By Shelley Budd
I was sipping my morning coffee about this time, a year ago, mindlessly surfing the cable channels on a visit home to the suburban GTA, and suddenly a small boy-child caught my attention. He appeared to be madly in love and singing directly to each young face in the crowd, a swarm of tweens. Will Farrell was playing Will Arnett in some celebrity tennis match, and this was the performance to fill their break. I looked down at my dog, who was alert and facing the TV. She also appeared to be puzzled about his existence, as he hyped his hands in the air to the excruciatingly sparkling love of his throng. This school-boy had bush-league confidence and his veritable purity stopped us in our tracks – it was almost haunting. How was I supposed to feel about this young kid, was he really naïve? Being punished back stage for minor imperfections? Made to dance like a monkey by money-hungry parents? An alien invader poised for attack on the future child-bearers of our nation? Or was he just a really talented kid who created his vision of the future, modeled in the style of his idol, Usher; in other words, was he just a mature, self-made man-child-boy?

Today, he’s Justin Bieber. It didn’t take me long once Bieber Fever set in to recognize the freakishly self-assured eyes smack in the middle of a prepubescent face. I wonder now if that tennis match was set up wholly as a vehicle to introduce Bieber to the world? He’s become so huge that the water-bottle incident was bound to happen. Millions of fans, hot in demand discs and sold-out arena concerts – somebody throws a water bottle at his head. We weren’t surprised. There’s a perverse hilarity to it, say our friends at MTV, and you can tell by the number of hits that most would agree. But is the water bottle an indicator of a volatile future awaiting the soon-to-be puberty-ridden Bieber? How will the world react if he happens upon a phase, as most adolescents do, when the way becomes a little less clear and calls for pause?

His popularity adds up to a lot of money; we the public have witnessed young stars climb to fame then crash to trash all too often – it’s the classic Young Super-Star parable. You can’t give a kid everything before he’s learnt anything. I get the feeling whoever threw the bottle just acted on an unthinking urge, then Bieber survives, but with a quivering joke, and an expression of his pain through the word “OW.” The person immediately felt his or her tail lodge between his or her legs in realizing – the boy is real! He’s a real boy! And he handled it well? The answer to whether Bieber really is a young, self-made man, or just another ill-informed, blind grappler at fame and fortune will fall like a marble out of a blanket, somewhere down the line. Do we hear a stark, dark thud on the hardwood? There’s his soul, dropped and lost, taking it’s short roll over to the ventilation pipes, pinging against corners here and there on it’s way down, then gone – forever.