Where A Kid Can Be A Kid

A Facebook friend recently posted a Youtube link to a group of kids singing Stevie Nicks' "Landslide." Sure, it's a good song, but my friend said she was moved to tears. Tears. Did they overcome some great hardship? Did they have some kind of spectacular talent? I later saw the video posted elsewhere. This had to be good to be such an Internet sensation. I mean, these kids' videos had been viewed 9 million times. Someone was going to do a funny dance, or Mentos were going to explode from somewhere, right?

So I watched it. Well, these kids aren't winning any singing competitions. And they are cute, but not like anything in Gap ad. It's just a group of kids, sitting there, singing. So what has made the students in Staten Island's PS 22 kids choir an overnight viral sensation, earning famous fans like Ashton Kutcher, Stevie Nicks, Tori Amos and Nancy Pelosi (above) along the way? They are doing something even more rare for a kid these days: They are just being kids.

All over the media and even in real life, kids are often seen with their cell phones, their Strokes hair, their sarcasm -- which many like to euphemize as precociousness. And then we wonder how kids graduate to teendom complete with the cynicism, eye rolls, and indifference of the protagonists of NYC Prep.

But in these videos (below) the kids are unabashedly revealing something we don't often see from kids on TV and in the movies: emotion. How many reality shows these days would dare depict its young subjects clutching their fists to their hearts, closing their eyes and singing Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" like they really, well, believe? What's more, these kids really seem to be enjoying themselves -- all without a hint of irony.

Photo courtesy of SpeakerPelosi on Flickr.