Upsetting Day: The Haunting Musical Puppets of Sandra-May

We each live in our own silo crumbling to dust on a different entertainment wasteland, so I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the increasingly less popular television show, Britain’s Got Talent. It’s like American Idol, but some singers do trampoline dunks. Others do something much closer to m̵͓̯̊́a̷̞̭͗͠d̶͉͐͘n̵̈́̂͜e̶̜̗͝s̴̨̖͊͝s̶̖̋.

This is the story of Sandra-May Flowers, who auditioned for the 14th season (2020) with a musical puppet something.

I should add some more background. These shows used to really indulge in the torture of the delusional and desperate. In the early 2000s, about 40% of these shows was dedicated to showing ugly nerds that the entire world was going to be 7th grade. Like all things in the 2000s, it was sort of fun, but a terrible mistake. So they’ve slowed down with the bullying. Most acts in the recent seasons are either very good or suck in a charming way. Sandra-May Flowers was none of these things. She is a true, unexplainable mystery. She’s not an “oddball” or an “idiot.” She is a dream fragment from an undone timeline, and her act started the only way it could: with awkward confusion.

Her greeting is sweet, but asynchronous and strange, like one stranger going for a complicated handshake while the other tries to suck their fingers. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of it, but I’m about to make the case that one of these people is here from the wrong universe.

Sandra-May tells the judges she has been traveling the world like Batman to enhance her performing arts, and she has now returned home to show what she can do. This is the only clue anyone is given before the show’s co-hosts, Ant and Dec, bring out two human-sized dolls. The dolls are dressed for disco or worse, and whatever Sandra-May is going to do with them can’t be too complicated since they were just dumped on barstools by two untrained TV presenters with no idea what’s going on. My point is, a magician or a juggler doesn’t start their act by saying, “Go ahead and throw my sex dolls wherever.”

The music starts, and it’s worse than anyone could have expected. We hear the delicate sounds of birds chirping and piano demarcating the peace you once felt with Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.” It’s the song with a famously impossible high note, and it’s bad news. It’s the epic bacon of zany song choices. But don’t understand this act too quickly…

… Sandra-May picks a rhythm violently unrelated to the music and starts jerking her arm and neck in opposite directions. Is she meant to be theatrically strolling? Maybe d-dancing? How are the sex dolls going to come into this? By the way, the male sex doll looks like this:

It was made from waxing salon debris and has teeth. It is distinctly not a “funny” sex doll. This looks like violated human remains that would disappoint a serial killer father. It looks like a mole George Clinton would ask his doctor about. If a voice inside this begged for help, you would know they meant “shoot me.” Anyway, it grins lifelessly from a tangle of body hair as Sandra-May writhes confusingly.

She finally starts singing, and it’s stunning for a couple reasons. One, there was no reason to believe this was going to be a singing act. Two, it’s fine? Usually a woman dragging two dead bodies and putting in “Lovin’ You” at karaoke means you’re in for some clumsy sarcasm. But this seems like a sincere attempt by a 4/10 singer to do her best. Everyone seems pleasantly surprised. “Oh!” says judge Alesha Dixon.

And then Sandra-May sexually caresses her doll’s teeth. “Huh? Fucking god damnit, what the fuck,” says judge Alesha Dixon.

I don’t know how to describe what happens next.

As far as I can tell, Sandra-May bends down to wipe something off the doll’s shoe, rubs it on its mustache and mouth, and then eats it. Then she gets to work picking termites out of its hair. It’s a weird adaptation of “Lovin’ You.”

None of this is human body language anyone has seen before, but if I’m reading this boner correctly, she’s eating gum off this thing’s foot seductively. Whatever this is, whatever she is doing to the doll, she’s trying to fuck it, or us. Judge Simon Cowell senses it too, and he’s not interested. Sandra-May gets her first X.

Maybe Simon rejected her too quickly, because when the “🎶dood’n dood’n doo-doooo🎶” part of the song starts, she props the doll up by the pole in its ass and they foxtrot. It’s much closer to a mall intruder giving a mannequin the time of her life than it is to entertainment, but it’s beautiful in its way. A story is forming. It’s the story of a fifty-great-year-old woman robbing Michael Jackson’s grave and falling in love with his bones. Oh shit, here comes the high note.

Amid all the corpse molesting, everyone had forgotten about the approaching note. There’s no way this amateur pubic hair sculptor will be able to hit it, right? “Fucking not even close,” says Sandra-May as she picks up the doll and shrieks in its face. “YAAAAAIIIIIEeeEEEEEEeeeEEEeEEE” she sings like a steamboat cumming; like a cat being punished for its eternal sins. And it’s too much. The judges are stunned beyond the capacity for comedic bits. Why do this? Why a toothed puppet? Why a puppet at all?

We’ll never know. Sandra-May certainly doesn’t. She flips the doll upside down and positions its legs. Not for something, like you’d expect, but only to add to the puzzle. This is no dance or pantomime. This is now a singing woman plunging a doll as it eats its own asshole. The judges are openly discussing what the shit is happening. The audience members are no longer laughing or cringing. They are starting to panic, their primitive senses telling them this may be a type of unknown to be feared. If deadly gas started billowing from this no one would be surprised. If she stopped singing to say, “I just tricked ten million people into seeing how I masturbate,” they would be even less surprised. Judge Amanda Holden isn’t waiting to find out. She gives Sandra-May her second X.

With no answers to her riddles given or coming, Sandra-May grabs a second puppet lover and attaches it to the first puppet’s butthole pole. As troublingly strange as anything else, she does this with no thought to theatrics or showmanship. This is a woman who added eleven sexy steps to licking a scarecrow’s foot, and now she is assembling a mannequin naginata like a bored toll booth operator. Despite this, she screws it up and the girl puppet’s wig flops off, giving her act its first laugh. It’s a laugh of pure relief. It’s a hint that whatever this may be, she’s maybe not good at it. We may be looking at mere failure, not a ritual to raise the tormented dead.

Next, Sandra-May spins. Again, and again. With no skill, thought, or reason, she twirls. Only twirls, for far longer than you’re imagining. What does it mean? Is the girl doll stealing her doll boyfriend? Does this represent the turmoil of a mostly mannequin throuple? The puppets offer no hints, their limbs flopping from the edge of a nonsense tornado. And again, this is not what anyone would call “dancing.” It’s more like a home remedy for children with too much blood in their torsos. It’s the wikiHow for “Easy Solutions For Wet Mannequins.” Call it what you want; it’s physical enough to affect Sandra-May’s singing.You can’t hold a note during a 700 hit Dynasty Warriors combo.

She endures. Sandra-May continues screeching and twirling, screeching and twirling, generously giving everyone time enough to react. Is this a silly thing? A sex act? The ordinary behavior of a being raised on another world? But no amount of twirling is enough. The audience and judges remain mostly confused and stunned, but as she howls the next high note, Sandra-May gets her final two Xs.

Her act is over… a grotesque violation of our natural laws. Scholars and historians can argue about the best way to describe it, but with both too much and not enough self-awareness, this woman face-tanked a cliche during a double sex doll Star Wars Kid. And as the sound of the buzzers grind her inconclusive spinning to a halt, she froths heavingly at the judges.

She’s been rejected, but Sandra-May pants and waits, pants and waits, for the judges to gather their thoughts. They have no words. How could they? I barely have words, and I’m a writer specifically about madness. After four years of thinking about this, it looks like I typed… “froths heavingly”? That’s no help to anyone. There are no answers here. This is an axe wound in our understanding of things.

Almost with unconscious muscle memory, each judge politely tells Sandra-May her reverse puppet stick fight musical “is a no from me.” As if one can simply stand before the howling visage of the Frenzied Flame and go, “Nah, not today, dawg.”

Britain’s Got Talent cuts away and moves on as if ripping apart the foundation of our reality is a cute thing to squeeze between breakdancers and a one-man-band. But I wasn’t satisfied. I had to know what I was missing. How could a person decide to do this? What gauntlet of casting directors saw presumably less polished versions of this and agreed, “yes, I choose this form for the traveler.” So I found Sandra-May’s YouTube page.

Hidden among her three videos was the prototype for this very act. It is Sandra-May and these exact puppets doing an a capella performance of “Hey There Lonely Boy” in a basement talent show. It’s… I’m not going to say “better,” but she does incorporate more moves than she did on television. Instead of spending the whole song in a double lariat, she sings to the doll, makes it kick, and generally hints at the vague feeling of “human behavior.” At least until the end.

With no judges to buzz her off, Sandra-May gets to do her big finish. It combines ventriloquism with very specifically not ventriloquism. She holds aloft her disco sex doll and says the words, “I LOVE YOU SANDRA-MAY, WHAT!?” It is two sides of a conversation screamed with a single voice, mouth, and sentence. It’s perfect. Then, for some reason, she does it again. And it’s perfect again.

Despite that being aggressively not a conclusion to anything she has done, she whispers, “thank you” and leaves with half her puppets. The video then lingers on six minutes and forty-three seconds (6:43) of silent darkness. It’s what the cowardice of the Britain’s Got Talent judges took from us; a better finale than anyone could have hoped for.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Patrick Herbst, now with telescopic puppet pole! (Orifice not specified.)