Many of you know Jeremy Gossett, the young man who's been the announcer for the Pride of Oklahoma for the past five years. (Due to scheduling conflicts, he wasn't at homecoming this year - that was our old friend John McCormick stepping back in, but Jeremy did the others, including the Centennial halftime in 2004.) He also produced and directed the 58-minute film Legacies and Friends: the 2005 Pride of Oklahoma that was announced here last August and available on video. It was also shown this past weekend at the Trail Dance Film Festival in Duncan.

If you follow the Fox television series American Idol, you may also have seen reports about the "Oklahoma Five" - five OU students who traveled to the San Antonio auditions for the show last August (about the same time Legacies and Friends was being shown!) and who all made it to final auditions in front of judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and Randy Jackson. Due to agreements with Fox and 19 (the producers of Idol), they're not allowed to say how those auditions went until the show with that day's auditions.

[Update: Fox has now, for reasons known only to Fox, moved the San Antonio audition show to Tuesday, February 6, at 7PM CST ("Auditions No. 7: San Antonio"). The show on as I update this (Wed 31 Jan, 8 PM CST) has auditions from Los Angeles. Dang!]

And you're probably already ahead of me - the link in this article takes you to a Duncan Banner newspaper article pointing out that our Jeremy Gossett is the brother of recent OU vocal music education alumnus Laura Gossett, who is one of Idol's "Oklahoma Five!"

So if you're watching Idol on Wednesday night, there are five OU music students to root for: Heather Appel, Grant Fisher, Tony Foster, Michael Preston, and Laura Gossett. My news spies are good, but I can't tell you if any of the other four are or were in The Pride (cross-overs at OU between vocal and instrumental performance are reasonably common), but I still thought this was a fun family connection worth sharing! Yay Gossetts!