Toooooooepicks!

Still feeling my figure skating craving unassauged, tonight I was watching my copy of A/P's Jive OD from '98 for probably the first time since high school. I totally saw part of our Jive choreography from ballroom in there. They were doing the last half of it, the part with the standing-in-one-place-and-kicking-your-leg-out-and-around (that's totally the technical term for it). And sugar walks! Sort of. Sugar toe picks? It was as close an approximation as you can really get in skates, anyway.

(Yeah, I know, this shouldn't be surprising, since the compulsories and OD of ice dance purport to be ballroom on ice--well, mostly--but I don't remember entire steps being translated. Then again, I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to figure skating since I started ballroom, even though one of the original reasons I joined the club was because it was the closest I could get to actually doing ice dance my own self.)

Say, I should drag the other ballroomers over to a TV when a competition is on sometime this year...maybe the Olympics. This year's Original Dance rhythms are Rumba and Mambo and something else Latin, so if nothing else, there ought to be overuse of illusion fabric and gyno-lifts to mock. (Actually, these things are always present to mock, but excessively so in years with those particular rhythms, I feel.)

Tangent: Speaking of competitions, I reallyreallyreally hope Pechalat and Bourzat, the Marina and Gwendal clones, placed high enough at this week's Grand Prix event in France to make the cut in the ABC broadcast. I'd love to see how they skate.