Idol Chatter & Voice Views

[windowsmedia]http://w2.yorkdispatch.com/mark/ericarhodes.wmv[/windowsmedia]

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

She used to be a series regular on Barney and Friends.

She showed up on American Idol dressed as a dominatrix.

Another tawdry tale of child actress gone bad?

Hardly. This is a young woman with a plan.

Besides, there’s a story behind the whip, the wild outfit and those wicked, wicked shoes.

First the story.

Erica Rhodes, 24, of Irving, Texas, had tried out for Idol three times and never made it past the cattle call.

So when friends suggested she audition in Dallas for season nine, Erica wasn’t keen on the idea. Until she spotted an ad on craigslist.

A Houston resident wanted to do a documentary called “Chasing Down an Idol.” He wanted to follow a singer through the Dallas audition process. He’d pay $500.

The catch: That someone would have to wear a costume.

“After I contacted him, he and I both came up with the idea of a dominatrix. Because no one have ever done it before, basically,” Erica said.

Next stop, a costume shop where Erica picked up those knee-high black boots (“I had the hardest time walking in them. They were really high.”) and a black police woman’s outfit (“I didn’t want it to be too provocative.”) and her whip.

Cattle call audition? No problem this time.

She eventually landed in front of Simon, Randy, Kara and guest judge Neil Patrick Harris.

Erica cracked her whip with authority. At the judges’ request, she sang a sweet-sounding snippet of the Barney song. Sweetness gone, whip cracking again, she belted out a few lines of En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind.”

And she got a golden ticket to Hollywood.

Her Idol experience ended in Los Angeles. Dominatrix garb gone, Erica got the boot in the first round. (Hear more about her Hollywood experience, the documentary and which top 24 contest impresses her in the audio clip above.)

But about the same time the Hollywood round was being filmed, Idol’s audition shows were airing. And Erica was a star of the Dallas episode, featured in a 3 1/2-minute clip.

“It’s helped put me in touch with a lot of people who can help me in the future,” Erica says.

Ah, yes. The plan.

Erica graduated from Southern Methodist University with a degree in journalism. In June, she plans to take the law school admissions test.

Yes, the former Barney actress, the dominatrix for a day, wants to be a lawyer. She figures she’d start law school in the fall of 2011.

If she doesn’t get a break in acting or music in the meantime.

Last week, she was putting her acting reel together. She played a starring role in a short film called “Changing” that showed at the Texas Black Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a multi-racial school counselor trying to get the 2010 Census and the Dallas Independent School District to include boxes on forms for people of multiple ethnic backgrounds.

She’s also working on a new music demo. Those contacts she’s made as a result of Idol — they include managers and music producers.

“I’m focused on (singing) right now,” Erica says. “But I know there’s only so much of a window, and I need to make money as well. And law school needs to be done.

“I have three goals: to be an actress, a singer and a lawyer.”

Interesting …

“I know,” Erica agrees. “I want to be the real Ally McBeal.”

But you can tell from talking to her that Erica’s a wee bit worried about what people might think after seeing that clip on Idol.

“I hope that people can see from my audition alone that I’m not a bad person at all,” she says, laughing. “It was just a costume.”

One that resulted in the right kind of exposure.

Editor’s Note: This interview is copyrighted. Feel free to link to it. Feel free to use a snippet of it and link to it. Do not rip off the entire interview. The promotional photos are used with the permission of the artist for this blog and this blog alone.

Want more Erica. Go here for her MySpace; here for her Facebook. And go here for a snippet from “Chasing Down an Idol,” the documentary still in the works. And now, the Idol clip.

[youtube]TQVGEbQIG-o[/youtube]