‘Dancing With the Stars’: Kristi Yamaguchi gets a perfect 60
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
It seemed as if tonight the judges, perhaps feeling a bit bad about some of their past nitpicking of Kristi Yamaguchi and her partner Mark, decided that nary an even mildly derogatory insinuation should pass their lips, nor a chastising furrow darken their brows. Yes, fans, tonight was Kristi’s night, even though the live audience seemed to want it to be Jason Taylor’s night.
The first dance tonight was a group dance or, as our hosts portentously put it, “a cha-cha face-off.” Each couple drew a number from a hat last week, and this determined what order they would dance in, with each couple’s routine leading into the next’s. In rehearsals, we see Jason acknowledging that he needs to show he can do a Latin dance, but we also see him complaining that being 6’6” and doing the cha-cha don’t mix. He says the same thing later about the freestyle. Oh, Jason, do they let you get away with that whining in the Dolphins locker room? Maybe that explains last season’s record. We also see the entire group in rehearsal, where Jason and Edyta and Cristián de la Fuente and Cheryl perform their entire routines, but Kristi and Mark only perform 30 seconds of theirs. Did this represent sneakiness on their part, or simply procrastination?
During the actual cha-cha face-off, Cristián and Cheryl lead off, and Cristián is wearing magenta satin pajamas. They perform a nifty leap and slide at the beginning, and Cristián drags Cheryl across the floor at the end, but I thought it looked somewhat stiff. But not as stiff as Jason, who just couldn’t quite nail the cha-cha, despite Edyta’s best efforts to distract us by being spray-tanned to the point of poisoning and by wearing one of the more preposterous outfits of the season. Kristi and Mark’s routine gets off to a raucous start when Kristi plants a kiss right on judge Bruno’s lips at the beginning, and it keeps moving from there. At the end of the routine, all three of the finalists dance in a row, and Jason and Cristián lift Kristi, which was rather cute, I thought.
The judges love the face-off. Judge Len compliments Cristián’s hip action but pities Jason since this wasn’t the foxtrot. He says Kristi has technique, hips and rhythm -– “the complete package.” Bruno also thought the dance was exciting, and he praises Cristián for “banging like the best.” He applauds Jason’s “presence,” by which he must have meant “size,” and tells Kristi she was in a class of her own. Judge Carrie Ann thinks Cristián’s movements were a little “clipped” and that Jason still has an “awkward arm,” but Kristi “won hands down.” In terms of scores, these thoughts translated into a 26/30 for Cristián and Cheryl, a 24/30 for Jason and Edyta and a 30/30 for Kristi and Mark. The face-off was performed to Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” so it was appropriate that a woman beat the men.
Next up is the freestyle round, and first up are Kristi and Mark. In rehearsals, Julianne drops in to show Kristi how not to be afraid to toss Mark into a back flip and to leap into lifts herself. The key, Julianne says, is to “spread your legs and point your toes.” In the performance, Mark and Kristi wander sleepily onto the stage in pajamas, which they promptly rip off to reveal outfits of sequined pinstripes. Kristi is actually wearing pants; really, that must have been a relief. Also, she’s wearing sneakers. They bust out into a routine with lots of lifts, lots of hip-hop action and what a fellow viewer described as an extended “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” sequence. The back flip goes off without a hitch, by which I mean a spinal injury. Bruno calls it an “inspiring fusion of mambo and hip-hop” and applauds their synchronicity. Carrie Ann calls it a crowd pleaser. And Len, somewhat surprisingly, likes it as well, saying it held his attention. That’s another 30/30 for Kristi and Mark, giving them a 60/60 for the night.
You just know Jason and Edyta are going to go all-out on the lifts in the freestyle, and they do not disappoint. During rehearsals, Edyta takes quite a few spills, and Jason’s cute kids and sultry wife stop by to cheer/coax/shame him on. While the routine has a troubling striptease element to it, the performance is quite fun. I can’t tell you what the song was, but it had Miami in it, and I liked it. The lifts are spectacular, and Jason shows an ability to inject some hip action that would have served him well in the Latin dances. Better late than never, I suppose. And the judges? Enthusiastic. Len says you could just picture them down at South Beach, Jason in a Speedo and Len in his thong. What? Score: 27/30, totaling 51/60 for the night. Co-host Samantha Harris tries to interview each of them and gives them so little time to speak before interrupting that it’s rather baffling as to why she even bothered. All they could have said in the time she gave them was “Yes.” Co-host Tom Bergeron refers to this as “interview in haiku.”
Finally, Cristián and Cheryl are up, and it becomese clear in rehearsals that this is where having only one arm really starts to get inconvenient (since, you know, it’s totally no biggie in the rest of your life). They perform a heavily Latin-influenced freestyle with lots of butt-shaking, shoulder-shimmying and some lifts that are impressive due to the one-armed-ness of them, but it isn’t quite at the level of the other two, and the judges’ comments reflect this. Score: 26/30, for a total of 52/60.
Tuesday night, on the two-hour results show, we’ll see Usher sing and dance, and after one couple is eliminated, the other two will get one more set of judges’ scores. And then we’ll find out who gets to take home that mirrored-ball trophy. Any predictions, fans?
-- Sarah Rogers