When he dances the challenging quick step on Monday night, computer icon Steve Wozniak will be dancing on a broken left foot. “Don’t call it broken,” says Wozniak, 58. “Call it fractured. No, call it ‘crushed.’ That’s the word the doctor used.”
Whatever you call it,
ouch. It’s a small bone in the area of the left arch, and – unbeknownst to viewers - it was so swollen before the big premiere last Monday night that Wozniak sat out a major rehearsal on Sunday. He knew there was something amiss. But since so many parts of his body hurt, he wasn’t alarmed enough to quit. “When you’re rehearsing for
Dancing With The Stars, you feel like you’ve fractured
everything,” he says.
At that point, the producers must have wondered if season eight is cursed. They had already lost singer/songwriter Jewel and “Access Hollywood” host Nancy O’Dell to serious leg injuries before the opening credits.
But Wozniak told producers he felt good enough to go on with the show and promised to go to the doctor on Tuesday morning. When he did, he was accompanied by his pro partner, Karina Smirnoff, who battled a neck injury last season. “As soon as the M.R.I. came up on the screen, she went kind of silent and quiet,” says Wozniak. “And just seeing her, made me, for the first time, lose my laugh and go into a very worried, sad mode.”
The doctor gave him a foot cast and advised him that he could continue as long as the swelling stayed down. Wozniak, newly fired up about dancing, says he he’ll be trying a softer pair of dancing shoes and is determined not to quit. “If I were some crackpot, trying to be funny, trying to be Mr. Clown, I wouldn’t do the show,” he says. “But I love the show. And even though we got the lowest score from the judges, Jimmy Fallon did a comedy take-off on our dance that was so funny. He used the pink boa that we used, and we’re going to use that pink boa from now on. Karina and I are going to fight over it.”