I am mortified by Dancing With the Stars

I was flipping channels a few days ago and landed on Dancing With the Stars.

Why? Why this show be like this? I no speak good after see show.

I understand the premise of this show to be that we want to watch professional dancers yell at non-professional celebrity dancers, who then dance in front of a trio of loud-talkers who give them points, and also take them points away as punishment for bad rumbas. I don't know who these judges are, but they are very animated people who seem to care deeply about dance. They are frightening.

I think watching celebrities fail at something difficult in an artistic field that is not their own is supposed to make me feel good, or vindicate my non-celebrity status, or maybe, to be more charitable and glass-slipper-half-full, make me identify with the participants, who it seems are just regl'r folk like me who take adult education classes. Except that their adult education class is televised, and they are forced to sit next to Marie Osmond. (I know that was a previous season, but I saw clips of her fainting and her hair and her big face and her chipmunk cheeked demon dolls on the news at the time and I won't forget it any time soon.)

Whatever this show is supposed to make me feel, it primarily makes me feel like hiding my face under a blanket. If I can still hear the show from under the blanket, it makes me want to press my face into the blanket until I suffocate and no longer have to hear the stress and the mugging and the pleading for votes and the clinging -- god, the clinging! -- in my dreams.

And the outfits.

I am so deeply mortified by the skits that the couples do before and after and, god knows, during their dances that I can't believe the producers manage to get people -- people who have accomplished some something in life! breathing people, with souls! -- to make those faces and paw each other and act like the least talented middle school drama troupe ever formed via a sign-up sheet in the cafeteria.

Why the mugging? I've sat and watched ballroom competitions on PBS, so I know from the tyranny of dance, and I'm familiar with the kabuki theatre of the lipstick and false eyelashes and the Vegas theatre of the showgirl outfits, but I swear I've never seen those people mug. They are all business off of the dance floor. Mugging would muss their makeup. Mugging would take muscle energy away from their lines.

Yet it is required on this show, even from perfectly dignified athletes who are game enough to give it a go with the mock-sexy faces and the exaggerated pouts, but god, I wish they wouldn't. Does being a celebrity willing to go on this show mean that you are not permitted to retain any dignity at all?

The outfits. Professional dance ladies, why butt cleavage? Why cutouts to expose hip bones? Why spangles and ribbons on bathing suits? Why the entire spinal column? The men cannot button their shirts because they must let their shaven, spray-tanned chests say Hello! to the world, I understand, but why no buttons at all, ladies?

I am mortified. No wonder I can't dance.