Its small dark space reminded him of an old-fashioned confessional, if one ever had to take all one’s clothes off to go to confession. It gave the stripped-naked soul a whole new look, not to mention the rhythmic sweep of cold dye as one assumed the position and turned.
If the object was to be reborn looking like a Beach Boy, it had worked.
Matt knew he’d hate this celebrity dancing show and all its works, but everyone, including Temple and his boss at WCOO-FM, hadn’t wanted him to miss this “opportunity.” An opportunity to look like an idiot in front of a local audience. If only the exposure was just local.
Since this was Las Vegas and nothing in Vegas was really “local,” the half-hour Hollywood gossip shows were all over the rehearsals. He never knew who would burst through that closed door besides his drill sergeant, ballet master, and dancing partner, Tatyana Tereshchenko, aka Tatyana the Terrible, five-foot-three inches of wiry and wily Russian tsunami.
She burst in now as if summoned by his thought, wearing a wispy tease of skirt over her lime-green leotard and tights, toting a bag for towel and bottled water.
“Matt-eeeu, Matt-eeeu, Matt-eeeu,” she mispronounced his name in her heavy Russian accent. “Are you ready to lift Tatyana up to the heavens today?”
“It’s just Matt,” he said. No point in correcting her. The long form of his given name was Mathias. “And I’m game for lifts if you are.”
“Of course you are,” she said. Her teaching technique was the whiplash application of carrot-and-stick in rapid alteration. She came close, suddenly kittenish. “Such lovely strong shoulders. Svimming is the most vonderful sport for dancer. Makes long, lovely muscle, all over.”
She accompanied this inciting conclusion with strokes and purrs, her position being that his ex-priest status had made him shy.
With her, a Tasmanian devil would be shy.
“But,” she added, drawing back and pulling herself up like a ballerina on pointe. “You have rhythm and we must pull that out of you before the competition begins, or Tatyana will not vin and one thing is sure: Tatyana will vin. Ca-peach? As they say on, on . . . These Three Sopranos!”
“Capeach,” Matt repeated dutifully, amused by her slaughtering the language and the TV show name, which he took as a deliberate ploy.
In a week of lessons, he’d learned Tatyana was a force of ego. She was the Yorkshire terrier that lived to boss around Great Danes. And she truly had a passion for dance, and for making him into a dancer.
“Good. You learn. With Tatyana you learn to be dancer and love it. So. Today. Surprise.”
He wasn’t surprised when the door opened again and a cameraman backed in, filming the incoming newcomers. Oh, my God! Surprise was right.
In came Ambrosia, his nightly on-air predecessor host at WCOO and his “Midnight Hour” producer, wearing a leopard-print caftan and singing “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man” while banging a jangling circle of wood and metal overhead.
The cameraman kept backing up so far he almost tripped on the floor mat, just before Matt himself leaped forward to steer him around the barrier like a balky dance partner. He’d picked up a move or twelve from the driven diva who was his coach.
The cameraman had backed up so far because Ambrosia was three-hundred-pounds-plus of quivering leopard-skin-pattern caftan, and she was followed by a chorus line of women equally larger than life and as exotically clothed as she, or more so.
They were not shy, that was for sure.
Tatyana was grinning like a demon brat.
“So, Matt-euw. You say as priest you like to visit these gospel music churches. Miz Ambrosiana has brought whole gospel group to rehearsal. You will no longer hide rhythm from those long, hot shoulder muscles and hips, right, Miz Ambrosiana?”
“Right, girlfriend! We all gonna hip-hop today!”
Ambrosia began by bumping hips with him, but not before he could perform an evasive maneuver that kept him on his feet.
“Show us what you learned at dance school today, Beach Boy,” Ambrosia urged.
Matt had heard her selecting songs that soothed and inspired her radio call-in listeners for months now. She was a wonder at massaging sad hearts and sore feelings back into some hope of functioning again. He knew her repertoire, and she knew he’d played the organ a little and liked Bob Dylan.
So they could do a little act for the cameras, which was always what cameras demanded.
“Shall we, Sister Ambrosia?” he said.
“Shall we, Brother Matt?”
“A little Dylan?” he suggested.
“And a lotta rhythm.”
After he led on the first line, she joined in singing the rollicking, feel-good anthem of “When the Ship Comes In” as if rehearsed, while the other women clapped their hands and tambourines and shook their booties and joined in.
They formed a line to march around the room New Orleans funeral style, Matt turning to waltz Ambrosia in a circle, then do-si-do among a few women of the church choir, borrow a tambourine and do a little arms-raised hip-banging with a three-hundred-pound dynamo, then perform a dip with a tall, skinny woman playing the kazoo.
By then the song had segued into “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine” and Matt had circled into the center of the room to sweep Tatyana up into the alternating over-the-hip lifts of the swing dance they’d practiced.
When he let her feet hit floor, she grinned into the camera coming in for a close-up and crowed, “We are gonna be ready to rock with the angels on tonight’s show.”
Wrap and roll.
The cameraman left, happy not to have been steamrolled under, grinning at the great sound and motion he’d recorded.
The churchwomen filed out laughing and gossiping, Ambrosia last.
“Were you surprised to see me?” she asked Matt after he hugged her goodbye at the door.
“I was floored.”
“Did we help?”
He considered. “Sistah, if the church choir can shake it like that, so can I.”
“Right on! Don’t hold back. That’s what you tell our people out there in radioland almost every night, and that’s what we do to show ’em the way.”
“Amen.”
“Now we vork,” came a tight, light voice behind him.
Matt turned around to study his tiny but fierce taskmaster. No one who had heard Ambrosia’s hypnotically soothing voice for years over the airwaves knew she was a woman of size. Now the world would.
If she was willing to “bare all” on TV for him, he guessed he should be willing to reveal a little “rock and roll and rhythm” for her. Besides, he couldn’t let Temple down by looking like a dork.
“Now we work,” he agreed.
Danny Dove regularly dropped by all the rehearsal rooms, being the general overseer as well as chief judge. Matt was glad he came by to help with lifts.
This was Vegas, baby. Dramatic “lifts” might be rarely allowed on Dancing With the Stars, but here they were encouraged.
“You two are made for lift training,” Danny diagnosed. “You Tarzan, she Jane and weighs a hundred pounds tops. Perfect. And you,” he told Matt, “are already at home with slinging a petite woman around.”
“He may be able,” Tatyana said, “but he is blushing! This is the trouble. I need a mate with erotic command.”
“A ‘partner,’ ” Danny corrected her quickly, taking pity on Matt after having picked on him himself. “And you need acrobatic command.”
“Whatever this language means. He must lift me with confidence and skill, and look like he likes it. So far, you would think I was a teacup, when I must be a . . . a kettle.”
“A teakettle,” Danny corrected her again, “a hot Russian samovar, maybe, about to blow its top.”