Encounter with Tom Bergeron, Conrad Green, and More at Dancing with the Stars Live Las Vegas

I’m sure that Princess Heidi, Vogue, and Courtney have been wondering and waiting for me to finally get around to posting about the Dancing with the Stars Live Las Vegas event. I apologize for the delay. Needless to say that it was a night to remember.

I think I’ll save comments on the show itself for another post and just include some of the pre and post party entertainment in this post. Although, it’s worth mentioning that Dancing with the Stars Live Las Vegas was incredibly well designed and wonderfully executed. I actually plan to go and see it again. I hope the show does really well and gets extended for a really long run. Las Vegas needs a ballroom show. So, go and buy some tickets for DWTS Live Las Vegas. Looks like it’s already been extended through July 7th.

Now, to the pre-show festivities. I showed up quite early to the Tropicana to meet my friend for dinner. We chose to eat at the delicious Bacio inside of the Tropicana. We ate at a table that was basically out in the main hallway. Turns out that it was the perfect table. As we sat their eating our dinner we saw almost every star and DWTS pro pass by. If I was in full paparazzi mode I’d have pulled out the video camera and gotten some footage. Although, I just felt creepy doing that. Sorry guys. It’s just not me. I would recommend you doing the same if you go to the show. I bet you’ll see many pass by before the show since the hotel tower is down that hall and I’m sure many of the stars and pros are staying in the tower.

After enjoying the dinner and Dancing with the Stars gazing, I headed over to the pre-party for the show. Yep, there was a pre-party cocktail hour and then a post-party at the club in the Tropicana. I wasn’t sure who would be at the pre-party, but it turns out a bunch of the DWTS pros that were attending the premiere stopped by.

Probably the most popular person at the pre-party was Tom Bergeron. When I saw him, I knew I had to get a picture with him to make Princess Heidi jealous. In fact, I think I told him as much. Tom seemed to respond fine to the idea of him being her boyfriend.

If you take a look at the photo, many of you might not recognize the man in the middle (I’m the one on the left and Tom is on the right of course). At first I wasn’t sure who he was either, but after talking for a minute with Tom and him I correctly guessed him as Conrad Green, executive producer of Dancing with the Stars. He was shocked when I asked him if he was Conrad Green saying something like I surely didn’t recognize his face. I’ll admit that I was pretty lucky since I’m usually terrible with names.

The great part of meeting Tom and Conrad was that I mentioned Pure DWTS and they both knew about the site. It sounded like Tom had seen our work on Twitter before and Conrad seemed to know the site really well. In fact, he mentioned that the thing he loved most about Pure DWTS is that we were real fans of the show as opposed to other media outlets that are just trying to file a story.

Conrad also paid Pure DWTS a great compliment when he told me that he was always amazed at how good Pure DWTS was at predicting the partners for the upcoming season of DWTS. He then kind of hypothesized out loud that it kind of made sense that we could do it so well since we go through a similar process to what they do in matching partners. Of course, we all already knew that this is basically what they were doing when they paired up the couples. If I was quicker on my feet I would have suggested that Pure DWTS could help him with the pairings if he wanted.

I also asked Conrad about having A-list stars on Dancing with the Stars. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a full answer, because just as I asked him and Tom started heading into the show. Although, he did reply that Dancing with the Stars won’t ever really get A-list Stars. I’m sure there was more to his answer before he went into the show. Based on the way he said it, I assume he also felt like DWTS didn’t necessarily need A-list stars on the show. Sure, they’d love to have them, but he was realistic in his understanding that most true A-list celebrities won’t be going on DWTS. I think Conrad is right about not necessarily needing A-list stars. 20 million viewers seem to agree. In fact, there’s something cool about DWTS helping us to see another side of some stars and to get to know stars we’d normally never have learned about otherwise.

Another highlight meeting of my DWTS Las Vegas pre-party event was meeting Elena Grinenko (DWTS Pro) and Rib Hillis (Extreme Makeover Home Edition).

Most of you will recognize Elena and Rib from their recently launched Dance Junkies TV videos which we’ve posted before. Sadly for me Stuart Brazell wasn’t there also, but Elena and Rib were very nice and hopefully we can work together with them on stuff in the future.

I have a video of Rib interviewing Tony Dovolani at the pre-party event too that I’ll post with the next writeup. Although, I think their video turned out better.

I’m not really sure what I should mention about the post-party event. I should have cracked my way into the ABC/DWTS section of the club to talk with more of the pros, Stars, Tom and Conrad, but I didn’t. Needless to say, everyone was having a good time and there was quite a bit of dancing happening all around.

One thing that was interesting was the number of people from So You Think You Can Dance that were there at the event as well. It makes sense because something like 6 of the DWTS pros and DWTS Troupe in the show were on So You Think You Can Dance. Plus, that same day was the first taping of the SYTYCD Las Vegas auditions. I’ll be doing a full write up on SYTYCD over on Pure SYTYCD. Not to mention, Twitch, Comfort and Allison dancing at the DWTS Live after party.

There was obviously a lot of intermingling and friendship between the dancers from DWTS and SYTYCD. Jason Gilkison who choreographed DWTS Live Las Vegas was there and from what I saw mostly hung out with SYTYCD which made sense because he’s a choreographer on SYTYCD. As Nigel Lythgoe has said before, these kids need work. I’m glad that SYTYCD and DWTS aren’t super territorial about it all.

Ok, that’s enough for now. I’ll continue my write up of Dancing with the Stars Live Las Vegas in my next post. Plus, in it I’ll post the video I took of Tom Bergeron dancing on stage. Well, at least the part of it I got before they stopped me.