Free Wallflower In Bloom by Claire Cook Page A

pick it up again, I got a little bit wobbly. Lack of sleep and those damn time zone changes will do it to you.
    As soon as I got back to my bed, I was okay again. It was like my bed was this great big soft fluffy life raft, and I was just floating around in the middle of the ocean. The water could be teeming with sharks and stingrays and idiot boyfriends and guru brothers who could suck the life out of you, but as long as I stayed right here, nothing could touch me.
    I fired up my laptop and opened a news site. I clicked past a bunch of burglaries and shootings and wars and cheating politicians and rising this and shortages of that, looking for a ray of sunshine. I mean, what a world.
    A headline jumped out at me: “Celebrity Dancer-to-Be Checks Into Rehab, Dancing With the Stars Viewers to Choose Last-Minute Replacement.” A producer from DWTS had been trying to get Tag on the show for at least three seasons now. Tag was pretty athletic, but he danced a lot like Elaine on Seinfeld , so it had become kind of a family joke. Maybe I didn’t get the pick of the gene pool when it came to some things, but I’d been the best dancer in the family by a long shot.
    Oh, how I’d loved to dance when we were kids. And I was good. Everybody said so. Even in my crib, according to my parents, as soon as I’d hear music I’d pull myself up by the rails and start bouncing away in perfect time to it.
    I started dance classes at five. I was a fluffy ducky in my first recital. When it was over I refused to take off my scratchy yellow tutu. I even slept in it until it fell apart. By third grade I was so good I was readyfor a double promotion. The teacher moved me into Colleen’s ballet, tap, and modern jazz combo class. I pointed, I tapped, I made jazz hands. I practiced all week on the linoleum floor in the kitchen so I could keep up with the big girls on Saturday mornings.
    And then my mother, my own mother , talked the teacher into letting Joanie into the same class. Just so she wouldn’t have to spend the whole morning chauffeuring us around to different activities.
    “Oh, she’s adorable,” everybody said. And then suddenly Joanie was the family dancer.
    The whole thing was so traumatic that after the session was over, I dropped out, never to dance again. At least in public. The truth was that I turned into a closet dancer. Instead of singing in the shower, I danced. Even now, when I checked into a hotel room on business and All That Jazz or Footloose or Dirty Dancing just happened to be playing, I’d pull the curtains closed and dance my ass off.
    I clicked on the link.
     
Actress Kelly Genelavive checked into rehab this week after being arrested for allegedly stealing an Oscar belonging to her former boyfriend, actor Kent Lazer, and putting it up for sale on eBay .
    I liked her spirit. If she wasn’t in rehab, I’d call her up right now and tell her about Mitchell and the golf cart so we could commiserate. I took another sip, smaller this time, and went back to reading.
     
The mandatory thirty-day inpatient internment resulted in the cancellation of Genelavive’s earlier commitment to this season’s Dancing With the Stars , slated to begin rehearsals next week. The show has left the choice of her replacement to its viewers, and aFacebook page has been set up for voting purposes. The female candidate with the most votes by midnight EST tonight will join this season’s DWTS celebrity and professional dancers in Los Angeles on Monday .
    The voting link followed, along with the proclamation, “IT COULD BE YOU.”
    Wow. It could be me. I mean, it really could be me. I was just one step away from Tag, who was guru to thousands upon thousands. He’d maxed out his Facebook friend list, and his Facebook fan list was enormous. His Twitter followers more than tripled his combined Facebook numbers. And his e-list, the one that we’d been building for the last ten years by collecting e-mails with event registrations and with every