Victor’s Pick: Fantasia Barrino

When Fantasia Barrino’s dream came true, it wasn’t a prince bringing back her lost glass slipper.

Her shoe broke.

That’s because, as the title of her book and new TV movie suggests, “Life is Not a Fairy Tale.” You can see it at 9 p.m. Saturday on Lifetime.

Barrino won the third season of “American Idol” despite the odds and her notion that people wouldn’t see her as a role model.

“When you hear the word ‘idol,’ people think that you have to be a certain way. You have to be a perfect person. Your slate has to be clean,” Barrino said last month at the TV Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, Calif. “And when I went, I was the only one that had dropped out of school, that I had a child at a young age, and you know, I wasn’t the perfect person that they thought that the idol should be.”

Barrino had it rough and told her story in a New York Times best-selling book that inspired the movie.

“I would tell my mom, ‘Mama, I’m not going to win this. They won’t give me a chance. They won’t see that I’m trying to better myself,’” Barrino said, recalling her now famous performance of the classic “Summertime.” “I (wanted) them to see that in spite of all of that, I still am somebody.”

Victor Balta

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