Used to be, a talent show was something your civic club scraped together to raise a bit of cash so kids could go to camp. Great fun it was, too, because where else would you get to see your city councilman in pantyhose or your dentist doing a tap dance? Even when shows like “Amateur Hour” and “Star Search” popped up on television, the local talent show retained its special soft spot in people’s hearts. Sure, you could follow along as a distant Miss Twinkletoes rose through the ranks to win a trip to New York, but it just didn’t evoke the same feeling as when old Reverend Washburn romanced his antique oboe or little Lucy from around the corner did a comedy routine in a mop wig.

I hadn’t thought about any of this when I took in “America’s Got Talent Live,” which opened last week in Planet Hollywood’s CHI Showroom. I didn’t catch even one episode of the television show last season. I didn’t know who had competed, who had judged, or who had walked away with a million bucks. I went to the show last Wednesday because it was a benefit for Keep Memory Alive and the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. Doctors and researchers are the sort of talent I like to see showing up here in Las Vegas. Maybe there should be a show where they do tricks with scalpels and microscopes—but I digress.

One thing “America’s Got Talent Live!” has that its television predecessor did not is Jerry Springer. Yes, that Jerry Springer. Reeling off overly rehearsed but nonetheless funny one-liners and filler banter, he provided the glue that held this otherwise disconnected slate of performers together. At some point, as I watched the 75-year-old standup comic, the hip-hop violinists, the opera singer, the trampoline basketball players, the nerdy contortionist, and the trashcan percussionists, I started thinking about those old talent shows of yesteryear. If I’d know these people, if they’d been my neighbors, my librarian, my hairdresser… and then somehow I was chatting with the woman in the seat next to me.

She did know these people. She’d been watching them all season long, rooting for the ones she liked and getting to know their personal stories. She’d traveled all the way to Las Vegas from her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania just to see them perform in person.

While it would have been impossible to tell every performer’s story in detail during the live show, each act began with a quick video recap of what happened during the television season. The 75-year-old comic never thought she’d see the day. The opera singer was a cancer survivor. The million-dollar winner was a chicken farmer from Kentucky. It all plucked a heartstring or two, but what I was feeling was nothing like what my acquaintance in the seat next to me was experiencing. For her, the performers were as close and dear as neighbors in a small town. For her, this was an old-time talent show, where friends and family strut their stuff and make you weep with pride and joy.

I can’t say I was utterly unmoved by the show and its performers. There is something sweetly appealing about people who have talent but who don’t yet have stage experience. Timing is a little off, voices a bit uneven. Plain old nervousness pops through every once in a while. None of this is true of Jerry Springer, of course, and even though he isn’t supposed to be the main draw of the show, it was a story he told that actually made me forgive the production for all its imperfections.

“I have lived the American dream,” he said. He went on to relate how his parents escaped the Holocaust and went to England. When Springer was 5 years old, the family boarded the Queen Mary and headed across the Atlantic to New York. On a cold January morning in 1949, he recalled, everyone on the ship gathered on an upper deck to watch as the Statue of Liberty came into view. “There was total silence,” he said, and he asked his mother what it meant.

All she said was, “Ein tag alles.”

One day, everything.

Well, one day definitely came for Springer, whose American dream blossomed even more splendidly than his parents could have hoped. He put it this way at another point during the evening: “I may not be very good looking, but I’m really rich.”

Proceeds from last Wednesday’s performance were donated in full to Keep Memory Alive to benefit the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. For me, that’s what ties Wednesday’s show even more closely to real people. Two of my closest relatives have suffered from brain disease, which, as anyone familiar with these sorts of afflictions knows all too well, means my whole family has been stricken. To have an organization here in Las Vegas dedicated to finding a cure for illnesses like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s is another kind of American dream.

As I applauded Kevin Skinner, this year’s million-dollar winner from Paducah, Kentucky, I was genuinely happy that a chicken farmer had found recognition for his talent. I also thought it was great that the woman sitting next to me had gotten to see Barbara Padilla, the opera singer she’d fallen in love with while watching “America’s Got Talent” on television back home in Pittsburgh. How can you not like these triumph-over-adversity stories that the newly interactive capabilities of television plus the Internet have made so personal? Thanks to technology, the small-town talent show has been translated successfully to a global stage. Television gave us the capability of seeing people far away. Add in the Internet, and we’ve got “communivision”—not only can we see, we can connect. Whether we’re phoning, chatting, posting, texting, or tweeting, it’s all two-way now. Paducah and Pittsburgh are only as far away as Facebook.

Which of course means Las Vegas—more than ever—is ubiquitous, too. As I watch “that crazy building” take shape downtown, I’m hoping the world is noticing that “Sin City” is now host to a world-class facility for brain research. Frank Gehry’s split personality work of art may not be the Statue of Liberty, but I’ve seen it strike people silent.

“What is that thing?” they ask when they regain their power of speech.

The next time that question comes my way, I’ll be tempted to say, “Ein tag alles.”

Special thanks to Julie Ansell of Cashman Photo.