Columnist Susan Snyder: Singing should be treasured

Saturday, June 19, 2004 | 12:39 p.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

WEEKEND EDITION

June 19 - 20, 2004

The little girl with a pixie haircut stood in the living room and shouted to her mother, who was in the kitchen.

"Mom, don't listen!" she said.

Her dad then strummed a few chords on his old Kalamazoo guitar, and she sang.

Some nights it was, "Hi Lili, Hi Lo," which was his favorite. Other nights, "Sweet Betsy from Pike," which was her favorite.

Dad changed the latter song's lyrics, teaching his daughter that Betsy crossed the great mountains with her "brother" Ike. Maybe "lover" -- even Betsy's -- was not a concept he wanted her to entertain just yet.

I wish I'd asked him about it when I still had the chance.

Every year, the memory of those brief evening performances grows dimmer. I remember most of "Hi Lili, Hi Lo," but only a few lines about Betsy's travels West. I remember the guitar because it hangs in my living room now, just as it hung in my family's living room some 35 years ago.

Mostly, I remember the idea that singing is something people should do -- every day if possible, and always because they enjoy it. Talent has nothing to do with it.

Maybe that's why I can't get my head around the concept of a particular "reality" television show that ended Monday. I stomached small portions of only two episodes of the WB's "Superstar USA" before switching channels.

Generally speaking, the best way to handle reality programming involves the "off" button. Most plots revolve around publicly humiliating people while we laugh from the comfort and cowardice of our living rooms.

Still, I tuned into "Superstar" in the same manner I suspect a few of the dinosaurs stared at the meteor.

The premise of this twisted waste of air time was to find the nation's worst singer through a series of competitions in which talented vocalists were discarded and bad ones were moved forward.

The "joke" was that only the judges, the studio audience and a few million television viewers knew that the winners won because they had no talent. The winners themselves believed the accolades given by a panel of lying has-been, or never-were, celebrity judges.

On Monday a woman who couldn't carry a tune if you pinned it to her ample chest was handed $100,000 and the truth. More pitiful than the mean joke was the Internet onslaught of fan commentary.

After lamenting that the winner "didn't seem like she really understood," one chat-list reviewer wrote, "She wasn't upset. She wasn't shocked. She wasn't, well, anything. To me, it was a letdown."

To him it was a letdown? Give him a book about the fall of the Roman Empire.

Early "Superstar" reports say psychological tests were given to contestants to make sure they could cope with being bullied nationally and wouldn't go out and blow up a building or something.

We should use the WB tests to determine which schoolchildren can "safely" be bullied without fear of Columbine, because we aren't teaching kids not to bully.

We're teaching them that it's OK to maliciously exploit others' hopes and weaknesses as long as we write a check afterward.

A father should be mindful of what he teaches daily. There's no telling which lessons will be the ones that stick.