Dancing with the Stars - We Knew Her When

My wife, Anna, has been watching Dancing with the Stars pretty faithfully. I watched only the first show because I wanted to see Jerry Rice and Kenny Mayne strut their stuff. Rice played one season with the Seahawks and Mayne is a horse race announcer and commentator and is from Seattle. We were very surprised to see Ashly Del Grosso, the woman who had the unfortunate circumstance of having to dance with the hip-hop artist. It seems Mr. P didn't have much interest in dancing, only showed up for a few lessons or practice sessisons and generally showed his contempt for the proceedings by wearing his baseball cap and doing little dancing.

Segue to some years back. We were traveling on one of our famous wanders. In Wyoming we visited Devil's Tower or as the Indians call it, Bearlodge. We had hiked around the base of the tower and watched climbers. It was a pretty warm day. Just outside the park entrance there was a small store with various tourist items for sale. What attracted us after our hike was ice cream. We bought towering cones piled high with ice cream and went outside to sit on the porch and watch the prairie dog colony nearby. A very handsome family came into the store, bought cones and soon joined us on the porch. Anna remarked on how lovely the children were. The children were beautiful ranging from about five to twenty-one. It turned out that thefamily was Mormon and were on a vacation before the boy friend of the oldest girl went off to do his mission. The mother said that she was a dance teacher from Salt Lake. We mentioned seeing a program on television that featured child dancers and that some of them had been from this family. There were nine children altogether. The mother asked the two youngest, a boy about five and a girl about six, if they would dance for us. They obliged by doing a little cha-cha for us. The girl was the vivacious Ashly that danced on Dancing with the Stars. What a small world.