Hollywood Dancesport Championships

Warner Center Marriott, Los Angeles, California, November 3-7, 2010
By David Easa, MD.

This competition was organized by Michael Chapman, Mary Murphy and Fidel Nabor so we knew it would be executed to perfection.  Attention to detail is Michael Chapman’s strength as we witnessed previously at the Millennium Comp which was held earlier this year in St Petersburg, Florida. This was only the second year of this event for Michael; there were over 5,000 entries which is pretty impressive and a testament to Michael’s reputation. Overall, I would consider this a medium size comp if you define size by the number of entries and reserve small comps for those around 2,000 (like the Hawaii Star Ball) and large ones over 10,000 like the Millennium.

In any case, for me, it was a nice size because I had 2 to 3 competitors for many of my heats. (It is clear that men my age are either already dead or effectively dead:  as they are often observed planted firmly on the sofa nuzzling their remote controls). Ladies generally are armed with a greater love of dance which ostensibly results in greater competition; the other student from Hawaii, Maria Handl, had many more highly contested heats.   

Maria and I were accompanied by our instructors Lucas Jaime and Yanna Samkova; the four of us represented the Divino Ritmo Dance Studio. We met a few Hawaii transplants there and also one other Hawaii dancer at the competition. “Us Hawaii folk” did very well and it was an enjoyable time that was full of dance and entertainment, but also reasonably relaxing given the size of the competition and the organizers’ well thought out, detailed and thoroughly prepared and executed event.

I realize in my past blogs, I have regurgitated a running commentary of the event covering the venue, the competition, the professional dancers, and the local tourist sites with some effort at balance.  For a breather from this encyclopedic travelogue approach, I will provide a bit more detail (more than you will ever want to know) from a few of my observations, heavily doused with bias and personal opinion.  So I admit this to you upfront in case you seek truth rather than willing to accept my skewed interpretation.

Michael is good.   Yes, he and the other organizers did an excellent job.  Breakfast buffets….great egg white omelets, although the fruit salad was a little tired.  Bananas and water were provided complementary in the ballroom for a quick pick me upper, a sandwich and salad counter right outside the ballroom during lunch hours. Free popcorn in the foyer right outside the ballroom for an extra lift, chocolate balls in your room at bedtime, T-shirts and picture frames presented to all students who purchased the full package, the dinners were all sit down except for one buffet, and they were accompanied by a live musician playing a lot of oldies with a great synthesizer….”She loves you/yeah, yeah, yeah”.

Dinners were good to excellent with a decent variety, although that large slab of steak served on Friday night frightened me a bit now that my diet has shifted to less meat and more digestible greens. It seems like Michael has thought out all of the fine aspects that students would need and want to be happy and comfortable, and has provided them to us without asking. Only one complaint!

The hotel was about 30 to 45 minutes (LA traffic is brutal) from Hollywood.  Well Michael acknowledged that it was unfortunate that there was nothing available any closer to Hollywood that would accommodate the volume of dancers.  The hotel was itself acceptable, although nothing to write home about.  Why is it that the invariably the lobby of any hotel is usually preserved and reasonably pristine but the rooms are the first to suffer the indignity of time without shame?  And shockingly, you had to call the front desk to get a mini refrigerator to your room which they gladly provided you even free of charge.  Yikes, I was a little on edge wondering where to put my bottled water and snacks. 

Arriving one day earlier, my dance teacher Yanna and I ventured to see some of the Hollywood and Beverly Hills sites. We got our fill on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of Hollywood for the last billion years, or at least that’s what it felt like….temperatures ranging to 96-104F.  We landed our cab at the Chinese Theatre which was properly adorned in the typical Chinese architecture, ornate and lovely as it stood protected by two large Fu (or Foo) Dogs flanking the entrance.

Another building worth mentioning was a beautifully preserved movie theatre, the El Capitan that was built in the 1920’s.   There were expensive shops that that you could find anywhere, but to purchase items in Hollywood, you would have to pay three times more than in the next town.  Then there was an endless barrage of shops selling junk, I mean souvenirs, and more junk and even more junk.  Just how many plastic academy award trophies do you need to stack on a wall to get people’s attention? 

A tour bus took us around to see all of the sites and pointed out where all the celebrities lived, the gate that Michael Jackson’s body came out of that fateful day, the Landmark Motor Hotel where Janis Joplin committed suicide at 27 (an unwilling member of the 27 Club which includes Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, etc), and an endless list of homes and mansions that you could only imagine but never really see since they were buried by fences, trees and other barriers that prevented any meaningful view.  The tour guide was really cheesy, so cheesy that even the cheesy guests (excluding your truly and Yanna of course) did not tip the guide a single dime (I felt sorry for the poor sap and emptied my wallet to him).

When he was bored and between hidden mansions, he would embarrass passengers and drivers in other vehicles with some small talk, and even chased after expensive sports cars and land rovers looking for celebs that he ostensibly identified driving past – the veracity of such bravado remained unsubstantiated leaving only his pathetic word as proof.  Anyway, that turned out to be the highlight of our tour.  We took a second bus that we were imprisoned on for 2 hours…you either sweltered in the hot sun on the deck or were asphyxiated on the first level by the exhaust fumes that found their way through cracks and crevices of this enclosed and under ventilated tomb, made in the 1920’s and propelled by a prehistoric manual gear shift mechanism that sent earthquakes up your spine during shifting, and forcing you to almost simultaneously inhale and gasp a plume of non air-conditioned stink.

Intelligently, Yanna chose to swelter on the open sun deck; I was sure that she would burn red as a ripe tomato but somehow her skin laughed off the insult with not so much as a hint of pink sunburn! Still, she was a bit drained from that experience.  I was brain dead as I was sucking on some mixture of exhaust fumes that put me to sleep on my way to the big sleep. When I woke up, for an instant, I thought I was back in New Delhi riding on one of their put puts swimming in a sea of highway smog…..what a nightmare.  OK enough of Hollywood and Whine…..

Part B will continue in tomorrow's West Side Story blog.