'Idol'-izing Super Sherman

"Pore" Sherman never in a million years thought his auditioning for "American Idol" would snowball into this. He truly just wanted to honor the commitment he made to his lady friend, Melissa Miller, who passed away two days before the audition from cancer at the young age of just 54. They met in a local production of South Pacific in Encino, California, "I slid up along side her one day, she was looking really cute and I just gave her one of these throaty, wolfy growls and she smiled at me and we started going from there." They had been together twenty years.

With tears in his eyes Sherman relayed the story of how they hatched the plan for him to audition for "American Idol." After being diagnosed, Melissa was given three to five months to live, "She and I had this Lance Armstrong philosophy. We were going to outdo it. We were very optimistic and I thought the best way to keep the optimism going was to keep on singing the love songs that I had sang to her on the way home from work everyday. Every night on the way home I would be coming down the hallway of that hospital singing to her and trying to carry some of that brightness to her."

One night they were watching "American Idol." "She has been telling me for years to do something with the singing. She has been prodding me and encouraging me. Finally, when she got into the hospital I thought we need something positive so I am going to do something that all along I have been promising to do. So, she and I read this article in the paper about "American Idol" was going to audition in August and that was three weeks away so she and I cooked up this plan for this audition."

After standing in line for six hours he finally got up to the front of the line. "When I got up there, they were ready for me and they said 'Hey for you this one time, one time only - our limit is 28 but we are going to let you try it.'"

Melissa, whose father Marvin Miller was a famous voiceover artist who narrated Disney's "Sleeping Beauty," passed away just a few days before Sherman was to audition in front of Simon, Randy, Paula and Olivia Newton- John, "She passed away around 11:00 on Friday morning and for the next day and a half I was sitting around the apartment dumping several buckets of tears. I don't know what I was looking for but I was looking up in our bookcases and all of a sudden I spotted some cards that she and I had exchanged over the years. Each time I would pull a card out there was another thing she had written to me that to me was a message from her and she said 'Stop your crying, get off your tail and go out and do what you promised.' So, on Sunday morning I was there. I knew she was in the room with me. I was sure of it."

Needless to say at this point in the interview, with Billy, most everyone on our stage and in the control room was in tears. Things got weepier when Sherman sang us the same song he did on Idol and broke down half way through. This guys got a huge heart and I'd pick hanging out talking to Sherman any day over interviewing a spoiled celebrity. My favorite moment was when I asked him what he did for work. He told me right now he fixes furnaces and does electrical work but said that back in the seventies and eighties he designed the machine that made the mold for seamless bras, "If you are wearing a seamless bra, I probably had my hand in it."

A sweet man with a big heart and a great sense of humor to boot! The ladies will surely be lined up around the corner should he be ready to date again. Billy definitely was thinking what I was when he asked if Sherman would be able to love again, "Yeah, I can love but there is always going to be a big place for her. Always. Yeah, but I think it's because she wants me to because that's the kind of person she was."