I've already admitted that I watch "Dancing with the Stars", a usually inoffensive ABC show where B-list and C-list celebrities from the performing arts. sporting arenas and elsewhere, half of whom are remotely familiar, are paired with professional dancers to learn a new ballroom dance each week. They are judged by professional dancer-choreographer judges and one "star" is lost each week from a combination of viewer votes and judging scores.
This upcoming season is the, I don't know, 15th or 20th season of the show, which means they're running out of stars that people have ever heard of; for the last few years that means they've been running out a bunch of stars of Disney teen shows (Disney, of course, owns ABC) and other folks of little celebrity. The B list, apparently, is exhausted and the alphabet is not.
But I digress.
In a desperate effort to fill out the season a couple years back, the producers brought in a professional model named Charlotte McKinney. Now, you would not know the name; however, you would definitely know her commercial, a Super Bowl ad from 2015 wherein she took a bite out of a hamburger or some other sandwich in what was intended to be a very seductive way. When you're in a commercial like that, you had better grab your fifteen minutes of fame, and there were the Dancing with the Stars producers a-waiting.
By the third or fourth week of the show, there was enough time to tell that Miss McKinney and her partner were not going to win. She wasn't bad, mind you, but there were some celebrities that season who were excellent dancers and, having watched the show for years, I could tell roughly when the judges and the fans will conspire to remove someone.
OK, she wasn't great, either. There appeared to be some ability to dance, but as the fluffy intro showed, she had not put as much time into it during the week, and that frustrated the judges who saw potential unfulfilled. The judges respect dance and expect the celebrities to devote themselves each week to learning it. Their scores for her were accordingly lower than they might have been had she been a bit less capable but a bit more devoted.
But I digress again. It should be mentioned that, unlike most models, Charlotte McKinney has a very un-Twiggy physique. Did I say that delicately? And, let's face it, there is a presumption that when an endowed blonde crosses your field of vision, men are not thinking quite as much about her intellectual capacity, nor perhaps their own.
And so it happened that after Miss McKinney and partner did their routine, and the judges gave their capsule critiques, and after one of the others had taken her turn ask her to work harder and do justice to her dancing ability, it came to judge Bruno Tonioli. Bruno is a rather enthusiastic critic, standing up most of the time for his speeches and waving his arms around. It should be noted that he is Italian, but his English is better than many Americans, and I'm not exaggerating.
He began his allotted time by saying, "Well, my dear, you're never going to win the Nobel Prize for quantum physics ..." Yes, really, he said that.
I suppose he was trying to make a point that was in his head, but it never got finished as the audience gasped. To her credit, Miss McKinney turned to her partner and kept her mouth shut and didn't make a face.
I'll tell you what. I have a degree from M.I.T. and I still get called "stupid" once in a while, sometimes for good reason. I've gotten called a lot of things in my life, some true, but nothing gets under my skin more than being called "stupid". Of course, I've never had that happen to me in the middle of a very popular live national television show. And when I get called "stupid", it's because of something I've said or done, not because someone looked at me or my body parts and made an inference.
I just couldn't wait for the fallout. You see, in addition to his capacity for offense, Bruno Tonioli is quite gay. So when he is inevitably taken to task for his lapse, and someone -- Disney, the network, his peers, whoever actually has the authority -- suspends him or whatever, what next? Do we have a fight between the "blondes are not dummies" crowd and the "gays should be allowed to say anything they want" crowd? Well, apparently not, because not only wasn't he suspended, but he has returned every season since.
We have more serious disputes among constituencies in this country -- think about seniors, represented by the leftist AARP, fighting with unions, represented by the even more leftist AFSCME and the AFL/CIO, fighting when over-committed pensions negotiated by the unions threaten government capacity to pay Social Security benefits. So this little tiff about a careless and insensitive remark will be but a moment's concern.
Bruno Tonioli actually seems like a very nice guy, who had a point he wanted to make about the expectations of a model and really screwed up badly trying. But I have to wonder how a guy keeps his job or gets away with it, calling someone stupid on national TV based on her measurements and her hair color. And I wonder whether his lack of punishment offends the blonde community, or his actual punishment triggers the gay community.
This will all, of course, should have been hashed out in social media online. But imagine that, next episode came and went, Miss McKinney was eventually and mercifully eliminated, and nothing happened to Bruno.
A tangled Web 'twas, indeed.
Copyright 2017, 2015 by Robert Sutton
