Bristol Palin and the muddled American viewer

(Bristol, the dancer?  There is more going on in this competition than just dance.)

I was forced to watch Dancing With The Stars this year against my better judgment. I couldn’t stand to hear my wife screaming from the living room as Bristol Palin, who was absolutely terrible at the beginning, made it through each subsequent week. My wife has a bit of a heart condition, so I thought I needed to be by her side to keep her calm. But as I watched, I began to worry about my heart, which is perfectly fine.

Sarah Palin’s daughter displayed no rhythm, clumsy footwork, and a tendency to walk through steps that should have been danced, if you know what I mean. There is no doubt that she got better, as almost anyone would with intense training for weeks by a dance expert. But she should have been eliminated weeks ago, before Brandy and at least one other contestant were voted out. I’m no dance expert, but after having spent the past 25 years in latin dance clubs in four countries, I can see who has the moves and who doesn’t.

How do we explain this interesting result? There are only two explanations that I can imagine. First, the American public does not have the ability in general to judge dance or almost anything else critically. The plethora of really bad movies, tv shows, books, websites, and music of the past two decades would argue for this explanation. It may just be that there are too many people with too much money to spend on entertainment to allow natural selection to do its job efficiently. As my mother used to say about certain people, “their taste is all in their mouth.”

The second possible explanation is that politics was at work in the Bristol Palin case. Right wingers, or tea partyers, or whoever voted for her to show their political support indirectly for Bristol’s mother by usurping a popular tv program that is supposed to be about dance. Of course, none of this is Bristol’s fault; she is mostly just a clueless kid from Alaska.

Either explanation is disappointing to me. Come on America. Put on your crap detector and think straight. Let’s give credit where credit is due. If something is lousy, let’s call it lousy. If something is good, let’s call it good. It’s simple, really.

Article first published as Bristol Palin and the muddled American viewer on Technorati.

Just not that into you?

(A dance of nurses, but the dance I attended was more exciting than this one appears.)

The call came on a Wednesday and on Friday night my college roommate and I jumped into his red Chevy convertible and headed off to the nursing school down the road.  We met the two girls who had invited us, but they were so short.  It just wasn't going to work.  So we politely cut it off, split up, and reconnoitered the room full of dancing nursing students. 

Within an hour we were each dancing with a freshman student nurse who turned out to be roommates at the school.  Later, we went out for a hamburger in the convertible, which must have been impressive, and by the end of the evening it was obvious that the girl my roommate had been dancing with and I were muy sympatico.  I called her the next week, we went to the OSU homecoming dance the following month, and we were married in three years.  Simple.  Now, four dogs, six cats, and three children later, we are still married 44 years after that Friday expedition.

Meeting the right person seemed so easy then.  But last night I watched "He's Just Not That Into You" on tv for the first time, and I was reminded of how difficult it seems to be for young people to develop satisfying relationships in recent decades.  And finding that ONE right person is nearly impossible, or so it would seem.  My conclusion is also supported by dozens of conversations I have had with my students over the years.  I won't be so pretentious as to offer a solution for these difficulties, but my observations suggest that the older you get and the more experience you have with potential partners, the more difficult this all gets.  It is like trying to choose a cell phone.  There are simply so many models that come with so many different plans that it is difficult to settle on the package that is right for you.

But let's analyze this fundamental issue of human ecology a bit more.  There are two aspects to the "problem".  First, you have to encounter that right person and, second, you have to recognize the right person after you have encountered them.  I'm betting that #2 is a more common problem than #1, given that most of us encounter hundreds of people every month.  There may be dozens of Mr. or Mrs. Rights all around us; we just don't know which ones they are.

But maybe I've made that too simple.  We "encounter" lots of people every week, but we don't really "meet" most of those whom we encounter.  You would never know who the right one is if you sat next to them at Starbucks if neither of you uttered a word.  I used to talk a lot more than I do now, and my wife has always given her words away freely, so this was not an issue for us in 1965.  We opened up completely with our thoughts and goals and hopes; we hid very little.  What's the point of false advertising, given that the other person will eventually learn the truth anyway?

So that is how it went.  In hindsight, it seemed simple and easy, but I am sure there was a bit more to it than that.  There was a huge dose of serendipity involved as well.  If that short girl had not called my roommate, if we had not gone to that dance, if my roommate had not had a convertible, if I had not worn that sexy cranberry sweater, if they had not played the Bristol Stomp at the dance, if she had not moved her hips in exactly that way, if, if, if...........  But I wonder if the movie that I saw last night had been made in the '60s, would we have even understood it?  I just don't think we would have been that into it.