Ruben Chamorro/Cosmopolitan.comSometimes, “A Moment Like This” is all it takes to change your life. For Kelly Clarkson, that moment came after comment from a mysterious stranger. And as Kelly tells Cosmopolitan.com, that one comment is why she’s a chart-topping artist today.
When Kelly was 13, she sang solo for the first time, performing Mariah Carey’s “Vision of Love,” and it went pretty well. “Literally, the amount of applause that happened at the end, I was like, ‘Well, this is cool!'” she remembers. “It was first time I kinda felt confident.”
Then, Kelly recalls, “This old man comes up to me, I mean, probably in his 80s. [And] literally says, ‘That was so amazing, you’re gonna do this for the rest of your life!'”
“I kinda was just taken aback ’cause I’d never received any kind of compliment like that in my life at that point,” she continues. “I don’t even think I said thank you.”
“He…walked away, and then I was asking everyone whose grandpa that was,” she continues. “No one knew him.” But what he said put Kelly on the path to stardom.
“From that moment, that’s all I focused on was singing. Whether it was getting a scholarship for college…or trying out for Idol, all of it was from that one, singular moment.”
“To this day I have no idea who he was,” she swears. “No one knew who he was. It might be borderline creepy, ’cause, like, what was an old man doing there? Or like, was he real?”
But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What he told her did the trick.
“We all have these moments in our lives that are so pivotal and seem so mundane in the moment but are such a big thing — that really was that fork in that road that sent you a completely different path.”
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