Dear Paula: What Did You Do With Corey and When Did You Do It? Still Wondering. Your Pal, Barry

(Special Commentary by Barry Garron)

We’re deep into a new season of “American Idol” and something isn’t right. I know I should be fixated on the finalists. I know I should be focused on who will be the next victim of the digital Russian roulette ritual performed with cell phones and computers.

At the same time, I know what you really want to read is detailed analysis about whether Chris or Sanjaya deserved the ignominy of garnering the smallest vote total instead of poor Stephanie. But I can’t bring myself to write about that. Not while my mind continually drifts to thoughts of Paula Abdul.

I see her everywhere. She beams at me from the cover of “TV Guide.” She smiles confidently in the face of cameras from “Extra” and “Access Hollywood.”  She seems to be everywhere at once and my torment grows greater.

That’s because no one ever asks her the most important question, the one that cries out for an answer. No, they ask what she puts in her Coke cup. They ask if she has secret feelings for Simon. They ask why her speech is slurred and why she bobs and weaves on TV interviews. To my way of thinking, none of that matters.

Now here’s what I would ask. I’d ask what she was talking about all of that time with Corey Clark. Remember Clark? He was a finalist on “American Idol” in 2003. A couple of years later, he told some incredible stories about how Paula gave him advice on how to game the system, how she bought him a cell phone, paid for his clothes, coached him on what song to sing, spent intimate moments with him and called him incessantly.

“Primetime Live” on ABC investigated the claims. Some of Clark’s evidence seemed pretty thin but he did have the cell phone bills with dozens of lengthy calls with Paula.

Now I’m not suggesting that Paula compromised the integrity of the show and that Fox played viewers for chumps by acting like this was no big deal. And I’m not suggesting that the FCC dropped the ball by not looking into whether “American Idol” was rigged. After all, Fox hired a big law firm that conducted dozens of interviews over more than three months and concluded that nothing could be proven. At least, I think that’s what the law firm concluded. Fox never released the report, only Fox’s own summary.

But if I’m sure of one thing in this life it is that Fox would never twist the truth merely to protect its biggest hit show. So if Fox says their lawyers found no hanky-panky, I believe it. Corey Clark can describe all of Paula’s beauty marks in all those intimate places from now until doomsday. I’m still going with the lawyers and Fox.

But then there are those phone records. If Paula wasn’t telling him what to wear or what to sing and if she wasn’t making all those dates that Clark said they had and that the Hollywood Hills security guard said he witnessed, what do you suppose they were talking about?

It could have been an op/ed piece in the L.A. Times on how hard it is to achieve peace in the Middle East. Or it might have been about whether inflationary pressure will force the Federal Reserve to take action. Or maybe they just exchanged recipes for strudel.

But, unless someone finally asks during one of those thousands of interviews with Paula, we’ll never know. And I’ll keep wondering when I really should be concentrating on Gwen Stefani being a guest judge.