and the promise of title when he stood up for what he knew was right, and later despite the tremors of Parkinson's Disease held the Olympic torch high and brought a stadium filled with athletes to their feet, in awe, and appreciation; and Barack Obama, the child of an African immigrant and a white single mother who overcame an American history of racism and prejudice to become our 44th president less than a hundred days ago. There are ordinary people on my list as well. There's an aunt who never married and sacrificed much to help her brothers support their families and lived at home while caring for aging parents. There's a child who was nearly destroyed by depression, who summoned the determination and the strength to return to college and earn a degree. There's a friend who lost her vision overnight and within three months had trained with a guide dog and returned to her former life of caring for her family and dedicated service to her community.

Though she comes from a life of relative obscurity in a remote village faraway, though she is unemployed and the work of her lifetime was caring for parents during their final illnesses, though her knowledge of romance derives from other people's stories and the music she interprets so beautifully, though she has never been kissed, and her manner of speaking and dressing and engaging others in conversation is somewhat less than extraordinary, though a lack of oxygen when she was born 47 years ago caused her to struggle every day with the affects of learning disability, though she is the kind of person (like most of us) who wouldn't attract much attention in a crowd, and whom the audience and the judges were all too ready to ridicule, Susan Boyle's ordinary life and extraordinary courage and talent lead me to add her to "my list." I want to Thank her for joining the others in my personal reservoir of strength and hope, and becoming one more person to whom I can turn for inspiration and strength when life becomes too discouraging.

Thank you, Susan Boyle, for your courage. Thank you for enduring and surmounting the sorrows that allowed you to sing that beautiful song with so much longing and so much pathos and all of that emotion that traveled straight to our hearts. Thank you for keeping on keeping on and surviving the abuse and the cruelty of uncaring classmates and bullies. Thank you for having the strength to tell others about your learning disability. Your strength gives strength to so many others.

I hope that you will sing other songs for us and that we can look forward to experiencing your beautiful voice on new recordings that may come to us soon.

But, even if you don't record other songs. If you find instant fame and worldwide stardom daunting or unappealing and you decide to allow your appearance on "Britain's Got Talent" and the subsequent YouTube video to remain a once-in-a-lifetime moment of fame, you have already given each of us that treasured understanding about not judging a book by its cover and the importance of character and compassion and resolve, and a transportive experience of hearing you sing, "I dreamed a dream in time gone by..."

Thank you for helping each of us connect again with the dreams that rise above adversity and disability and allow us to become the people we intend to be.