Dancing with the Stars, Please Call My Agent (aka Me)

I love the new crop of dancing TV shows: So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing with the Stars. I obviously wouldn't qualify based on age, training or street dancing ability to be on So You Think You Can Dance, but I think I could fit right in on Dancing with the Stars.

If only I had a legitimate claim to fame... can you imagine the narrator announcing me? "And now, you may know her as former Editor in Chief of Software Development magazine, it's latin jazz singer-songwriter and blogger Alexa Weber Morales, dancing with Maksim Chmerkovskiy!" My husband enjoys watching Maksim, a Russian dance champ who is so light on his feet, he puts the other leaders to shame. Performing before a national TV audience would be incredibly daunting and stressful, but the dance training would be so much fun.

I have always wanted to be a dancer. Little girls, don't let your body type deter you from dancing! Well, that's one of my excuses, and the other is that I simply didn't believe that one could be good at many things--be a triple threat, so to speak--and I had no idea what discipline was involved in studying any sort of art. Writing came quite naturally, as did singing, and I was blessed with extensive training in both areas. But I coulda been a contender! How am I going to star on Broadway without those fancy feet? I fear if I don't get my act together I am going to fail to instill this discipline in my children, too.

Anyway, I left the TV on for the next show, although I practiced music a bit during commercial breaks. Finally, I just watched 10 minutes of The Bachelor, and what a soul-sucking production that is! It's only a shade better than Age of Love, which I actually endured for several entire episodes last season. The premise of that one was that women in their 20s were competing against women in their 40s for the "love" of a man in his 30s. My husband couldn't believe I was watching it. "Can't you see how offensive it is to those women? How degrading!" In that sense, I was rather pleased that he was more feminist than I. Then he figured it out. "You're rooting for the 40-year-olds, aren't you?"

To wrap this post up with a neat concluding paragraph: "Reality" dating shows where women compete for a man are gross. Most reality competition shows are gross. Dancing with the Stars is not gross because it involves great costumes, hard work, choreography that makes a lay dancer look like a pro, great live music played by an impressive orchestra, exercise, a witty host (Tom Bergeron is great), a hilariously loquacious Italian judge, and good old fashioned showmanship. Maksim Chmerkovskiy is hot and my husband agrees (that he's a good dancer). If the producers of Dancing with the Stars are expanding their definition of "star" to include former editors of 100,000 controlled qualified circulation trade magazines, I eagerly await their call.