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Interview: Mandisa - Beautiful inside and out
Page 2

Words: Kofo Baptist
Sunday, 28 October 2007

For a woman who was mocked on national TV about her weight and then suddenly eliminated from the show, Mandisa, the American Idol contestant has refused to take a backseat.

“I know that the Lord has gifted me in so many areas…That’s what makes me valuable. I’m not valuable because of how I look, I’m not valuable because I sing, I’m not valuable because I’m a celebrity, I’m valuable because he created me, he made me the way that he wanted me to be and that’s where my value comes from.”

Mandisa phones me at exactly 7pm as we had arranged. She is cheerfully polite and I am on the other end waiting for a divaesque vibe that is the hallmark of some famous people, but it doesn’t come. She tells about her day and proceeds to ask about mine and I am thinking ‘I only have 30 minutes, I need to make this as short as possible’ but her pleasantness makes it hard to be clinical about the interview. So when we finally begin, I am at ease and feel like I’m talking to an old friend; only she’s not a friend, she’s a celebrity from the world of glam, riches and fame and her name, as she is simply known, is Mandisa.

American Idol fans will remember Mandisa, the powerhouse vocalist who blew Simon Cowell, (he’s the rude one on American Idol) away at her first audition. She seemed a favourite to scoop the Idol title in season five of the popular contest but shocked viewers were surprised to see her eliminated after landing in the bottom three for the first time. Rumours have flown since then, with many speculating that she was eliminated because she was a threat to Katharine McPhee who fitted the bill for an American Idol.

Mandisa by contrast is definitely not a Katharine McPhee; she’s very large and although she has outstanding vocals that places her somewhere in a league with some of the best singers there are, her weight is something she has battled with for the longest time and in this superficial world we live in, one of the first things people will notice about her.

Coming from a divorced home and raised by her single mother, the 30-year-old singer who doesn’t remember ever not singing is a realist, and so going for the Idol audition, she considered the many things that would be said about her weight. But despite her many preparations, Simon Cowell’s famous, "I think we'll need a bigger stage,” comment still caught her by surprise. And later on in the show, when Paula Abdul compared her performance style to that of former idol star Frenchie Davis, Cowell made another remark stating that a more apt comparison would be to France itself.

“I’ve been watching the show for years and I’ve heard Simon make comments after comments about people’s appearances, particularly about their weight so I did expect that it would be an issue,” she says. “I guess I was caught off guard because of the comments he made about my weight, he didn’t make them to my face. He was actually very complimentary when I auditioned; he said I had a beautiful face, he said I was everything he hoped I would be and it wasn’t until I walked out of the room that he made those comments. So I found out along with the rest of America when the show premiered.”

Mandisa, not knowing whether she had made it through to the semi-finals, confessed to Cowell and the other judges that her feelings had been hurt by the things he said and that she had cried but had now forgiven him. A move which Cowell said humbled him, immediately offering her an apology.

“I was devastated, humiliated and angry,” she explained, “but then I had some friends who prayed for me and as they prayed for me, they began to pray for Simon and they asked the Lord to forgive him and they asked the Lord to help me to forgive him. That’s when I realised that this was about so much more than how I was feeling and about my weight, that it really was about the Lord and about Simon and that’s how I was able to kind of forget what I was feeling. Honestly, I know that forgiving Simon did more for me than it probably did for him. If I had not forgiven him I could have held onto bitterness and anger and I would have become a bitter and angry person and he would have gone on with his life and not thought a second about it so I recognised that forgiveness is just as powerful for the person that’s forgiving as it is for the person that’s being forgiven.”

Having recently released her first book, Idol Eyes, where she charts her self discovery journey from her Idol experience to her battle with food addiction and her new found fame, it’s obvious that for Mandisa putting pen to paper has been a therapeutic process. “Idol Eyes, the subtitle is my new perspective on faith, fat and fame. Those are just the issues that I learned so much about,” she states with a straight-from-the-heart delivery. “I just went through a lot being on American Idol and I realise that hopefully people will be able to identify with my story and will be able to relate on several issues that I went through and that I dealt with. So I wrote it, one for me, it was really therapeutic for me to write my story down and to realise certain things about myself but then also I feel like it’s a story that other people will be able to learn from and hopefully benefit from as well.”