Feb. 02--America got a couple brief glimpses of an Indianapolis native Thursday night as she made it through to Hollywood during the St. Louis audition episode of "American Idol."
Alisha Bernhardt wasn't a featured contestant, but she did make an impression thanks to a bit of branding. The Indianapolis Public Schools officer wore her badge and police t-shirt in hopes of setting herself apart.
"My chief and everybody at work call me the singing cop, so we'll see," Bernhardt said to Fox 59 when we first ran into her during St. Louis auditions alongside 10,000 other hopefuls.
It took a lot of waiting, but she finally made her way inside to sing for producers. Her strategy paid off.
"I'm really excited!" Bernhardt said, after getting through the first round of auditions. "I tried last year and I didn't make it, but the cop card worked this time."
The 'cop card' worked again a few weeks later, as executive producers in St. Louis eliminated even more contestants.
On her third trip to St. Louis, she finally had the chance she'd been trying to dream about.
"Tomorrow, during the day I'm going to be standing in front of Steven Tyler," Bernhardt said. "That doesn't happen every day, so yeah I didn't sleep."
For months Alisha has had to keep quiet about what happened in front of the judges, but now she can say the experience was even better than she'd hoped.
"I was nervous going into it, but once I got there on the American Idol stage and stood on my 'X' and I looked up and I saw the judges sitting there my nerves weren't focused on who was in front of me," Bernhardt said. "It could have been anybody sitting in front of me."
Before she sang, Alisha gave the judges a little reminder of her background.
"I gave them a little sticker badge and Steven put his on," Bernhardt said. "It was kind of cool."
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