At the end of Day 1, thirty-two dancers have made it through. Then we get a montage of Nigel throwing out some dance terms to auditioners, some of whom can perform the Russian jeté or whatever, some of whom can't. No one is asked to do The Sprinkler, so I'd be shit out of luck. The magic of editing makes Dan look really baffled by what Nigel is on about it, because he's just all hip-hop, y'all! We return to Dancing Derrick, who demonstrates moves like "Airplane Turbulence" "Land The Plane" and "The Toothbrush." They're as awe-inspiring as they sound.
Jenna Dejosia, 21, from Blue Point, N.Y., "knows she can dance," and we're spending an awful lot of time with her for someone whom we already saw just before commercial crying and cursing out Nigel, so we know where this is going. She can't even keep her balance as she attempts to leap and spin for the judges. Dan asks if she's ever been taught the proper way to break, and she says yes, and then Mary lowers the boom by asking her if she's saving it for another time. Then we find out she's a dance teacher, so Nigel breaks his promise to himself that he wasn't going to be mean. She stomps off stage, cries and swears, and tops off her overall crappiness with the always lovely "he should go back where he came from."
Chasmar Wells, 18, from Rochester is all angles and camouflage pants. The judges don't like him, and flat-out laugh at him. Melissa Browne, 21, from Schenectady flails about alarmingly until Nigel calls her a dancing version of Ugly Betty. D'oh! That's on ABC, Nigel!
Hanna-Lee Sakakibara, in addition to being the place where Puff the Magic Dragon comes from, grew up in Israel, and worked as a dancer at weddings (?) and "events," and was dancing at a wedding when the floor collapsed, and we see it, on harrowing home video. She fell three-and-a-half stories and was partially buried in rubble. Twenty-four people were killed. Three-hundred and fifty people were injured. Her jaw and nose were broken, and she has metal plates in her face. She dances in a red halter top and short denim shorts. Unfortunately, she's not great, and Dan's not interested, but Mary and Nigel are perhaps a little more willing to acknowledge the whole degree of difficulty involved in being partially buried in rubble when a building collapses, and want to see her in choreography.













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