Donny Osmond is kicking himself all over the dance floor. Monday night’s
Dancing With the Stars semi-finals tango that disintegrated before our eyes started with a wardrobe malfunction: Osmond and his pro partner, Kym Johnson, tripped on her dress. “It all went to pieces,” said judge Bruno Tonioli.
“I’ve been there before, where things don’t work on stage,” says Osmond, who’s been performing since age five, “and you just have to pull yourself back up and move on. But it’s never happened to this extent, with this many people watching.”
That would be upwards of 18 million, if anyone’s counting. “We were both mortified when it was over,” says Johnson, who adds that the judges’ scores of three “7’s” - by far the lowest scores of the evening - were generous. “We’re so similar in our personalities,” she says. “Both perfectionists. And we did that dance so well in rehearsals.”
You can see the disappointment in their faces. Osmond has been the runaway favorite with the studio audience from the minute he joined the show. But he knows muffing one of his three dances on this all-important night does not bode well for his chances of making it into the finals. All three remaining women outscored him. And Mya, in particular, left him in the dust, scoring 85 out of a possible 100 points. Osmond scored 74.
In an unprecedented move, Osmond actually spoke to the judges at length during the commercial break after his second dance, the samba, during which he redeemed himself and received an “8” and two “9’s.”
Why was he chatting up Len, Bruno and Carrie Ann? “I needed to hear what they had to say,” says Osmond, “because they realized that the first dance was a disaster for us. They said, ‘You really pulled yourself back.’”
He had help. “I was really upset, too,” says Johnson. “But backstage, before our second dance, I had to switch into coach mode and not be upset. I told him, ‘If anyone can come back, you can.’”
“We just had to dust ourselves off,” says Osmond. “We had no choice.”