Cat's dress manages to be tacky and awful without being funny. It's just a black dress with some unfortunate cutouts. I'm not sure what would be wrong with her wearing a black dress WITHOUT unfortunate cutouts, but I can guarantee you that she never even considered that. In fact, maybe this started out as a normal dress, and then she took the scissors to it herself, because God forbid she should ever wear an outfit that's lacking some little touch of whimsy.

I'm punk rock, bitches.

I really can't bash Cat's dress too hard tonight, though, because Mary is wearing the single ugliest outfit I have ever seen on this show. It's a leopard-print bustier, under a black jacket, and then it has bizarro bright-orange long sleeves poking out of the blazer - are those sleeves attached to the bustier, or to the jacket, or are they just their very own garment? Are they on one of those strings inside her jacket, like you give to little kids to clip their mittens onto so they don't lose them? Then, as if all of that weren't enough, there is fringe on her orange sleeves, and don't even get me started on the necklace. Oh, Mary. I think we need to have a little session.

My only guess is that this was sewn by Mary's drunken, blind aunt in her group home.

In the process of introducing the jidges, Cat also tells us that there were "almost ten million" votes after the performance show. Hm - "almost" could mean a lot of things. But I guess I have no reason to believe she's lying. Honestly, I can't get all superior about not voting, because I don't watch this show live and so I never have a chance. I can't exactly promise that I wouldn't be just the teensiest bit tempted.

Cat asks Nigel whether he's surprised by the composition of the top eight. He says no, because the whole thing now is about popularity, essentially. Then he says that it doesn't really matter, because the show is succeeding in its mission to "bring dance into America." I think it's funny that Nigel views himself as some sort of cultural ambassador. Most of the types of dance on this show are already prominent in American mainstream pop culture, via either music videos, Dancing with the Stars, or musical theater (which most high-school students are exposed to in varying degrees). I mean, why does Nigel think it's called "Broadway," anyway? He seems to think that America is this wilderness land where people have never heard of the whole concept of "dance," despite the fact that quite a few of these dance styles were more or less invented in America.

I actually thought it was much more surprising when Dancing with the Stars premiered and it turned out that people were willing to watch an entire show about just ballroom, which is a style that may very well have most of its adherents outside the U.S. After the success of that show, though, I'm not surprised by the success of this one. Nigel goes on to brag that So You Think You Can Dance was the "most Tivo'd show" of the past week. How does one find that out? That's kind of a cool fact. Nigel says that he is equally pleased by the success of Dancing with the Stars, despite the fact that it's not a Fox show. Well, that's very generous of you, Nigel. He also says "Americker" a couple of times.

Worship me, Americker. I have come down from on high to bring you culture.

Mary interviews that the most improved dancer in the competition is Ivan. That's probably true, but he's still not as good as the others. Mary rehashes the fact that she didn't want Ivan in the top twenty. I think by now we are all as familiar with that fact as we are with our own phone numbers. Dan interviews that one of the difficult things about this show is the fact that the dancers have to take on so many different styles of dance, when most dancers in real life specialize. Cat recaps last night's show. Then she shows us the four "girls" lined up on the stage, and she tells us that Busta Rhymes is going to be performing. Yay! Now, I already explained that the gaps in my musical knowledge are caused by the fact that I get most of my pop-culture information from celebrity-gossip publications rather than from the actual radio, but there's another salient fact that I should have mentioned: I'm old. And Busta Rhymes is even older than I am, and that makes me happy.

Posted by Amanda on July 30, 2006 10:49 AM