American Idol, March 21: America meets ''the crying girl''

Forgive me for trotting out the old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words, but can any of you think up an adjective that describes Sanjaya Malakar's cover of ''You Really Got Me'' as accurately as the image of the sobbing little girl the Idol producers kept cutting to during tonight's episode, the British Invasion theme night? Now mind you, I don't know who the girl is. And I don't know if she was crying out of joy, or terror, or pain, or amusement — or some combination of the four. But with even Simon deferring to the evening's unlikeliest star — ''I think the little girl's face says it all'' — it was clear something spectacularly awful was going down.

Indeed, watching Sanjaya, sporting his hideous gloved sweater, doing his Gene Simmons tongue before the commercial break, grinding suggestively in front of Paula, and growling lyrics like ''You've got me so I can't sleep at night,'' all I could think was ''No, Sanjaya, you've got me so I can't sleep at night!'' — Michael Slezak