Tonight Betty & I saw about 10 minutes of that new So You Think You Can Dance? show, and what I saw made me ill. I like dancing, and I love watching dance.
The problem was this: one contestant is a 6′ tall woman, graceful and strong, who got on the show doing Irish dancing. During the elimination rounds, from what I can figure, different groups of dancers are put with different choreographers, blah blah blah. This tall woman wound up with a Latin dance choreographer, and at some point he picks up a tiny woman (she was maybe 96 lbs, if that) and kind of had her twist around him, like a snake, or a vine, from about his shoulder to the floor.
The tall woman knew she couldn’t do that with any man in the room; she was taller than all of them. Interestingly, the choreographer was significantly shorter than her, and shorter than the other men in the room.
But not being willing to give up, she tried the move with him, and about halfway through the twist, they both fell over, because he couldn’t support her 6′ tall frame.
She got upset (you know how weepy these reality TV shows are) and his response was to play a joke on her, by showing the “final move” for the dance number, where he literally threw this tiny 96 lb. woman all over the place – over his head, off to one side, through his legs, upside-down – and the tall dancer just left in disgust, knowing she’d lose because she couldn’t be tossed around like that. Ha ha, what a funny joke, to make a tall beautiful woman feel like a horse. I wanted to smack him for her.
Anyway, I just sat there feeling like Buster Keaton on the set of a Marx Brothers movie* thinking, “But there’s such an easy solution to this problem – let her toss around the smallest guy there, or the 96 lb. woman the guy was using!”
But alas, primetime is not ready for such radical gender inversion, not yet.
* During the 1930s, the late, great Buster Keaton often worked at MGM working out gags for other comedians .