Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Topaz Tango

This was where the rubber met the road in the ballroom dance world.

Along with the tango that ended this competition Thursday, the pasodoble was the most demanding and dramatic dance. It didn’t call for lifts, but it required slides and drags. The woman was the slidee and the dragee.

So it was Latin to the core.

The man was the matador, macho and lethal.

The woman with her elaborate Spanish skirts was both the scarlet cape the matador wielded with swashbuckling dash and the wild creature, the bull to be conquered. Or not.

Temple was always pro-bull whether it came to the ring or the rodeo, but this time she wanted the matador to win. Well, she wanted Matt to come off acceptably. To master his inner sexist and slayer. To outMax Max.

This was terrible! How could she be so shallow? What was best about Matt was that he didn’t have any of that macho baggage. Oh, heck, like any other red-blooded American girl, she just wanted her sweetie to come off hot and sexy.

Max could do this number. A given. He’d been a performer forever and knew how to turn sexy on and turn it off like a switch. Rafi could do this dance. He had that smoldering Latin love-hate attitude toward women, twice removed, culturally and personally.

José would do it, exquisitely. He was from the culture.

Crawford Buchanan couldn’t.

Was she so wrong for hoping that Matt could?

Yes, because she’d coaxed him into doing this gig, taking this chance, putting him out of his element. It was a good career move. It just might not be a good move, period.

Temple swallowed. Her throat felt like a wad of gum had stuck in it.

Everything that was good about Matt would not work in this dance. It would have to be a total acting job. He was cast utterly against type and could be exposed as a wimp in front of the whole world, although he was anything but.

What had she been thinking?

Crawford’s bass voice was issuing a dark challenge. “Tonight we separate the men from the boys. Tonight the matador rules the dance floor in the sexy pasodoble. Who of our quartet of competitors is man enough to command the cape and the bull and the killing ground?

“Who will deliver the final thrust to his partner and competitors?”

Temple was slinking down in her seat, Zoe Chloe Ozone curling up in anxiety within her.

Mistake.

She couldn’t watch.

The order of performance and pairing of the partners was never announced beforehand, or known to anyone on the show but Leander Brock, the producer and judge, who gave Crawford his notes at the last minute. The dancers rehearsed in secrecy.

Crawford was back, crooning verbally into the mike.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first pasodoble couple, and they go together like Salt and Peppah.”

Temple cringed at Crawford’s attempt at being hip-hop.

“I give you . . . Keith Salter and Motha Jonz! Together again! Without interruption, we hope. Live and in passion”—Zoe Chloe almost hurled—“on the Dancing With the Celebs stage.”

The audience ooohs celebrated the fact that Salter was upright, and back dancing. Scattered clapping audience members stood in tribute to the stricken celebrity chef’s grit in going on with the dance.

He wore a gaudy black-and-white, embroidery-scrolled Cisco Kid outfit, if anyone remembered the early TV series that featured Latino stars seven years before Lucille Ball forced studio execs to accept her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz, as a costar.

The embroidery was the pattern you’d see on the huge sombreros of mariachi bands at Tex-Mex restaurants. On Keith it looked like a drizzle of angel hair pasta over a burnt potato pancake. Cheesy in a Velveeta way, not flattering. More nacho than macho.

Motha Jonz was a tasty Latin sausage in ruffled scarlet satin stolen off of José Juarez’s back. They glared at each other in that fiery manner across the raised stage, then stomped down the stairs to the dance floor a fourth-beat off rhythm.

“Lame,” a watching Mariah leaned across her mother to rasp in Temple’s ear. “Even EK could be sexier than Motha Jonz and she hasn’t the boobs to go with the costume.”

The music was heavy on trumpets and castanets, but no amount of will could make the pair look sexier than an animated set of red pepper flake shakers maneuvering on a border diner’s Formica tabletop.

Temple cringed, but Zoe Chloe nodded with sage teenage disdain. “Lame lamé mama!”

Alas, Salter and Jonz were game but just as lame as she’d anticipated. The food poisoning incident had taken the starch out of the chef’s onstage presence, and Motha Jonz was just too hefty for him to dominate.

Temple spent a full minute stifling giggles imagining this odd couple in each other’s dress. That would be a more believable scenario.

The rest of the dance was plain painful, but the audience gave Salter a few, fevered huzzahs.

“Undercooked,” Danny decreed. Keith Salter, he declared, “was the Taco Bell version of a matador, heavy on the stuffed enchiladas and light on hot sauce. Not your dance, either of you. The attitudes are stiff but the moves must be as supple as a fencing foil. You both got ‘stiff.’ Alas, supple eluded you. Six.”

“Passive,” Leander echoed. “A pair of dancing bears lumbering about a bullring, a pair of dolorous bullfrogs courting on a lily pad, two dinosaurs sinking with their great weight into a tar pit, that would best describe your pathetic attempt at a pasodoble. Five.”

Temple cringed for the winded and unhappy couple in the camera’s eyes, got up in froufrou like figures on a Weight Watchers midway point cake.

“Well,” said Savannah importantly. “I . . . just . . . lurved . . . it.”

The silence made its own impact but the panting couple looked toward her hopefully.

“ Wonderbar !” Savannah said in German, puzzlingly. “You were cooking, Chef Salter, and, Motha Jones, you were the peppa to his salt. Oh, yes, you were! You are on my choo-choo train from Savannah to Havana heaven, honeys. Hot Cuban crimes of passion.

W hoo-whoo !

“You are perfectly matched. So cuddly and cute! I like fluffy things with coot, chubby, widdle cheeks, top and bottom.” She winked, broadly and commended Motha Jonz’s commanding pacing and strong turns.

Six, five, nine!

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Crawford’s booming bass trumpeted, “our next performers are that gay blade”—Temple cringed. Surely even Crawford . . . —“of the Olympic fencing team, José Juarez, and the queen mother of the P.M. suds, Miss Olivia Phillips.”

Temple cringed again. Gay blade? Sure, point out Olivia was pushing sixty. Clod!

After Crawford’s overhyped intro, the audience sat back.

They were waiting.

The lights dimmed, the music paused, and the spotlights showed two silhouettes at each side of the wings. A cigarette spark flared at each etched facial profile, then went out. The pair stalked toward each other.

Another thrill of guitar music, two lean bodies profiled against the stage far pillar. A high Spanish comb and mantilla making the woman looked horned. A flat-brimmed hat, cape, and sword etched the man’s silhouette against a drawn red velvet curtain.

José and Olivia were perfectly matched figures, like mobile wrought-iron images: tall, thin, dark, intense.

Even everybody in the greenroom caught their breaths.

This was a contender couple.

A whip uncoiled from the man’s side to snap once. The woman fled down the four steps in a trail of trembling lace ruffles. The whip snapped and followed.

When they reached the dance floor, she turned to confront him, haughty profile defiant, hands upraised to twine around each other like sinuous serpents. The whip cracked one last time and was flung aside as the dancers circled each other like courting scorpions.