Not Without Ketchup

Okay, I swore to myself that I wasn't just going to write about SYTYCD all the time because really. Not that many people watch it religiously like me, so I could be alienating some of my fan base! And then I realized... Fan base??! What fan base? Oh you mean my mom and husband? Yeah they have to listen to me anyway, so I can write about whatever I want! Yay me!

Anyhoodle, I am sitting here watching last night's episode and after getting through the first fifteen minutes of the two hour show, I just couldn't hold it in anymore! First of all, Cat Deeley clearly wants to be the next Paula because HOLY CRAP was she drunk or something?

In the opening of the show alone she said, for no apparent reason "Don't ruffle my feathers, Billy!" when strutting past him, and then kept repeating "Weren't they great this week?" Perhaps they were when you watched them in rehearsals, Cat, but the rest of us haven't watched them dance yet. After the first performance, which ends with Christina sort of straddled on top of Pasha, Cat says gleefully, "Woman on top! You're a girl after my own heart!" Um...okay...TMI maybe?

THEN it gets crazier. So they are doing these "packages" (as they call them on these shows) of clips of the dancers as kids. While Adechike is talking about how he has no photos of himself dancing as a child because his family lost everything in a fire, they proceed to show family photos of him engulfed in digital flames! I'm sorry...did that really just happen? That was both tasteless and uncomfortable. Congratulations, Fox! You just ousted Danielle Staub's "striptease performance" on the Real Housewives of New Jersey as The Thing Burned On My Retinas That I Never Wanted To See In The First Place. On to his performance with Allison... Oh I'm sorry, he was in that dance? I couldn't stop watching Allison; she was amazing. And herein lies the problem with the "All Stars" being on the show: the newbies risk being outperformed by the "All Stars" when paired up with the likes of Allison and Kathryn. And yes I am still putting "All Stars" in quotes much like I will write the Katy Perry song "California Girls" and not the deliberate (and ridiculous) misspelling she uses. I refuse to even acknowledge it. But that is neither her nor there.

Can I just take a minute here to sing the praises of Alex? I think he's my favorite male dancer. Although Kent was so stinking cute last week, he won me over a little bit. But Alex, to me, is the best male dancer on the show. Was he perfectly in the Fosse style this week? No, but he is such a beautiful dancer I really don't care. Add the fact that he was paired with Lauren, which to me worked in his favor, as she..well...SUCKS. Okay, obviously she's a better dancer than me, but that's not really the point. She's NOT better than, say, any other girl that's been on the show before and would have been better suited to be called an "All Star."

Next up, Cat manages to slur the word "Ashley" which is actually harder to do than it sounds, considering it has that built in "SH" sound that so often occurs in slurred speech.

By the way, is Mia Michaels wearing brass knuckles??

At this point in the evening, I half expected Cat to make a drunken remark about how the whitest boy to ever dance on their stage was about to krump and, well... she did manage to do a little "gangsta" hand motion when describing the "mean streets of Palm Beach" where he grew up. So I wasn't entirely disappointed. And in swoops Billy, out to steal my heart with the description of his first dance routine to the Backstreet Boys, replete with pleather, flame-covered costume at which point he says "it was pretty epic, I'm not going to lie." Oh Billy, that warmed my cold, black heart! And then Billy skips into rehearsal and says to Li'l C in true Billy fashion "Hiiiii Lit-tle C!" which is just so darn cute, especially when you anticipate that he is about to learn how to krump. Correction, Billy, THIS is going to be epic. I just hope they have plenty of pleather ready for him. And, well, Billy lucked out because that routine was about as much krump as Ashley's routine was jazz. Which is to say, not.

And then we have our resident tap dancer, Hipster McNoPersonality, who dances a contemporary routine in which I found her to be horrendous and the judges adored. Hmmm...WHATEVS

All-Star Kathryn (who doesn't get air quotes because she is EPIC) dancing Bollywood gave me chills. She was perfection wrapped up in a glittery, harem-wrapped, face-painted bow. I think she was paired up with one of the newbies but I failed to notice him.

I am excited to watch Lauren, my favorite contestant. However, the fact that I am 10 years older than her is not completely lost on me. This means that when she started dancing, I started high school. I have now officially become one of Those People who hates getting older. I'll try to let that go, because unless I locate Nicolas Flamel's Sorcerer's Stone and use it to make some Elixer of Life, I'm pretty much SOL on that front. Anyway, LAUREN. WAS. AMAZING! Love love love her! That hip hop routine was all kinds of awesome, and she NAILED IT! That just made my night. I may have to watch it again.

Not do be outdone, however, Cat manages to turn into a creepy sex predator. Lauren, young, sweet innocent and fresh out of high school, mentions how she tried to go to a deeper place (emotionally) with this performance, and Cat turns to her partner, Dominic, and says "Dominic do you want to get to a...deeper...place?" I am now convinced that Cat has been spending her free time with David Hasselhoff, and we will soon see her sprawled on the floor talking about cheeseburgers. I give it four more episodes.

Last up is Kent, who inadvertently calls his partner, Courtney, a whore, when he says she allows him to touch her as much as he wants, which is something new and different for him. I guess she didn't have the heart to tell him she was allowing him to touch her in the manner in which the routine was choreographed.

And the quote of the night comes from (who else?) Cat Deeley:

Nigel (to Courtney) "Would you eat [Kent] alive?"
Cat: "Not without ketchup!"

And OH MY GOD Cat actually says she's getting a hamburger after the show! Did I call that or what??! Better make that two more episodes.