My favorite part of Dancing With the Stars last night was watching Tony Dovolani and… Kim was it?… dance to Josh Groban’s live singing. I was getting a bit bored with the show since it was a lot of singing and not a lot of dancing and so was focused on my computer until I peeked up at the screen and saw the lovely lyrical number they were doing — which is why I didn’t get the name of the female dancer; just know she was one of the blondes… Anyway, I just love that kind of dance; it was closest to a Waltz I guess but resembled more of a lyrical contemporary piece with the beautiful ballet costume (light-colored underlying leotard with diaphonous chiffon pieces strewn about for the skirt) and pretty bare feet.
Funny, I’d wanted to do the exact same thing — balletish costume with leotard and chiffon and dance in bare feet — for my first showcase (our music was Take My Breath Away, Jessica Simpson version — so a soft, lyrical rhumba that would easily lend itself to that kind of style), but my then teacher pronounced emphatically, “NO. BARE FEET AND BALLET CLOTHES ARE NOT BALLROOM.” Okay then. Rules and labels and narrow-minded thinking. Love them all; can’t get enough of them. Sorry, not to be cranky, and I did wake up with a bit of a headache today… I know that dance instructors are excited about teaching us the rules that they’ve taken such pains to learn. But I wish they would understand that when you’re a lawyer and you deal all day with Rules, you want to come to your dance studio at night and just bask in the atmosphere of creative freedom that surrounds you there, or that should. I’m a lawyer all day; let me be meeeee in the evening please please…
Anyway, the second contestant to go was, as I expected, Shandi — just because I know people didn’t like her. I actually thought her Jive was quite good. Those Jive kicks are HARD. It’s very difficult to get that bounce, kick, bounce, kick just right, and she did pretty well with them, especially for a beginner. I was also kind of disappointed to see Leeza in the bottom two since I thought she improved so much from the first night. I guess people have their favorites from the get-go. I also think people just love to judge others; couch potatos are probably the best at that. Dancing is frigging hard; I’d love to see the most judgmental of the spectators (I think Sylvia Plath called such people “the peanut-munching crowd”) get off their lazy butts and try.
I became so bored with the results show at one point that I temporarily turned it off and so I missed that dance with Dovolani and his partner – too bad – it sounds like it was the highlight of the evening. There’s no way that Shandi should have been voted off last night because she did improve significantly over the first week and she was so much better than Clyde Drexler, for one (but then, of course, he was a basketball player and has his following plus the fact that many people get a kick out of voting for the worst performer – the American Idol syndrome) As you said, the people just didn’t like Shandi and for whatever reason, they are not especially fond of Leeza either because even the judges recognized how much she had improved over the previous week. This is why it’s hard to stay with the show – it’s so annoying when someone who has danced well is judged by the audience not on their accomplishments on the dance floor but on their personality. However, I will try to hang in there. Laila and Apolo continue to be my favorites (which means no doubt that they will soon be voted off).
I know how you feel, Bob — mine will probably be voted off soon too! Apolo seems like he has a following though…