Last month, during the height of the "Will Crystal Bowersox quit 'American Idol'?!?" hysteria, I wrote a piece about how it didn't surprise me one bit that she was thinking of bailing on the show, because she reminded me of something like a dozen girls I had worked with at a hippie-dippy smoothie bar in Altamonte Springs, Florida, and inevitably, when the burden of responsibility got to be too great for them, they would quit the place.
Needless to say, it was one the best things I've ever done here. Of course, not all of Bowersox's fans felt that way, calling me "an over-generalizing hippie hater" for writing the thing. Ultimately, the ruckus the piece caused was largely inconsequential, as Bowsox decided to stay on "Idol," finishing second to Lee DeWyze (something I did manage to call, BTW).
But that didn't mean that I wasn't still curious about Crystal's pre-"Idol" life. After all, we knew all about DeWyze's time spent working in a paint store, and we learned that Casey James was in a motorcycle accident, but show producers never told us anything about how the dreadlocked dynamo spent her time before appearing on the show. We knew she had a kid, but that was about it.
So when I finally got the chance to interview her, I made it a priority to ask Bowersox what she did before becoming famous? Did she actually work in a smoothie bar? (Sadly, no.) Did she spent a summer following Phish? (Surprisingly, no.) Did she peddle ice cream to unsuspecting kids and shovel horse crap to make ends meet? (Yes and yes!) It turns out she did a whole lot before gracing the "Idol" stage … and here, in her own words, is a brief tour through her (rather extensive) employment history. Because, really, there's no way to fit half of this stuff on a printed resume.