I’m dreaming of a white snowman
With a carrot nose and charcoal eyes
And when he cries, I’m going to tell him it’s O.K.
because Santa’s on his sleigh, and he’s on his way
The quote above is from the additional verse to "White Christmas" by a very gaga Lady Gaga. When she sang it during her a musical segment of her terrifying Thanksgiving special, I felt so embarrassed for her I wanted to climb under my bed. It is one thing to end a verse to the best selling song of all time, it is another to make it such blithering nonsense.
But it was also sometime around here, two thirds of the way thru a 90 minute "A Very Gaga Thanksgiving", I began to wonder if this consistent bizarreness was being done on purpose. Dressed in traditional family fare garb it was an inspired commentary on traditional values.
Or to put in another way, I couldn't decide if she was Presley straight out of the army, or an inverted Munsters. Presley cut back on the hip swirls and became a mainstream matinee idol, the Munsters were Frankenstein and Vampira as a middle class couple with a housefull of monsters and a normal daughter, Gaga reversed it for this show.
Lady Gaga is home for the holidays.She sings a duet with Tony Bennett, who called her the new Picasso, she goes to her old school and bores some 3rd Graders, she sings to her family -her family in shadows and she in the spotlight, over a family dinner, cooks turkey waffles, and is interviewed by Katie Couric.
With the exception of an early duet on "The Lady Is A Tramp" and a pretty good dance segment on "Born This Way", the entire show is squirmy unwatchable and sad. It's like a train wreck. How could Gaga be uncool and counter-culture at the same time? It is like performance art, the theater of the real and only she is in on the joke.
Grade: B-