Might as Well Laugh About It Now (3 page)

The first time I went in the spray-tan room the assistant smiled at me and said: “Strip!”

“Excuse me?”

“Completely naked,” she said, not even looking up from her paperwork.

“Where’s the tanning booth?” I asked, looking around the room.

“No booth,” she replied. “Just me and this.”

She held up a can the size of a fire extinguisher sporting a hose with a gun-shaped nozzle on the end.

She wasn’t one to mince words, and since it was season five, she was probably used to people being shocked the first time. (By week ten, it seemed as casual as taking your car into a drive-through car wash.)

“Just kill me now,” I said with a reluctant grin and started to undress. “So much for modesty.”

Fifteen minutes later I looked like a construction cone.

“This may not be my color,” I tried to suggest.

“It’s perfect,” she confirmed. “It never looks good in real life, but on TV you’ll look great. Be careful, though. It can rub off.”

That was her only understatement.

I stayed at my friend Patty’s house for all of the Los Angeles rehearsals and show dates because I felt so much more at home there than in a hotel. I could also take turns bringing one or two of the kids in with me every week to see “Aunt Patty.”

Over the first few weeks I unintentionally turned many of her sheets, pillowcases, and towels a bright orange. The insides and collars of all my clothing had turned orange, as had the handles of my purse, my car’s steering wheel, and any book I touched. It was as if I had emerged from a bag of Cheetos.

After the third week, Patty wised up and gave me my very own set of “already ruined” sheets and towels.

“I’ve gone through three bottles of bleach in two weeks,” Patty told me in her fake scolding manner. “Here are your pillowcases. They used to be white. Now they look like tie-dye. Don’t touch the walls. Don’t sit on the good couch!”

Every Tuesday, one celebrity was eliminated from the show. I suggested they change that term to “exfoliated” so that no one would have to leave with horrible bright orange skin.

Heading into the competition, I knew there would be a few obstacles that I’d have to conquer, like learning the dances and getting in shape, and a few obstacles that I could do nothing about. The biggest obstacle? Ballroom dancing, by its form, naturally shows off the flair and skills of the female partner. Though the males, of course, play an important part, they rarely do spins, leg lifts, splits, or anything that requires being upside down! When you watch ballroom dancing, it’s almost impossible to not watch the woman. The women celebrities on the show, in essence, had to compete against the professional female dancers. Not an easy task. The female professional dancers on that show were all phenomenal! The other reality that I could do nothing about was the lineup of celebrities. Most of them were ten to twenty years younger than me.

In fact, Jane Seymour, Wayne Newton, and I were the only three who were alive when man first walked on the moon.

I decided to have a blast despite the odds. I told the press that I was doing the show for all the people in midlife who felt that their lives were over. I wanted to prove that we don’t have to stop trying new challenges just because we’ve crossed the 4-0 bridge.

I started to joke around backstage with the other dancers and everyone on the staff and crew. With Jane Seymour on hand to represent the “dignified” woman so elegantly, I felt that I could be the “goof” that I truly am.

Jane and I shared the same extra-long dressing room trailer on the lot. It was divided in the middle into two separate and private spaces. Jane’s half was beautifully arranged with fresh flowers and art. Classical music and the scent of essential oils wafted from her door as she entered and exited. My half was more like your average Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria on a Saturday afternoon. Piled in one corner were toys, coloring books, and markers. On the shelves were video-game players, laptops, printers, and boxes of promo photos. The floor had dog bowls and chew sticks. Packages of NutriSystem crammed the closet shelf and the countertops were strewn with bags of red licorice (low-fat candy), show jewelry, tubes of muscle rub, and boxes of bandages for my blisters. If you opened the door to my side of the trailer too quickly, a stack of Marie Osmond doll boxes would topple out to the walkway. I had passed around my doll catalogue and told the staff and crew that they could order my dolls “at cost” if they were interested. I had no idea it would come to about eighty dolls!! After the first couple of weeks, a trailer that had emptied out was filled with doll boxes and became a satellite distribution center.

I knew that the producers loved it to look like the celebrities were in a fierce competition with each other, but the way I saw it was: Who needed stress on top of physical pain? Besides, it was a really fun group of people.

When the twenty-two-year-old Sabrina Bryan got perfect “10s” from the judges in one of the early weeks, someone backstage asked Wayne Newton if he thought he’d ever get a ten as a score. He chuckled and said: “I already did. I got two fives.”

As Tom Bergeron, the host, prepares to go to commercial break, the camera pans the backstage “holding room,” and all the dancers usually smile and wave to the camera. The first week I held up a banana peel, as if I were going to use it as a weapon to wipe out the competition. That seemed to get the other couples loosened up and pretty soon everyone was playing out little scenarios before the commercial breaks.

I started to get e-mails from younger viewers telling me that I was fun to watch, and comments from many others saying that it was great that I wasn’t taking myself so seriously, as others on previous seasons had done. Hearing this feedback led me to the idea of doing the YouTube sketch. I’ve never had a problem making fun of myself, my background, or my career.

In the first YouTube sketch I did a voice-over for my doll, which was “rehearsing” for
Dancing with the Stars
. We taped it in a little gym above an apartment complex on the west side of Los Angeles. I used my chipper 1970s voice, until I made a real appearance toward the end of the sketch with Jonathan. He was completely willing to be as goofy as me, and I’ll always love him for that.

The video got so many hits on YouTube that
Entertainment Tonight
got their hands on a copy and ran with it for the closing minute of one of their shows. The other celebrities saw how much fun we had making the original and were eager to get on board. Once we realized that all the female celebrities had dolls in their likeness, the idea for a YouTube catfight bloomed (“Girls Night Ouch”).

Each of the women contributed voice-overs for their dolls and then made a cameo appearance in the end, after the surprise twist with
All My Children
soap star Cameron Mathison, who jumped in to play along. Cameron is as sweet and authentic as the guy next door. (The really, really, really good-looking guy next door.) Both of the videos still play on
YouTube.com
. Take a look.

As many hits as each of those videos received on YouTube, my most-watched video, a million times over, was the one of me falling to the floor, unconscious. Talk about doing something unexpected before a commercial break!

When I stepped out on the dance floor with Jonathan for that samba, I already felt light-headed. Less than twenty miles from the television studios, the hills of Malibu, California, were on fire. A brush fire had caught hold and acre after acre of land, along with some homes, were burning out of control. The air over Los Angeles was full of ash and the smell of burning wood. I had been coughing much of the day from the bad air quality. Now, posing for the opening moment of our dance, I was feeling sluggish and exhausted. As the band began, I wasn’t able to keep up with Jonathan the way I had earlier in rehearsal. I was missing simple moves that we had practiced a thousand times. The audience became a complete blur and the music sounded warped in my ear.

Somehow, I got through it. However, when we walked over to the judges’ table to get our critique, I could tell that I was fading out quickly. I’ve fainted a couple of times before, from a combination of allergies and stress, so I could recognize the warning signals that preceded fainting.

Tom Bergeron looked at me like I was a crazy woman when I started jumping up and down while Bruno was talking to me, but I was desperately trying to shake off the feeling of fainting. It didn’t help. As soon as I stood still to listen to Len Goodman’s critique, a black veil closed off my vision and down I went.

The director went to a long commercial break, leaving millions of viewers to wonder if I had “flown the coop.”

When I came to, I looked up into my son Stephen’s face. He and my daughter Rachael had been sitting in the front row of the audience with my brother Jay and my manager, Karl. Stephen was holding my head and Jay had my hand in his. I didn’t realize where I was until Tom Bergeron’s face loomed over me and Jonathan came into view. Then I said, “Oh, crap!” because I knew that I had “decked it” on national television.

After a couple of minutes, I was fine to walk and wanted to make sure the studio audience knew that I was okay, so I decided to take a bow, as if the faint were a “death drop” at the end of my samba. I didn’t want anyone to worry; I knew that, though it was embarrassing, I would soon be fine.

The show executives had called in paramedics, who ran a few tests and concluded that it was a simple fainting spell and the only thing they could do for the knot that had sprouted on my head was an ice pack or two. The other celebrities and professional dancers were very sweet, rushing every food and drink imaginable to my side to improve my blood sugar. For the rest of the show, the producers insisted that I lie on a couch in one of the guest star dressing rooms.

By the second hour of the show, eastern time, the middle of the country was seeing the first hour. Karl was being inundated with calls from family and friends who had just watched me pass out on live television and had no idea what had occurred.

As my close friends and family gathered around me in the dressing room, the impact of my fainting on television began to sink in. I felt horrible about scaring so many people and shutting down the production for even five minutes.

One of the show producers came into the room to check on me.

“I’m so sorry,” I apologized to him.

“We want to make sure you’re absolutely okay,” he told me, “but, please, don’t feel bad for the sake of the show. That was the most dramatic moment on television all season!”

A full spectrum of reactions to my fainting followed in the days to come. Some people thought that I’d done it as a joke. Others thought it was terrifying. Comments flew around on the Internet that I had faked the faint to raise my scores. All I can say is, try faking a faint and hitting the floor with that amount of force sometime! The thud that could be heard when I landed was definitely not a sound effect.

I received thousands of e-mails of encouragement and support. Many people wrote to me that my willingness to get back on my feet and back into the competition inspired them to take chances and reach for their own goals. For the remaining weeks of the show, even on those rehearsal days when I thought I couldn’t go on, I did it for my fans. I couldn’t stand the thought of letting them down.

As much as it would have been great to be remembered for improving as a dancer from the first week to the last, I know that my most memorable appearance on
Dancing with the Stars
will always be those two minutes that I was completely unconscious.

Larry King said to me during an interview on his show a year later: “Look how it boosted your career. Even though many people know you didn’t win, if people think of that
Dancing with the Stars
, you’re the winner.”

It seems that even our most embarrassing moments can come with their share of gifts. Maybe Eve had an insight in choosing the apple, for which she rarely receives credit.

Perhaps she knew that we would appreciate our opportunities more if we put the effort into making the best of them. If she and Adam had stayed put in the garden they might have remained oblivious to pain and sorrow, but they would have never experienced what effort brings with it: a sense of accomplishment and great joy.

By the way, the winner of the coveted disco ball that season was the champion race car driver Helio Castro neves. Sure, he was charming with Julianne Hough, but I thought Mel B should have won. She did a series of three full moving splits in her final Viennese Waltz. Come on!!! Let’s see Helio do even one!

Be Still