Dancing With the Heather

I admit it, I'm watching Dancing With the Stars, and I must say I find something deeply disturbing about Heather Mills. She's just creepy, with her gaunt, wonky face—which, unnervingly, slopes downwards to the left, the same side as her fake leg—and her skinny 13-year-old’s frame somehow supporting her big "glamour model" tits. Her smile looks spectacularly forced, like an afterthought, and the tombstone teeth don't help, either. Maybe they're the cause of her mangled accent? Which also sounds fake, like she's dumbing it down to seem even more humble. And her determination to get her dancing right is just so, I don't know, aggressive. Maybe she should have been cast in Grindhouse instead of Rose MacGowan.

I might be completely wrong about her, of course: Perhaps I've been swayed by the negative reports that trail her every move like bad gas. But I don’t like her and I don’t want to have to look at her, even though I totally can’t help it and kind of enjoy hating to watch her and getting all worked up into a lather about it.

I’m also loving how the British press is cataloguing her every move on the show and quoting the most negative comments from abc.com’s message boards, suggesting they're all negative. Which they're not.   And the British readers, without even having seen the program, are screeching “She’s not a star!” and insisting that her Disabled Parking Badge be revoked: “She is making a mockery of the system designed to help people with genuine disabilities that affect mobility!” bellowed Peter, Bishops Stortford, Herts., no doubt shaking a virtual fist as he typed.

I’m kind of hoping she’s the first to go tonight, yet also hoping she stays just to see how pissed off the Brits get about it and to get all worked up about it myself. Call me crazy, you won't be the first.

UPDATE: She's back next week. Boo! Yay?

illustration by Blue Aerial Bergen