The schedule was pretty tight around here Monday evening. I had dinner earlier than usual, watched a bit of the news, did the dishes and then got into a very nice bath for a very nice soak. Then I got into my night attire and made a pot of mint tea – I love tea on cold evenings – and settled down on the couch. The lights went down, the orchestra warmed up, and Dancing with the Stars began. It was story night, no less. Each pair had to use its dance to tell a story. Story night, I thought: it took only those two words,
story night, to make the gayest show on television exponentially more gay, something I hadn't believed possible.
It wasn’t too long, though, before it went straight, as in straight down hill, or straight to hell.
But first, the good parts. The football player and the basketball player get sexier each week, and Monday was no exception. “You’re so charming,” one of the judges said to the quarterback, and I could not have chosen a better word myself. Imagine me, finding a football player charming. It happened. The Situation – his name? his handle? I don’t know – is hot as well, but in a different way. Endearingly earnest, I suppose. And “Bristol the Pistol,” well, I like her actually. She is just really not into it, and she knows she’s really not into it, and she says so, as do the judges. You’re in no danger of becoming the next Meryl Streep, one of them said. Her dance partner, who is luscious, cannot stop kissing her, which makes me think that headlines are in the making.
The first offender was Florence Henderson, who – in what appeared to my cynical eyes to be a ploy for sympathy votes – got all weepy talking about how much The Sound of Music, from which her song was taken, meant to her and how much it reminded her, weep weep, of … her … dead … husband. “I’m sure he’s very proud of me,” she said before her dance, the tears glimmering in her eyes like, well, like stars. “I’m sure he was watching you,” one of the judges syruped after her dance. Being manipulatively maudlin is one of the worst offenses I know of, and on Monday Florence Henderson offended with the best of them.
Margaret Cho was equally tasteless, but in a different way. Her story, in case anyone missed the symbolism of her rainbow-themed costume, including a feathery headdress, was all about pride, and coming out as who you are. After slip-shodding her way through Copacabana she faced the judges indignantly, telling one of them, who told her that her dance sucked, more or less, that the whole point of her performance was standing up to those who criticize you. I could just hear the go-alongs chanting, you go, girl! It got worse. Backstage, Margaret Cho got her two cents in just before the numbers to text in a vote in her support were announced. These are scary times for the gay community, she proclaimed. The kids are committing suicide and we must all stand together against bullying! Bullshit. Here’s my first problem: Margaret Cho, as far as I’m concerned, does not speak for “the gay community” (I don’t think anyone does, in all fairness). Here’s my second problem: regurgitating the talking points about youngsters killing themselves because they cannot stand up to the ages-old issue of bullying just before viewers of the most-watched television show in the U.S. are about to vote – or not – on whether you should stay or go is really, really cheap. It turns being gay into a circus act, I think, and, in the process, turns gay people and our “supporters” into caricatures of circus animals. No, thank you. And here’s my third and final problem: Margaret Cho is a shitty dancer. When even I can identify missteps, you know it’s bad.
Margaret Cho and Florence Henderson, however, paled in comparison on the meter of poor taste to the woman who used her performance to cash in on our hardcore romance with the military. Though I should have seen this coming, I was shocked and horrified by the dancing portrayal of a soldier who emerges out of the smoke machine’s fog (back from battle? from death?) to embrace his gal, who is sitting beside a table with a framed photograph of him in uniform on it. Backstage, right before receiving the judge’s scores and right before the voting on her performance via text and telephone began, the woman (I do not know her name), grabbed the opportunity to say, in a voice as authentic as margarine, that she’d like to dedicate the evening’s dance to all the men and women in the armed services. (Automated salutes are apparently as mandatory in Hollywood as they are on the network news: The woman who won the best director award for The Hurt Locker did the same thing). She just won the damn show, I thought, but I must admit that her dancing is actually pretty good.
