IN HIS FIRST performance on season 19 of America’s Got Talent, Richard Goodall was shaking. The 55-year-old middle school janitor from Terre Haute, Ind., pushed his glasses up from his perspiring face. “Whew,” he said.
“Are you a bit nervous?” Simon Cowell, one of the judges, asked.
“This has been a long time coming,” Goodall replied. He patted his chest and took a deep breath.
My husband, Michael, sitting beside me on the couch, was nearly in tears, and Goodall hadn’t even started to sing. Our children got us hooked on AGT a few years ago with viral YouTube clips of singers, dancers, and magicians wowing the world. We love the context, the variety of performers, and the back stories. And Goodall’s back story is a good one. He sang as a child, he sang alone in his bedroom with his Radio Shack stereo, and he sang while cleaning schools for more than two decades.
Standing in front of a live audience in Pasadena, Calif., he patted his chest again to steel his nerves. After a few more deep breaths, Goodall belted out the first lines, “Just a small-town girl / livin’ in a lonely world.” His rendition of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” shook the room. Howie Mandel referenced Goodall’s job as a janitor and said, “You just cleaned up!” Heidi Klum smacked her manicured hand on the “Golden Buzzer,” instantly qualifying him for the finals, while host Terry Crews blinked back tears. As golden confetti rained upon him, Goodall held his chest and cried while telling the crowd he had never flown in an airplane before coming out for this performance.
“I’m not a fancy person,” Goodall said in the moments before his performance. “I take out the trash, I wipe off the tables, I sweep the floors. I’m just having fun and I’m trying to make people happy,” he smiled, revealing missing teeth. His remarks reminded me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s often-quoted address to the graduating class of Barratt Junior High School in South Philadelphia in 1967:
“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
Watching this show reinvigorates my sense that all work, when done well, can become a work of art and that our neighbors may have hidden talents just waiting to be revealed.
Spoiler alert: Goodall won season 19. But Michael and I don’t watch AGT to see who wins. We just love watching people shine. From contortionists to dancers to the Jerusalem Youth Choir showing how Israelis and Palestinians can sing together in harmony — for a few brief moments on that stage, we see our nation as a place of excellence, courage, and inspiration. I know this all is leaning toward being corny, but we need sweetness, we need humility, we need people who do their best, no matter the job, and who “don’t stop believing.” Pass the Kleenex.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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