In fact, Tuesday night I watched the Dancing with the Stars premier show. According to what I read today, so did 21 million other people; so I know I wasn’t the only one with what some might construe as “questionable” taste. I tune in once at the beginning of the season, once in the middle, then the finale. I usually don’t know most of the “stars”. However I’m always looking for changes in appearance of the ones that I do know. (Somehow if they look older too it makes me feel better.)

Florence Henderson, who according to IMDB is 76, looked great! (I should look so good at that age.) Hell, I don’t look that good right now.

Jennifer Grey, of Dirty Dancing fame, did herself proud. If Patrick Swayze was watching from above, I’m sure he was smiling. I’d heard she’d had a nose job long ago; and seeing her now, I’m kind sorry she had it done. She was distinctive before, now, not so much.

Amanda must’ve watched that VHS tape at least 100 times, literally. She got hooked on it, big time. And I always thought that was weird because she was just just a toddler when she first saw it. I don’t remember watching it all that often when she was that young; but in retrospect maybe I did.

What I do know is that every time she and Brett went to Grandma Mary’s house for a sleep-over she took that tape. Brett always took Willow, the Ron Howard fantasy movie. Eventually we had to take an extra VCR over to my mom’s house so those two wouldn’t fight over what to watch. Good thing my mom usually had a buzz on and really didn’t care what they wanted to watch- over and over and over… A grandmother’s patience is endless it seemed especially mixed with Jim Beam.

I actually watched Dirty Dancing again when it was on last week. I still enjoyed it and still wanted to be Baby Houseman. If I wanted to do that now however I fear that even with Doug waiting to catch me, it could get really ugly. I’m just imagining now taking a run, jumping up and hurtling myself through the air towards his waiting arms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpmILPAcRQo

That’s almost too much for me to even imagine. I speculate there’d be blood- lotsa blood and probably compound fractures too.

Sadly, I fear a block and tackle might be needed to make that happen these days, thereby changing the whole feel of that great moment at the end of the movie. Besides, Doug would just say he didn’t want to dance; and that’d just get me pissed off all over again. To this day I don’t understand his refusal to dance.

I guess I’ll just have to take recreating that scene that off my bucket list.

The only other person I had any real interest in seeing was David Hasselhoff. I remember reading that when he was on Baywatch, he did 400 sit ups a day to maintain his abs. Overall he looked OK. (He’s not keeping me up nights or anything; but he’s maintained himself well.)  His dancing though was another story.

Judge Bruno Tonioli called his dancing  “A bouquet of insanity.” The Hoff was the first celeb voted off. No more need be said about that.

The very best part of the night for me was hearing Santana play “Oye como Va.” Took me right back to college. I’m including a clip of him performing it live in 1971. I’m sure the young ones who read this might get a kick of seeing how Santana used to look. (Perhaps even how their dads used to look.)

Pardon the quality of the clip. It was shot with what are now antique cameras; and I’d bet that the person who shot the footage was probably stoned at at the time. So go easy with your criticisms young ones. So for all you old farts like me, I present Santana from 1971-

I spoke to Brett last night. He was telling me about his life and I was hanging on every word like a good mother should. I told him about a new phone company that was about to launch. After I explained all the perks, his only response was, “Does it include text?” I told him I didn’t know, but it would be incredibly cheap with unlimited minutes.

He told me that his generation, and the one below it, just doesn’t talk much on the phone anymore. He could actually live without a phone I was told, or at least the ability to speak on it. Text is the thing. Now I knew this to some degree. However, I had severely underestimated just how popular texting is. When I switched carriers 18 months ago, I put the three of us on one plan in an attempt to save money.

When the first bill arrived, I damn near fell over. Brett had almost 4K text messages! That was more than I could wrap my brain around. Not to mention that we didn’t have unlimited text. (Thank goodness I was able to get that bill lowered.) I know I’m texting more than I did two years ago since I upgraded and got a Sidekick with a QWERTY keyboard- 1 button, 1 letter. What a relief. All that push this button twice for this letter and three times for that one was making me crazy. I remember in the movie The Departed a guy was actually texting with his phone in the pocket. Brett didn’t even find that strange.

I do text now more than I did two years ago, especially to my kids. However, they text to someone they know is available to chat, not at work or in a movie where taking a call isn’t pc. I still don’t understand that. It seems like a lot of extra work to me. I always thought that having a conversation meant having an auditory experience. (Except for the deaf, of course.) However Wiki defines conversation as communication between multiple people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation. So I guess by that definition that smoke signals and jungle drums are conversations too. It’s fine by me. (It just still seems strange to text someone you’re sitting next to in the car.)

On the plus side, if our kids hit hard times, they can make big money out on the professional thumb wrestling circuit.