Last week we bid a fond farewell to another couple — Leeza Gibbons and Tony Dovolani, or rather Team Gibbolani. You'll never meet a classier, more upbeat person than Leeza. She has one of the kindest souls of anyone I've ever met. And Tony — what can you say about Tony? Fun, driven, passionate and a bit of a jokester. Two wonderful people who we're definitely going to miss at Dancing with the Stars.Another week, another dance — this week we have the samba. The samba is a get-up-off-your-feet and "shake what your mama gave you" kind of dance. It's another Latin dance and one of my favorites. It encourages you to let your hair down and really feel the music. Ian loves the fast dances, and this dance is fast. He has the perfect personality for the rhythm of the music, and I believe the audience is going to love what they see. Our music is pretty awesome this week, too. I can't tell you what it is because we like to keep that top-secret until the show, but it's a real cr...
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If you thought head judge Len Goodman's tongue-lashing of the celebrity dancers tonight was scripted, think again. When he told them that they weren't rehearsing long or hard enough, it was his own opinion, something that had been building up in his mind since the performances last week. And it came from a place of genuine disappointment and frustration. "I just had a bad feeling," said Goodman right after the show. "So I looked at the DVD of last season, the fourth week. And then I looked at the DVD of this group three weeks in. And there was no comparison. There was no Emmitt Smith. There was no Joey Lawrence. No Mario Lopez. And I couldn't [figure] out why — because these people all hav
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It's a shame the cameras weren't rolling: During one commercial break for Tuesday night's Dancing with the Stars, Billy Ray Cyrus bounded up into the bleachers to sing to a lovely, gray-haired lady from Scotland who has a thing for the "Achy Breaky" star. Branded "most improved dancer" by judge Carrie Ann Inaba, it's as though Cyrus has finally dropped the shackles of his "two left feet" mentality and is ready to cut loose.
He's not the only one. What the television audience doesn't get to see is that members of the studio audience are asked — before the show and during commercial breaks — to get up and shake their groove thing. Doesn't matter if you're 18 or 88, any kind of movement goes. And with the sound system blasting bass-hea
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I can’t go so far as to say it was an all-out theme night, but about half of last night’s celebrities got inspiration for their dances from movies. First Edyta took John Ratzenberger to a Valentino movie to get inspired for the tango. This seemed to work in terms of him getting into character for the dance. I was impressed with his facial expressions and intensity, but I think that was the strongest part of his dance. The judges pointed out that he needs to make some technical improvements, and it did seem like Edyta was working extra hard making big movements around him. He deservedly got one of the lowest scores of the evening.Movie inspiration proved far more successful for one of the top scorers of the night (there was a four-way tie), Joey Fatone. While I wasn’t crazy about the Stars Wars theme music (I found it and the lights a bit distracting), I have to acknowledge that it was a really good tango. The fact that Joey is so into Star Wars gave his performance ex...
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It was a night of such passion and enthusiasm at this Monday's Dancing with the Stars that women were losing their jewels. In the audience, a woman named Becky from Fillmore, California, was clapping so hard that her $30,000 diamond solitaire flew out of its setting — a scary moment until another audience member retrieved the precious stone.
On the dance floor, fiery pro Eydta Sliwinska felt jewelry coming loose, too. As she snapped her head sharply back and forth doing the tango with John Ratzenberger, the fake diamonds adorning the back of her bun became more like dangling earrings, flying around her head as they separated from her hair.
Tango, it seems, can make everything — and everyone — bust loose, bringing out th
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