They are coming of age in a youth culture that thinks of public creativity, from an inventive Snapchat montage to a YouTube clip of a bedroom musical performance, as a primary expression of identity.
A previous winner in 1980 for "Coal Miner's Daughter", she has gathered a slew of awards for "In the Bedroom", a comeback performance widely regarded as the year's best.
To tease them out, however, the development of Clea is crucial, and though Ms. Gordon runs her mouth and works her curves like a champ — and ingeniously redirects our sympathies during a climactic bedroom confrontation — the performance is almost too brittle: words bounce off her without making a dent.
The video was filmed in one day in March 2007 at Hume-Fogg High School; the drama room was transformed to simulate a bedroom for the performance scenes.
Kum, aka Mr. Smiles, emerged from the bedroom for a goodbye performance, playing a couple of North Korean classics, "Looking at You" and then "Forever My Friend," on his trumpet.
When she raves about the French chef Jean Troisgros, who gave tutorials to well-heeled foodies at a Napa retreat, she also applauds his performance in the bedroom.
Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom.
On Friday, as we reached the halfway point in series seven, both Mark and Jez were struggling with trouser-led dilemmas: Jez lusting hopelessly after the dense but beautiful Zahra, and Mark, although now loved-up with Dobby, worrying about his performance in the bedroom.
After three years of panic attacks and agoraphobia, often spending months as a prisoner in his bedroom, an end-of-term performance in which he was cast as an English scientist called Mr Springate in a play called Ben-Ur (short for Benot Urban by the Canadian writer Jean Barbeau) marked the first step to recovery.
