School Of Pop
From all over Texas they come—teens and tweens with talent and ambition—to Septien Entertainment’s Studios in Addison, where a young, unpolished Jessica Simpson was first discovered. And the next big star could be.
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In the dressing room, many of the girls are checking one another out. Almost everyone is wearing, predictably, at least one item from Urban Outfitters. In a sudden moment of inspiration, Annie Dingwall, the dateless fifteen-year-old who wrote the song about surviving a relationship, has clipped pink extensions into her hair; her younger sister, Caroline, another of the master artists, has taken all her hair and put it into one giant ponytail. Anne DeFilippo, a junior at a Catholic high school in Dallas who sings jazzy Norah Jones—like tunes, asks everyone if her hair is “too poofed.”
“Oh, babe, no way,” says Carley Smith, who is dressed like a female version of Billy Idol, with rings on every finger, pants that barely get above her hips, a tiny T-shirt, and her blond hair shooting out like fireworks.
Surprisingly, for all her experience on Barney, Hunter Pecunia is getting nervous. She puts her hands in a bowl of ice—“my personal trick to keep from crying,” she says with a giggle, but tears fill her eyes anyway. Hunter’s mother, Melissa, standing a few feet away, is unfazed. “This is her first showcase, so who knows what’s going to happen? It’s not like she isn’t ready. She practices her singing for thirty minutes every morning, a few more times in the afternoon, and right before she goes to bed.”
Maddie Smith, meanwhile, is raring to go. She sings a couple of scales and straps on her guitar, at which point she immediately begins leaning to one side, her left shoulder sagging. “I’m only going to hold the guitar for half of my spin-the-bottle song,” she confides. “I think that will be enough to get my message across.”
The auditorium is packed with friends and family. The judges, who will pick the best overall performer, are on the front row: talent scouts, executives from Radio Disney, a rep from a record label, and, as always, deejay Kidd Kraddick, who says, “This is not only one of the best shows in town, it’s almost always far better than any showcase of new talent I’ve seen that is put on by a major record label.”
To get the crowd revved up, two handsome protégés of Septien’s in their early twenties who are not in the master artists program—her own son Remington and a former Guess model named Erik Neff—come out and play a few songs, followed by the winner of the best overall performer award from the 2005 showcase, a sixteen-year-old R&B singer named Alysha Deslorieux, who attends the city’s prestigious high school for the performing arts. (Septien is so convinced that Erik and Remington and Alysha are on their way to commercial success that she has agreed to back them financially for a couple of years in return for a cut of any future album deal.)
Then it’s time for the first master artist of 2006. Out walks Paige Velasquez, holding her own electric guitar. “I want everyone to know that girls can rock,” she says confidently into the microphone, before letting loose with “Listen to Me.” Backing her up is a professional band composed of other guitarists, a keyboardist, and a drummer. As Paige whips her hair from side to side, singing at the top of her lungs, middle-aged men in the audience lean back in their chairs, their mouths open. “Thank you!” Paige shouts when she is finished. “Let’s give it up for the band!”
Paige is followed by Emi Holt, whose rendition of Kelly Clarkson’s “Beautiful Disaster” is so dead-on that several people in the audience give her a standing ovation. Carley Smith—who is going by her middle name, Roxann, for the showcase because “it really sounds more artistic and more complicated, just like the real me”—gets a huge burst of applause when she sings “Liar.” Her stage presence is hypnotic; she moves around like a seductive spider, dipping her shoulders and throwing out her arms.
Then Maddie Smith comes out with her guitar, which she does indeed hold through only half of her spin-the-bottle song, handing it to a stagehand just as she gets to the lines:
All my girlies, let’s go party
Meet me there and don’t be tardy
I just want to get this started
Guess what, ladies, there’ll be boys there
Do that makeup and do your hair
We’ll play spin the bottle all night long.
The crowd roars. “Thank you so much,” Maddie says before walking off. “Everyone at Septien calls me the Little Bohemian, and I guess I am!”
On and on they come. The fourteen-year-old country music singer Deidre Thornell is pitch-perfect on her songs, and Kimberly Kottwitz, who has gotten over her cold, does a dance act with two sinewy male backup dancers as she sings “Princess in Pink,” about a girl who wants to be a famous singer (“All she wants is to sing/Dreams of the fun that fame would bring/She’s the princess in pink!”). Instead of going with “Survive,” Annie Dingwall performs another of her compositions, “A Girl’s Gotta Do What a Girl’s Gotta Do,” about teen empowerment, and the Catholic high school girl, Anne DeFilippo, who also has changed her name for the showcase—she is going by Shardon—sings a rather shocking song about the ways that poetry is like good sex.
Finally, pint-size Hunter Pecunia comes out onstage, her brown hair falling in her eyes. She is dressed simply, wearing blue jean shorts that come down to her knees, a brown shirt from Target, a cream-colored jacket, and brown wedges that she got at Limited Too. If there are still tears in her eyes, no one can see them. She flashes a slightly embarrassed grin at the audience and grabs the microphone, which is as big as her head.
“Okay, well, here goes,” she says, and she begins to sing “Impossible,” a song made famous by Christina Aguilera. It’s a very demanding piece of music, requiring enormous range and constant scatting. There’s no way to hide a missed note in the song: One little wobble and everyone knows you are off. Hunter bends her knees, throws back her head, lifts the mike to her mouth, and begins wailing, belting out a series of notes that are more than an octave above middle C. The notes seem to hang in the air.
Kidd Kraddick grabs his evaluation form. “Stop the contest,” he writes. “Game over.” He turns to the person next to him and asks, “Is this really an eleven-year-old girl we’re listening to?”
When Hunter finishes singing, there is no question that she will be named the best overall performer by the judges. Septien gets onstage and says, “Aretha Franklin, move over.” People in the audience—even the other master artists—try to get close to her after the showcase is over. Some want to have their photos taken with her so they can say they were at the 2006 showcase when Hunter Pecunia sang “Impossible.”
“Hunter, you’re a star!” one of her friends cries out.
“Actually, I’d just like to go get something to eat,” she says, holding her wedges in her hand. “My feet hurt. And I’m ready for a good night’s sleep.” She smiles at everyone, then heads out the door with her family.
WITHIN A WEEK, the phones are ringing. The L.A. producer Michael O’Connor is calling to ask about Hunter. Word also gets to Septien that executives at the Disney Channel are interested in meeting Hunter. (In fact, in late May Hunter flew out to Los Angeles to audition for a TV pilot.) “Here we go,” Septien says with a chuckle. “Everyone is about to want a piece of the little star.”
But what will really happen to Hunter? Is stardom truly around the corner? A decade from now, when she is 21 years old, will all of America know her name?
“It’s the great mystery,” Septien tells me as we sit in her office. “Will Hunter be the star? Will it be Paige? Will it be Carley or Maddie or Annie or Deidre or someone else? Or will it be none of them? Will they all move on to other things? Will the moment they had at the showcase be the big shining moment of their singing careers?” She sighs. “In this business, you just don’t know.”
There’s a knock at the door, and standing in the doorway is a gorgeous teenager in a short skirt, her long hair cascading down her back. She is one of the eight new master artists for the autumn 2006 class.
“Good Lord,” Septien says.
“Linda, I was hoping I could get a chance to ask you something,” the girl says.
“Well, you just sit right down.”
Septien starts smiling. Then she starts chuckling.
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