Of Makeup and Men...and other TEB 2009 Observations

I’m quickly recalling how busy this blog will need to be over the next few months… gotta watch, gotta post some observations, gotta look over the next week’s event, gotta make some more predictions before the compulsory dances get underway, gotta watch… and so on, and so on…
I’ll do my best to keep up, but as you probably already know, there are several places out there you can go to read results and scores quicker… right, Laura ? Or MRR ? Or Lifeskate ? Or Aaron ?

(In case you need a quick fix, though… Ladies? Kim/Asada/Nakano. Men? Oda/Verner/Rippon. Pairs? Muk/Trank, Dube/Davison, Szol/Sal. (They came in THIRD? Oh, how they did…)Dance? Vir/Moir, Pech/Bour,.Kerr/Kerr.)

(I was 6-for-12 on my predictions, by the way… better than last year, though I must admit that half of those good guesses were thanks to a fairly predictable dance event.)

But me, I’m better at watching it all, taking notes as I go, and processing the most interesting observations for bloglike consumption. Here are the five that seemed the most noteworthy, though there was much to choose from…

(In no particular order)

+ Adam Rippon is blowing my mind. My first thought in watching his SP was of how much more mature he looks this season… physically as well as in terms of his skating. Wow. I know his axels weren’t clean in the free skate, but from the “Rippon Lutz” on down (can we just call it that already?), I was very impressed.

+ Everything oldies is new again . Rippon’s SP was to music from 1973’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull (composed by Neil Diamond, arguably at his pop-music prime)… Dube/Davison skated to another 1973 hit soundtrack—or, more specifically, song—in Hamlisch’s The Way We Were. And Yu-Na Kim’s Bond Medley, perhaps the “it” SP of the season, had to be primarily stemmed in ‘60s/’70s tunes as well. And I think all three ideas really worked. Where have these would-be warhorses been for the past 30-40 years?

+ Love Stories Redux pt.1: Was it just me, or did anyone else see several shades of another Canadian couple who skated to another tear-jerker ‘70s movie soundtrack when Dube and Davison got their “Way We Were” performance underway? (I loved it all nonetheless, except I think the complete turn-away from each other at the very end is a little harsh… maybe they could face apart while still holding hands? Streisand and Redford’s characters don’t hate each other at the movie’s end, after all.)

+ Love Stories Redux pt.2: When I saw that the Canadians were immediately followed by Mukhortova/Trankov with the real music from Love Story, I had one hand on the phone, ready to call the irony police. BUT… when I saw how beautifully they skated in their FS, finally, and how they seem to be getting along better (at least for now)… I realized it was another irony that consequentially cancelled out the first one. No phone calls were made. (Except to Savchenko/Szolkowy I simply shouted “what were you thinking?” in German and hung up.)

+ Random cosMENtology observation: Between the clownish Szolkowy, the downtrodden John Kerr (playing a lost soul in the FD), and the face-of-time look taken on by Bourzat, I can’t remember when I’ve seen more noticeable makeup on the men. And Johnny Weir wasn’t even skating here… (rim-shot!)

Maybe more observations Monday or Tuesday, if time allows!

For the Clip of the Day, here is Virtue/Moir’s DDG (Drop Dead Gorgeous) Mahler free dance… holy cow, how lovely. Let me know if this link stops working; don’t know if the ISU will let the TEB posts stay up this year.