The drive to the airport should have been the exciting part. For Carrie Underwood, it was the moment the whole thing almost stopped.
Today Carrie is a country star and an “American Idol” judge. Back then she was a farm girl from Checotah, Oklahoma, who had never been on a plane. She grew up on a small cattle farm there. Her mom, Carole, was an elementary school teacher, and her dad, Stephen, worked in a paper mill.
Carrie was a mass communications student at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and she hoped to work in TV news. The summer before her senior year, she saw a news story about “American Idol” auditions. The closest ones were in St. Louis.
She asked her mom how far away St. Louis was.
“Six or seven hours in the car,” she said.
And then her mom said, “I’ll take you.”
That road trip led to a ticket to Hollywood. Carrie told the rest of the story years later in her own words, in an essay for Guideposts magazine. She admitted her mind was all over the place.
“I was so distracted that when Mom and Dad were driving me to the airport to go to Hollywood, I realized I’d forgotten lip liner. We stopped at a grocery store, and Mom dashed inside to buy some. All at once, it was just too much.”
Sitting in the back seat while her mom was in the store, Carrie burst into tears. Everything she’d been holding in came out at once.
Her dad saw it. And he did what a lot of dads would want to do. He offered her a way home.
“My dad turned to me in the backseat. ‘Carrie,’ he said, ‘we can go home right now, and we don’t ever have to talk about it again.'”
He wasn’t pushing her either way. If she wanted to quit, nobody would ever bring it up.
Carrie sat with that for a moment.
“I took a deep breath. ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll go.'”
So she went, and the trip had a few more bumps. She flew alone, made a couple of connections and missed one when a flight ran late. She ended up calling the show’s contact person begging, “Please don’t kick me off the show!” She told Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show,” all about that first flight, and it’s the one leg of this journey you can hear straight from her.
Carrie tells Stephen Colbert about her very first plane ride
She made it to Los Angeles in one piece. Then Ryan Seacrest, the longtime host of “American Idol,” asked if she’d seen any stars yet.
The farm girl took the question at face value. As she wrote in Guideposts: “No, it’s been too cloudy,” I said, not getting that he meant famous actors and singers.
She went on to win Season 4 of “American Idol” in 2005.
And now she’s back where it started. Carrie is returning as a judge for Season 25, which airs in 2027 and is moving production to Georgia. Some of the hopefuls who walk in next season will be just as scared as she was in that back seat outside the grocery store.