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Dancing With The Stars Season 8
marigold:
From Woz's site:
A photo of Woz in his trailer at, "Dancing with the Stars"reading and responding to fan e-mail.
Woz reads all the e-mail he gets.
http://www.woz.org/
marigold:
:ascared she's got curls
Karina at a tvguide party
Kiwi Jay:
I reckon she doesnt look good there!
marigold:
:popcorn: cool we can see their routine
Lil' Kim & Derek Hough DWTS Rehearsal: Lindy Hop
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGuQfdy5ZfI
marigold:
Steve Wozniak Blog:
It's been a couple of good long days, with daytime and nighttime practices.
We start some dance routines just knowing which type of dance it is. For example, if it's a cha-cha then Karina can begin by teaching me basic steps, and the timing, for some standard cha-cha moves. Then when our actual music arrives (from the DWTS production team) Karina listens to it and starts noting, on paper, the sections of the song and how many beats or groups of beats the song has. Next, she starts creating dance steps for herself across the empty studio. She gets a rough cut of what the dance might be in a short time.
Next, Karina starts teaching me what the parts of the dance are. In an early 6-hour session I might only be able to get a good idea of about a third of the whole dance. By then I can kind of walk through it and get a few steps correct. By the second day I might have a clearer idea of the entire routine. Some parts I get down quickly. Others take quite a bit of time and work.
I'll go through part of a short routine and Karina will complement me if I'm going in the right direction. We both know that her compliments are for my effort and learning, but not for getting very good for national TV yet. She will strongly correct me for other mistakes. When Karina rests and attends to viewing You Tube for dance ideas or texting DWTS people, etc. I will fore myself through a short sequence of maybe 8 to 10 steps, over and over until my body knows how to land each step with my balance ready for the next one. This sort of trying and trying does the best job of bringing a decent step to my muscle memory and brain memory.
I usually go home and play our short minute and 20-second piece all night long while I sleep. I am alone most of the week here in L.A. My wife, Janet, works for Apple back home and only makes it down for the shows on Monday and Tuesday. I might awaken at midnight and 2 AM and 4 AM. I usually spend about 20 minutes going through the steps in my head to the music. That woks better once I've had enough practice to relate steps to counts of the music. Sometimes I'll find that my thinking has gotten to the speed of the music. We have had very fast music for our dances so far. When I get to that point I'll start dancing in the dark and maybe I can't get the steps to the speed of the music yet. But by morning I can usually do it at full speed, at least for the sections I had been working on overnight.
So far, I have gone into every dance without nerves and happy and smiling and thinking of the audience. My joy is obvious and overflowing. I usually get a thought in the few seconds before we start about how lucky I am to be here doing this with Karina Smirnoff. In rehearsals I sometimes come up with a huge grin by remembering a funny incident or joke. The most recent joke that brings a grin is the one about the guy who checks into a hotel and asks for his porn channel to be disabled. The clerk tells him that their porn channel is normal and calls him a sick bastard.
This Monday I will dance an Argentine Tango. In this dance, it's more about the character than the dancing. I'm up on the dance but not so great at the character, for various reasons. Maks has been helping me a bit tonight on this, with some great ideas. Karina and I have some dramatic moves of strength. In one place I hold her above me and swirl her around. In another she jumps in the air and I catch her an a leg and then swing her back down. She does a complete backflip over my arm in onether spot.
Maks gave me a great idea. At one point I move my foot up her leg, bending at the knee, as we are together. It's like I'm lifting her dress with my foot. It only takes 4 beats but I'm standing right by the three judges so I look over at them with a big smile. It's way out of charcter for this dance, but I can't help it. I'm sort of treating the judges like voyeurs at a peep show, ha ha ha. You'll have to see it. I hope the camera angle does a good job. In my first dance, a cha-cha, there was a place where I even stick my tongue out at the judges but it wasn't caught well on TV.
Tonight we had time on the real DWTS stage and we worked out a few parts of our Argentine Tango that we couldn't do in practice. One part relies on the stairs down from the podium to the main stage. By the end of this evening session, we felt good and confident. Tonight I will sleep all night thinking about my body position and movements and especially my hands as being in character for this dance. I'm really trying to do a much better job in judging terms. But I'm still not expecting too high a score from the judges. I don't know why. After all, I still can't really explain why my other scores were as low as they were. I watch a lot of You Tube videos of DWTS dances from other years and see horrible dances getting much better scores.
I am so thankful for my many friends on the show. So many production people tell me that they are all for me. I can't explain this huge phenomenon.
Oh, this week we shot a couple of videos. One was for the DWTS package that plays before my dance on Monday. It has me leading a group of Segway riders to thank some fans and pass out leaflets to get votes. They make you say corny lines but I'm told that the package came out pretty good. The other video was for the Jimmy Kimmel show this Monday or Tuesday. He speaks of the actor backing out of the remake of Footloose and how they found tape of another unknown auditioning for the part. I do a bunch of funny corny dancing around to the music, sort of a spoof of the movie. It should be hilariously funny when it airs, and does include me doing a worm.
I'm on stage at 11:00 AM tomorrow for camera blocking. They get ready for all their TV shots, which cameras from which angles. Then I have a long practice time with Karina in a local dance studio, to get ready for our dance on Monday.
I'm ever thankful for the huge support of all you fans. I beg of you not to get complacent. Don't assume that everything will go fine without you. Only your continual effort throughout this show can take me right to the finish line. Please find the way to organize parties and tell people to see me on the show. If you can get 10 people to vote for me on their phones, that's incredible. And it might be less work than even the effort I'm sure you are making to dial 10 times for me yourself.
Onward and upward,
WOZ
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