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PureDWTS Season 30: Court is Taking a “Hopefully Temporary” Break

Hey all 🙂 By now, I’m sure you’ve all seen that I didn’t do power rankings for week 2.  Part of that was due to me currently being in the busiest, most chaotic portion of my professional life thus far; part of that was because I simply could not motivate myself to write them last week.  Every time I had a spare moment and set out to write them, I either felt like I had nothing to say, or found myself coming across unnecessarily cranky and not particularly insightful. I think it was around 2018 (when the show started transitioning to a fall-only format) that Heidi, Vogue, and I came to the realization that quality should really be taking precedence over quantity when it came to posting at Pure; wherein the early days, we got by mainly on volume (posting literally any tidbit of news about DWTS, no matter how trivial or out-of-left-field), by the time 2018 rolled around, there were oodles of other sites and social media accounts that had sprung up that were also dealing in the sheer volume of DWTS news that had the time and resources to do it that we, as part-timers with 9-5 jobs, simply could not keep up with. We were okay with that; I think by that point, we were burnt out on the mad dash to post spoilers, analyze cryptic tweets, and scrutinize arm birthmarks in Instagram posts; we wanted to post insightful content that our loyal readers would enjoy.

Then 2020 rolled around, and with all-around pandemic fatigue came a slew of changes to the show that left it…less enjoyable to watch. And then add another year of pandemic fatigue, a slew of changes in my personal and professional life, and I am simply tapped out right now. My therapist likes to pose the question “Do you think you have the bandwidth for this?” or “Is the bandwidth you are sacrificing for this worth it?” whenever I complain about being stressed; and when I ask myself those questions about blogging the show…the answer right now is unfortunately “no”. And when previous passions start to feel like a chore, I am self aware enough to know that it’s time to take a step back. So for now, I think I’m just going to stick to live tweeting the show – you can play along with me @SeeCourtTweets on Twitter – because it’s a lot easier for me to plunk out quick thoughts these days than write analytical, well-though-out paragraphs about each couples.  Perhaps when work calms down, and there aren’t 5 bajillion couples to write about, I’ll resume the power rankings; until then, thank you to all my faithful readers over the years, and I hope to be back to you soon 🙂

Love,

Court

October 4, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 30, Week 1 – Power Rankings

Yes, these are a bit late – and a bit different, because with my interest in the show becoming more and more casual, I’m having to find ways to keep fresh my desire to write.  And with fifteen couples to write about, let’s just say the power rankings can be a bit daunting, until we drop down to a more reasonable 12ish couples. Seriously, DWTS: fifteen couples is about 3 too many.  I am older now, and my brain not quite as sharp to remember all of them at the end of the night 😉

So in watching the premiere, it became evident about midway through that we may have a repeat of season 24 on our hands: a season where nearly all of the women have more technical skill, but the men are far more entertaining to watch. That season proved that you can be the ringiest ringer in all the land (hello, Heather Morris), but if your male pro doesn’t know how to showcase your talent, and you aren’t having fun…a dude (or more than one dude) with zero formal dance experience is going to last longer in this competition than you are. Will be interesting to see if the male pros pick up on it this time around – it’s been 4.5 years since that season, and some of them have done some growing up; others…not so much.

So this time around, rather than going in circles with myself to rank the couples (when there are 15, and some are clustered together with equal levels of skill, making it hard to really rank them until we see more dances and voting results), I decided to group them by what expectations I had of them headed into the show, and how they met them: did I have high, low, or no expectations of them? And did they do better, worse, or about as well as I expected? I also picked my bottom 2/headed home picks at the bottom.  Might stick with this format for a few weeks while we whittle down to a more manageable number of couples, might do a traditional ranking next week.  Who knows…the world is my oyster. 🙂 Read more..

September 22, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 30 Pro Roster Revealed

First of all, please forgive me – like Heidi, I am having a very, VERY hard time getting excited about anything DWTS-related right now…especially in light of some of the names I’m hearing in the mix as rumors…zzzzz…

Anywho, ET announced the 15 pros that would be returning this season:

Brandon Armstrong

Lindsay Arnold

Alan Bersten

Sharna Burgess

Cheryl Burke

Witney Carson

Artem Chigvintsev

Val Chmerkovskiy

Sasha Farber

Jenna Johnson

Daniella Karagach

Pasha Pashkov

Gleb Savchenko

Emma Slater

Britt Stewart

 

Noticeably absent pros from last season’s roster? Peta, whose anti-vaxxer status likely disqualified her, as ABC/Disney is mandating vaccines for most employees; and Keo, who probably had the misfortune of being too tall for this season’s crop of male-partnered female celebs…at least I hope that’s the reason…

…back after a one-season absence are Lindsay & Witney, with bebes in tow; I think they likely owe their return to Peta’s refusal to get vaccinated and JoJo’s same-sex partnership opening up an additional slot for a female pro this season. Absent those circumstances, I tend to think TPTB would have just kept the same roster as last season for the sake of ease, as both Witney & Lindsay reside permanently in Utah and had to temporarily relocate back to LA to do the show this season.

Thoughts? I don’t have a ton, other than Sharna possibly being paired with JoJo for the simple reason that she strikes me as being one of the more open-minded pros that would embrace such a challenge. Like the situation with Chaz Bono 10 years ago (a season that Chelsie curiously sat out), I think TPTB would quietly avoid saddling one of the LDS girls with a potential conflict of interest; Cheryl would probably be open to it, but last I heard she was struggling with severe tendonitis and I get the impression that JoJo is going to be an energetic and talented partner that could go far. If anyone other than Brandon or Pasha gets Sunisa, I’m going to be irked, because by my count they’re the only two who haven’t gotten an Olympian yet AND they aren’t lazy and likely to phone this season in on lame choreo (looking at YOU, Gleb).

What do you guys think?

September 2, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

DWTS Juniors Pros Elliana Walmsley & Sage Rosen Spill “Tea” on the Show; Court Reacts

So a reader shot me a Twitter DM this morning, containing the link to a YouTube video and asking “Is all this true?” I thought it would be a casting rumor for the upcoming season, given the timing; you can imagine my surprise when I saw that it was a “tea spilling” video from two of the child pros from DWTS Juniors – the one-and-done season they did 3 whole years ago. I watched it; most of what was said wasn’t entirely new or groundbreaking (and I think we already spilled a lot of this same “tea” here 3 years ago), but I thought I’d go ahead and do a reaction post…hell, there ain’t much else going on right now. With the ‘rona still a-ragin’, it might be good for my psyche to flash back to a simpler time!

First thoughts: whoa. THAT’S little Elliana? She looks very…grown up. Or maybe teenagers just looked different when I was her age? We Millennials all went through an awkward teen phase where our makeup was terrible…Elliana’s generation seems to have skipped the white eyeliner, glitter face gel, and metallic lipstick phase…probably thanks to YouTube and beauty influencers. Sage looks the same…maybe a little more mature in the face.

Sooo…they’re “scared” of getting in trouble with the DWTS producers? Then why are you making this video, guys? For what its worth, I doubt the DWTS Juniors producers care…the show got cancelled, and I think many of them from that time period have either gotten canned or have moved onto other ventures by now. But when in doubt – don’t do anything that might sabotage future work opportunities, kids.

First “tea” they spill: the kids apparently “couldn’t talk to or see each other”, and were prevented from interacting with with other couples/pros when they weren’t filming group dances or intros. This was one of the few things they said that was news to me. And it may sound harsh (especially to kids, who are chatterboxes), but DWTSJ is not the first show I’ve heard of that has had this policy. I know the queens on Rupaul’s Drag Race are forbidden from talking to each other when the cameras aren’t rolling, because production wants to be able to catch any and all interactions to potentially use them on the show later. In the case of these kids, I honestly think it was just done to try (in vain) to prevent leaks – the less the kids are allowed to interact, the less they know, and the less they’re able to potentially leak to friends, the internet, etc. In the end, I think it was all for naught, because those kids were posting potentially spoiler-y pix on social media left and right, and lord knows I had zero issues getting spoilers from people who were in the audience at the tapings. NDA who? Don’t know her…

Second spot of tea: some of the parents were “kinda crazy”, or, as Sage put it “low-key psycho”. Ableist terminology notwithstanding, this was not really news to me – I had heard a few anecdotes about some of them being pushy stage parents, which isn’t really all that surprising when you take into account that many of them are acting as their kids’ de facto managers. I don’t know who specifically they are referring to when they talk about a mom “blowing up” on set and being “escorted out”, but my money’s on either Bristol Palin (Tripp’s mom) or “Mama June” Shannon (Alana’s mom). The former allegedly signed her kid up for the show without telling him, and he only found out on the day of his first rehearsal when Bristol dropped him off at the studio (I recall being told it was an awkward, tearful, and understandably tantrum-filled first meeting); the latter just struck me as a bit twitchy around that time, and I remember some lightly veiled threat she made to Artem & Tristan about “treating Alana appropriately” or something like that during their first meeting. I also recall June being arrested and then entering rehab for an ongoing drug problem a year or so after Juniors, so that could explain any potentially unhinged behavior she might have displayed on set.

Tea #3: Sage technically wasn’t allowed to be on the show. Can confirm – the age cutoff for the initial auditions in Jan/Feb of 2018 was 13, and Sage was already 14 at that point. That’s why I think a lot of readers were like “Who the heck is Sage Rosen?” when we first leaked the list of junior proshe wasn’t even one of the faces we saw at the auditions, because his age automatically disqualified him. However, I was told that once they got around to casting the actual kid celebs, it became obvious that they would clearly need someone a bit older for Kenzie – so Sage got the call, along with Jake Monreal, who I think had the advantage of being Jenna’s partner on SYTYCD two summers prior. Could also be “there just weren’t enough decent boy dancers”, like Elliana mentioned; if the only boys cast in the second audition went to the troupe, she must be referring to Cody Bingham and Sebastian Jozuka, who I think were both on the younger side and probably not ready for the responsibility of being pros.

Tea(ish?) numero quattro: the kids had to wear these super heavy mics they had to wear that were strapped on them like a waist trainer. Don’t recall hearing anything about those, probably because it’s what I’d consider a rather mundane detail that our readers wouldn’t be particularly interested in knowing.  But given how much attention the crew was paying to child labor laws, I’m a bit surprised they had the kids lugging around heavy, restrictive mic sets with the potential to burn them. Sage also talks about feeling like he couldn’t really say much because he was mic’d at all times – this could explain why I feel like he barely said 100 words all season long.

Spot of tea #5: Someone fell off the stage. I vaguely remember something along those lines being mentioned to me – but I think my source glossed over it as just a funny blooper where nobody got seriously hurt so it wasn’t really even worth mentioning. I will say that I always found that star-shaped stage to be an accident waiting to happen…I’ve been through enough OSHA audits to know that they really frown upon raised platforms without guardrails, let alone ones in awkward shapes. It being JT or Artyon sounds plausible – I recall hearing them described as two of the younger, more boisterous and spirited of the kid pros, and they had a LOT of energy.

Tea #6: They taped two shows per week.  Yep – we knew this. With the exception of the first week (when they only taped one episode), the couples would have Monday-Wednesday to learn and rehearse two dances, camera blocking would happen on Thursday, taping of one week’s show on Friday, taping of the subsequent week’s show on Saturday, and by law, all the kids had to have Sunday off. I think there was one week where they had to camera block AND tape an episode on a Thursday, and then the next one on Friday, because Kenzie had some commitment on Saturday of that week. They basically shot a full 9-week season in one month – the breakneck taping speed owing to the fact that they needed to wrap everything up before the kids had to head back to school in late August.

Tea #7: There were some partner changes. No news here – I remember being told originally that Makeila Lawrence was going to be a junior pro, then told about a week later that no, she had gotten moved to the troupe, because she was too tall for not only her partner, but the rest of the male junior celebs as well. What’s funny to me is that the crew seemed to not understand the fundamental difference in growth spurts between adolescent boys and girls – the girls have theirs a couple years before the boys do, so it’s not really all that unusual to have girls that tower over boys the same age. I feel like Miles was always supposed to be with Rylee, though, despite the height difference – or maybe I’m just projecting, since I predicted them as a partnership a full year before they even started casting Juniors 😉

Tea #8: Kids would cry in the skybox if they got bad scores. Um, duh. There were a lot of tears.  Probably because they were kids that hadn’t yet learned to manage their emotions in the same fashion as adults. Really shocking tea you’re dropping on us, guys 😉 But for what it’s worth – some those kids handled defeat far better than some of the adults we’ve had on DWTS.  I recall Akash being particularly gracious and mature when he got eliminated.

Final tea: The voting remotes were janky.  Again, nothing we didn’t already suspect – I had heard stories about them altogether not working and crew members hastily distributing pencil and paper to the audience, and suspicions that they probably weren’t working all that well for the remainder of the season. In the end, I doubt it mattered much – I remember people in the audience at the finale saying it was clear that Sky & JT were the favorites to win, and the fact that there was no cash prize means the show didn’t really have to worry so much about “voting integrity” like they do on the adult version.

Final thoughts? I’m guessing Sage needed content for his channel, and they didn’t have anything else going on – hence the room-temperature tea from a show that ended 3 years ago. It’s a little annoying to me that they seemed to paint the experience in a somewhat negative light, given that a lot of those kids seemed to be having the time of their life up there and I think it was probably the first big gig as a dancer that some of them booked; but hindsight is 20/20, so in retrospect, maybe they’re seeing the cracks. Oh well.

August 7, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

Tom Bergeron to Return For Season 30 of Dancing with the Stars??? Mysterious Instagram Post Hints At the Possibility

This cryptic Instagram post from earlier today seems to indicate it’s not out of the realm of possibility…

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Tom Bergeron (@tombergeron)

I’m not aware of any other recently-vacated gigs that Tom might be referring to, so I have to assume he’s referring to DWTS. If so, I could see him making season 30 a helluva lot more bearable.  But I have to wonder: does this mean Tyra’s out…? Or that he has to *cringe* cohost WITH her? The former is preferable to the latter, but the latter is preferable to no Tom at all…so I’m excited at this development.  Thoughts???

April 19, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 28’s Mary Wilson Passes Away Suddenly

Sorry to report that we’re going to need yet another commemorative star on the dance floor next season – season 28 contestant Mary Wilson has passed away, per People:

Mary Wilson, a founding member of The Supremes, has died. She was 76.

On Monday evening, Wilson — who made up the first arrangement of The Supremes alongside Diana Ross and Florence Ballard — died at her home in Las Vegas, her publicist Jay Schwartz confirmed to multiple outlets.

Wilson’s cause of death was not immediately clear but Schwartz added in a statement to CNN that she “passed away suddenly.”

According to Schwartz, funeral services for Wilson will be private due to restrictions and protocols amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but there will be a public memorial later this year.

I still maintain that Mary had a lot more to show us on her season, and that the judges messed up big time when they opted to save Ray Lewis and send Mary home first. Her “Baby Love” foxtrot was darling:

And she and Brandon seemed to really have a nice bond, which showed in her dances (even when she maybe didn’t exactly remember her choreo):

Rest in power, Mary.  You left us far too soon 🙁

February 9, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 7’s Cloris Leachman Passes Away at 94

So today we lost another former contestant – season 7’s boisterous, sassy senior, Cloris Leachman. Per ABC News:

“It’s been my privilege to work with Cloris Leachman, one of the most fearless actresses of our time,” her longtime manager, Juliet Green, said in a statement. “There was no one like Cloris. With a single look she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh ’till the tears ran down your face. You never knew what Cloris was going to say or do and that unpredictable quality was part of her unparalleled magic.”

“She loved her children and her grandchildren ferociously. A lifelong vegetarian, she was a passionate advocate for animal rights,” Green added. “The family requests that any donations in her name be made to PETA or Last Chance for Animals.”

Green said Leachman died of natural causes in Encinitas, California.

To my knowledge, at 82 years old, she was the oldest contestant we ever had, and one of the funniest – I’ll never forget her hiking her leg up on the judges’ table during a critique to try and make eyes at Len 🙂 I wish I could find a video of her in the season 7 hip-hop group dance, which treated us to Cloris with gold chains and a grill, mean-muggin’ in the background with Corky as the rest of the cast danced, but these dances will have to do – god, I had forgotten how entertaining she was, even when she wasn’t really sure of her choreography:

Godspeed, Cloris. If there’s a season 30, I had better see her name in a commemorative star on the dance floor next to Florence & Valerie’s 🙂 Kinda sad that Corky’s only 2 former partners on the show have died…we’ve now lost #TeamFlorky and #TeamClorky 🙁

January 27, 2021 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 29, Week 10 – Power Rankings

I apologize for the atrocious lateness of these rankings – while I’ve been working remote at my 9-5 since mid-March, I actually had to go into my office this week for what’s called an “action workout”; for those not familiar with lean production practices, it’s basically utilizing employees as a sort of think tank to solve in-house problems. The problem being addressed: how we’re going to free up 25K sq feet of space for a new production line in our roughly 75K sq foot building. The upside? I am now going to be working remote permanently, owing to the fact that they need to annex quite a bit of office space on site 😉 The downside? A week’s worth of long, contentious discussions, me pretending to know how to work in CAD, countless Powerpoint presentations, and one very sh*tty cardboard and styrofoam 3D model 😛 But it was totally worth it for the knowledge that I won’t have a morning commute, I won’t have to get all dressed up every morning, I will have a lot more flexibility in my schedule, and when I scream into the void in frustration, nobody will complain (except maybe the dog and the cat) 🙂 Has anyone else’s employer had a peculiar change of heart about remote work since the pandemic hit? A colleague asked my boss back in January (before anyone was really taking COVID seriously) if she could work a few days per week from home, and he said (with a straight face) “No, we need you here, it’s impossible for your job to be done remotely!!!” Fast forward to March 16, when we all got pulled into a conference room and were told that any of us that had the means to do so should start working from home immediately due to COVID, but we should be cleared to return to the office by June; June comes and goes, and in July we’re told that we won’t be coming back to the office before October (at the earliest).  Then 2 weeks ago, suddenly the discussion turned to “So, how would you feel about working from home permanently? You’re cool with it? AWESOME! When can you come clean out your desk??? The subcontractors will be here Monday to start planning out the remodel!” Amazing how it took a pandemic to make my very old-fashioned employer see that working remote can be beneficial to both employer and employee. Read more..

November 21, 2020 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 29, Week 9 – Power Rankings

Soooo…I can’t be the only one who went “Whoomp…there it is!” when they heard about Gleb’s divorce over the weekend 😛 It would not shock me to see Chrishell & Gleb getting papped together at some point in the near future, and I’m wondering if that’s part of the reason the show kept them around so long this season – perhaps the fleeting hope that they might get the chance to go public with a showmance? Who knows. Gleb’s divorce clearly wasn’t the biggest news this weekend, but I got a chuckle nonetheless 😉

So the face-offs went about like they have every other season: each face-off seemed to have one couple that went for technique while the other went for performance. And like most other seasons, the judges seemed to reward their points to the couple that needed them more (with the exception of whichever couple they were trying to oust – in this case, Nelly & Daniella). Also found it interesting that they seemed to make the celeb’s face-off costumes to match their first dances – not sure if this was done as a cost-saving measure or a time-saving one (or both), but I don’t know that we’ve seen anything like that before. Just curious.

In a move I don’t think most of us saw coming quite this soon, we lost AJ and Cheryl – a couple that many of us had predicted would win this season in our preseason poll. I think they were unfortunately just a sacrificial lamb – Nelly seemed to be the intended target for elimination this week, but when it became clear that he wasn’t going anywhere (and dancers that belong in the finale were falling into the bottom 2), the judges had to pivot; AJ just happened to have a bad day at the office when his Viennese waltz went off the rails, so I think he was the only logical choice. I’ll admit that I found myself a skosh disappointed with AJ this season – maybe my expectations were too high, maybe he just didn’t get the right choreo, maybe he got screwed with song and dance assignments, who knows. But I guess I just thought he would be someone who easily bested Nick Carter’s often-erratic performances, and instead I think he ended up only slightly better than Nick when you netted out all of his dances. Read more..

November 11, 2020 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.

PureDWTS Season 29, Week 8 – Power Rankings

Generally, it was a pretty “meh” week. I don’t feel like anyone had any huge breakthroughs or astounding performances, and everyone was more or less in a holding pattern from the previous week. Or all the days are running together due to the pandemic, and the sense of impending doom I’m getting from the election is just dulling my senses. Both are equally plausible at this point.

As it usually happens at least once per season, Carrie Ann appointed herself the “critical” judge this week, and seemed to nitpick just about everyone, and Kaitlyn doubly. I feel like she pulls this shit right after she gets called out for giving generally dumb or just unhelpful feedback – in this case, it was her “I wasn’t feeling it” comment in response to Kaitlyn’s paso doble last week, which prompted both Artem and Val to speak up in the media about her lack of helpful feedback. It’s like she gets defensive to the point of having to prove that she’s a serious, tough dance judge with credentials, and ends up just looking petty because of the way she just reeeeeaches for stuff to pick at. It’s a not a good look, but it’s not like we haven’t know for YEARS that Carrie Ann was the least legitimate of the judges. And it did seem like Derek was trying to soften the blow after Carrie Ann went on her rampages – more often than not, he gave reassuring compliments, and was scoring a point or two higher than both Bruno & Carrie Ann. Caught a weird moment immediately after the bottom 2 were called – Derek and Bruno seemed to be gesturing towards one another as if to say “Well what do you think?” before glancing over at Carrie Ann, who seemed engrossed in a bunch of papers she was writing on and ignored them completely. WTF was she doing, filing a tax return??? The scores had long since been logged, not sure what was so important that she felt she needed to write it down before the elim…

Now with Chrishell gone, I don’t think there’s any truly crummy dancers left – which leaves us in an interesting position. One could probably argue that Nelly’s the weakest, but he’s still improving and he also appears to be quite popular, as he has yet to fall into the bottom two despite some harsh scores. On the flip side, both Johnny and Skai have been trending upward with scores in recent weeks, but both have been in the bottom 2 at least once. Then you’ve got Kaitlyn and AJ, who are good but seem to vacillate in a bit in terms of quality; and there’s Justina & Nev, who are consistent but not always super memorable to watch. Add to the mix the fact that we still don’t know how many couples are headed to the finale (I think five is a good number, as it’s the top 1/3 of contestants this season, but who knows), and I can’t really state with confidence who will be there and who won’t. I’d say this made me excited, but anymore, I’m struggling to feel passionate about this show – I’m afraid a lot of the magic died for me with Tom’s departure. Add Tyrant trying to fake cry about Jeannie for attention and I’m damn near changing the channel…ugh.

So we obviously bid farewell to Jeannie – which sucks, because she really was one of the most fun contestants to watch this season, and I loved how she vibed with Brandon.  But I’ve come to learn that one’s health is nothing to trifle with, so I’m glad she caught her ailment at such a crucial point and will likely make a full recovery. If I’m being honest, I had already predicted her as one half of the double elim in last week’s rankings, so I can’t say I’m terribly surprised…although the cause of her elimination is something I definitely wouldn’t have predicted. At the very least, Brandon made it further this season than he ever has before. Then we (finally) shook the dead weight of Chrishell & Gleb loose, which I felt was long overdue. The fact that Gleb had the audacity to pull out the damn bed as a prop FOR A VIENNESE WALTZ had my blood boiling, as did the fact that he once again managed to include the minimum possible number of steps needed to be considered a Viennese waltz and somehow got he and his partner another tongue bath for it. Then there was the suspicious convenience of Carrie Ann NOT calling them out for a lift (after specifically nitpicking Kaitlyn for something similar earlier in the night), and I was downright incredulous by the end of their critique and scoring. Seriously, I wanted to smack all three judges (Derek included) for their gushing.  Why did Chrishell get diplomatic immunity for most of the season??? That’s the real question.  And I think I finally figured out what it was about Chrishell that grated on my nerves: she’s a perpetual victim. I think the only week she didn’t play that card was 80s week, when her package dealt with her being an NKOTB fan. The rest of the time it was “I grew up poor!”, “I got divorced!”, “I had to freeze my eggs!”, “I’m sooooo busy as a real estate agent!” I think of all the other contestants this season, and while everyone had a week or two that was sad, for the most part, their packages all netted out to be generally pretty upbeat and positive. Chrishell’s seemed to be a laundry list of trauma and ways in which her life is hard. I don’t claim to know exactly how her divorce went down, or whose fault it was (as a kid of divorce, I’ve found its usually both spouses’ fault, to some degree), but after seeing her on this season of DWTS, I do think she’s a bit of a bullshit artist and is likely fibbing a bit when she gives the “I was completely blindsided!” line with regards to her divorce. And Gleb…well, y’all know how I feel about him. Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly broken up about it when the judges opted to save Skai & Alan over Chrishell & Gleb 😉 Read more..

November 4, 2020 I Written By

Ultrasound sales specialist by day, semi-knowledgeable DWTS fan by night...with a smattering of hair & makeup enthusiast, occasional model, baker, and crazy cat lady peppered in to make things REALLY interesting ;-) I might pee my pants in happiness if Donnie Wahlberg ever does DWTS - or if they ever use "Sunglasses at Night" as a paso doble.