Tamika's Bio page 3 - Tamika on TV!       Tyler sailed through a local audition in December of 2004 and headed for Austin, Texas, the following January for the semi-finals. Her solo performances of "Lift You Up" and the Patty Loveless heart wrencher "You Don't Even Know Who I Am" landed her a spot on the show. Tyler was one of ten finalists chosen from a field of more than 8,000 hopefuls.       When production began in March of 2005, Tyler quickly established herself as a frontrunner among the talented field with dynamite renditions of "You Don't Even Know Who I Am" and Jo Dee Messina's "I'm Alright." After bringing the house down on the third episode with Martina McBride's barnburning "God Fearin' Women," judge Anastasia Brown exclaimed "I am lovin' me some Tamika!" Phil Vassar dubbed her performance "stupid good."       During the fourth week of the show, however, potholes started to appear on Tyler's road to Nashville stardom. Many of the finalists were stricken with strep throat, including Tyler, who had a particularly severe case. In fact, just before her performance on the fourth episode, the nurse who took her temperature (103 degrees plus) said she probably wouldn't be able to go on.       "When she told me that it was like a switch clicked in me," Tyler recalls. "I sat right up and said 'I bloody well am going on' and I did, although I can't remember anything about my performance that night."       She got through Bonnie Raitt's "Something to Talk About" in fine style, delivering a truly heroic performance that belied her fever and medication-induced near delirium. The Realities of "Reality TV"       As it turned out, though, strep throat wasn't Tyler's biggest challenge that week. The politics of "reality" TV had a bigger brickbat in store for her.       "When contestants started to get eliminated, it got pretty emotional for the cast members," Tyler says. "So to help everyone deal with the stress, another contestant and I called a prayer meeting with just the finalists - no cameras, no crew, just us - just to help take some pressure off."       The previous day, the cast had assembled in the common room at their hotel to shoot their usual "behind-the-scenes" footage. At some point, one of the producers asked the two youngest finalists if they thought the older contestants had less respect for them because of their relative lack of experience.       "It was very provocative," Tyler remembers, "and really unfair because we all had a lot of respect for each others' talent and accomplishments."       Still, the very idea made one of the young contestants hot under the collar for a few minutes, and when the show aired that week, some of her angry comments were intercut with footage of Tyler talking about the prayer meeting she had called.       It was never made clear that there were two meetings or that they were entirely unrelated to each other. As a result, many viewers got the mistaken impression that Tyler had called a meeting specifically to tell the younger contestants that they didn't belong there.       Tyler says, "I started getting e-mail right away from people calling me a 'prima donna' and a 'nasty diva' and all kinds of stuff. It was very painful to have my character attacked, and I never got a chance to set the record straight." Next Page: Looking Forward   1 2 3 4