Last week, Good Morning America’s Laura Spencer chose to mock six-year-old Prince George’s interest in ballet. “Prince William said Prince George absolutely loves ballet,” Spencer said Thursday. “I have news for you Prince William, we’ll see how long that lasts.”
Spencer rightly faced an avalanche of criticism for the casually flippant bullying. Professional dancers, amateur dance lovers, and parents of young male dancers filled Twitter with their disappointment.
And on Sunday, writer Patricia Ward Kelly, who was married to legendary dancer Gene Kelly before his death, published an open letter taking Spencer to task.
Here’s what Ward Kelly had to say, via Deadline,
In 1958, my late husband, the dancer, director, choreographer Gene Kelly, decided to take on the stigma facing male dancers in an Omnibus television program for NBC that he created and starred in called “Dancing, A Man’s Game.” He hoped that by aligning the great sports stars of the day—Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas, Vic Seixas, Sugar Ray Robinson, among others—he could challenge and destroy the shame surrounding male dancers once and for all. For Gene it was more than a professional task. It was, in his words, a personal “crusade” to show that dancers are athletes and that it is okay for a man to be graceful. As he says in the special: “What could be more graceful than a football player throwing a pass—what is more excitingly beautiful than the swift movement of a double play? Every motion a good athlete makes is as beautiful as any a dancer makes.”
Sadly, on August 22, 2019, Good Morning America elected to run a disgraceful segment about Prince George and his ballet classes. That host Lara Spencer would mock a boy’s study of ballet in a nationally televised morning show and that her colleagues would join in her derision is both unacceptable and incomprehensible.
She continued to describe the ways in which dancing is beneficial to athletes and how dedicated Kelly was to bringing dance to sports. “Gene would be devastated to know that 61 years after his ground-breaking work the issue of boys and men dancing is still the subject of ridicule—and on a national network,” she writes. “ABC must do better.”
Spencer issued a brief Instagram apology last week, which she expanded on on-air this morning, saying she’d gotten “a true education” over the last few days.
- Viola Davis is going to play Michelle Obama in (and executive produce) Showtime’s First Ladies series. (via THR)
- Elizabeth Warren loves Ballers and Ballers loves Elizabeth Warren. She wrote about her love of the show in her 2017 book This Fight Is Our Fight, which The Rock was seen reading in this weekend’s season premiere. It’s a very meta lovefest. (via The AV Club)
- Speaking of meta, I thought Joker was just channelling/ripping off King of Comedy, I didn’t know it was such a direct homage. (via Yahoo)
- Here for ALL OF THIS:
Live from your timeline, we’ve got some news. #SNL pic.twitter.com/7HrcoM8OPg
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) August 26, 2019
- It was a big day for trailers. Check out this one for the Natalie Portman astronaut drama Lucy in the Sky. (via YouTube)
- And this one for the trippy Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) show Briarpatch, starring Rosario Dawson. (via YouTube)
- And there’s also this one, for Apple TV’s Dickinson, which I wish I was into but I am not. It feels like they’re going for a punkishly anachronistic feel, ala A Knight’s Tale, which plenty of other projects have tried for and failed. (via YouTube)
What did you all see out there today?
(image: MGM)
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