Laura is sitting on the balcony, in another of Solomon’s T-shirts. Her long legs extend to where her feet are crossed on the top of the balcony, her hands are wrapped around a cup of green tea. Her eyes are closed and lifted to the morning sun. Solomon watches her lazily from the couch where he lies with his guitar, strumming gently, slowly concocting a new song, mumbling words here and there, trying to make things fit together. He could never do this in front of Bo, he always needed to be alone, he felt too self-conscious, but Laura’s company is calming. She listens and occasionally mimics the sound of his strumming. He stops to listen to her, she attempts it a few times until she has perfected the sound. He practises his song, she practises hers. He smiles and shakes his head at the wonderful bizarreness of it.
Laura opens her eyes and looks at the folded newspaper that Solomon placed beside her. She felt him leave it there before sitting on the couch to strum on his guitar.
She sees the headline. SUPERB LYREBIRD.
‘You told me never to read these.’
He continues strumming. ‘You should read this one.’
She sighs and removes her feet from the balcony, needing to plant herself, to ready herself for possible attack, though she knows it must have positive content if Solomon is pushing it on her. It’s a piece about the StarrQuest final by TV critic Emilia Belvedere. Laura braces herself as she reads.
My mother was a midwife but related more with being a keen gardener. She dedicated most of her spare time to fighting a war with unwanted plants between the cracks of her pavement, in the lawn, on her hands and knees muttering curses and threats. Cracks and crevasses in pavements are comfortable, sneaky hiding places for weed seeds, carried in the breeze. Pulling them from their cracks is futile. Dandelions, thistles, sticker weed, pigweed, yarrow – these were my mother’s arch-enemies. I think of this analogy in particular when contemplating the part reality talent shows play in our society.
The judges, the finders, are not the breeze that carry the seeds. They have an element of my mother, in that they notice and they pluck, but are (at first) without her aggression or irritation. Their purpose is not to annihilate – though that is all too often the result of their efforts. They see something rare, something pretty, but in the wrong place, and they uproot them. The finders put them in a fancy vase or jar, a place where they will be shown to advantage for all to see. They convince the weed it is where it belongs. They convince the weed to fight with all of the other weeds who always stood out from each other in their own cracks in their own pavements and never had to fight before. This is both the skill and the downfall of the talent show. The finders cannot be keepers. They uproot, they pull, they replant, and it soon loses its beauty in its new habitat. It cannot grow, it cannot thrive, it has lost its chink where once it sprouted with vitality. It is lost to the great unknown, in an unnatural world that doesn’t understand.
The finders’ purpose is to shine a light, yet often the light is so bright it stuns or blinds them.
From their moment of conception, I have despised television talent shows. It is an hour of discovered talent displayed in the wrong place, nurtured, if at all, in the wrong way. It may not have been concentrated vinegar poured on these rare weeds before our very eyes, but it might as well have been. This year, one talent show changed my mind, the finder of the rarest weed, that has grown and flowered in the most distant of fissures …
Alan and Mabel was a worthy winner of StarrQuest, a likeable act, an act you cheer for, chuckle at, cannot help to be moved by with its veiled desperation, but Lyrebird stole the nation’s heart – correction, the world’s heart. I was transported, in that one performance, to my childhood … not something that happens often. Usually it is escape we desire, to get away from what we know so well. Lyrebird brought me to the core of me.