FLAAAAVAAAA FLAAAAAV!

Just before seven on Friday night, the crowd, eagerly anticipating the VCU’s Got Talent Show at the Stuart C. Siegel Center, was brimming with enthusiasm.

While it was nowhere near a full house, the crowd was excited and noisy enough about Flavor Flav and the upcoming acts to make up for the empty seats.

Promptly at seven, the MC came out to warm up the crowd. He announced that Flavor Flav would be out in just a few minutes. Time was killed with area code shout outs and a break dancing competition featuring a few brave members of the audience.

Flavor Flav came out at 7:20 p.m. And to answer your questions, he is everything that he appears to be on “Flavor of Love.”

He came running onstage in a plush mink coat, chains that hung low and of course, a shower clock hanging from his neck. He thanked everyone for their support over the years and gave props to VCU’s basketball team for being No. 30 in the nation.

Flav also reminisced with the audience about his days on VH1’s “The Surreal Life 3: Strange Love” with “that crazy lady Brigitte Nielson.” At this last part, Flavor Flav ended his monologue with, what seemed to be a disastrous bit of paralyzing laughter during which he fell to the floor and began rolling around.

With that, the talent show began.

The show included a variety of acts, mostly featuring students from VCU. There was everything from people singing country and rapping to freestyle poetry and dance.

The panels of five judges included co-anchor at NBC 12, Aaron Gilchrist; Dean of Student Affairs, Rueben Rodriguez, and 92.1’s DJ Lonnie B.

They were asked for their comments after the performances and were not afraid to be opinionated. The scores were on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest.

An audience favorite was freshman music major Jessica Millete, who composed the song “Fallen Star.” Jessica scored very well with the panel of judges, and earned five’s all across the board.

“I think the girl that wrote her own music and played the guitar was really good,” said senior Adam Uddin.

Other highlights of the night were the voice of Melissa Hetzler and the dance group Full Effect and Dance Vision Team.

The dance group came all the way from North Carolina and was the best dance group of the evening. Their moves were almost perfectly synchronized, and their beats made their mix flow very well.

First, Hetzler dazzled the crowd with a rousing rendition of a Whitney Houston song. A student of the School of Pharmacy, Hetzler, 21, was announced the winner later that night.

Hetzler said she has been singing in front of large groups of people for a long time, so she wasn’t nervous.

While the crowd was enthusiastic and interactive with Flav at the beginning of the show, after a half-hour intermission that was supposed to last only ten minutes, they all began to heavily disperse.

The show began to lag and the audience was quickly showing signs of boredom. The judges stopped giving comments to the artists after their performances.

Flav made up for this by talking to the audience for inappropriate lengths of time, given that for the most part even the most enthusiastic members of the audience had stopped responding to him.

Most of the crowd left by 10 p.m., and the rest seemed to just be hanging around to take pictures of Flav after the show.

One must stop to think that if only Flavor Flav’s clock would have been set, the evening would have started and ended on time.