James' neuer Blogeintrag bei Parade.com

I had a ton of fun with last night’s salsa. It felt really good to perform and we worked our butts off for that one. The foxtrot was cool, but it was frustrating because I didn’t have a lot of freedom to be myself. It was more about learning proper technique for a much more traditional dance, whereas the salsa—of course there’s traditional steps, which we incorporated–but there’s your personality and to me it’s more of a show. And that’s fun because I’m throwing more of myself in the mix and that makes it more comfortable for me. Our routine had lots of very, very quick and complicated spins and lifts, and quite honestly we didn’t get them every time, so I’m glad we pulled it off. I’m really proud of what we did. We didn’t pull out all the tricks, though, we’ve got a couple things up our sleeves for more dances to come.
I was highly complimented with Carrie Ann’s response last night. Personally, I thought Peta wore a little too much, but we’ve still got clothes to lose—he says somewhat jokingly! It was the salsa, we wanted to make it a little sexier, so having a shirt that came undone a little bit seemed perfectly acceptable.
It feels pretty cool to be tied for first place this week. I joked about Charlie and Meryl being the competition before we saw them dance, but that joke turned out to be reality. Those two are professional dancers, let’s be real. I say that complimentarily because they are both very, very talented and they’re killing it, so to be up there with them is a gigantic compliment. It definitely raises the bar for me to keep working as hard as I can to stay there, but you can’t worry about it. I’m just going to do my best like always and at the end of the day just try and have fun. I think that reads better than any kind of technique.
The double elimination this week was honestly shocking. They don’t tell us any of this kind of stuff, so we found out as soon as the audience did. The first thing that ran through my mind is “that sucks” and then I starting thinking, logically we can’t be eliminated during the switch, so there’s only so many weeks, they have to eliminate two people at some point. I’m glad they got it out of the way then and I hope they don’t try and pull something like that again.
Since we went straight to press after the show I didn’t really get to say goodbye to Diana or Sean. I gave Sean a handshake on the floor, but I hope that after this we can all meet up. I didn’t get to know him too well, but Diana was just the biggest sweetheart and so much fun. I might throw a wrap party and she’ll be the first invitation.
With the big switch coming up, polls are open for people to start voting who they’d like us to be paired with. I haven’t looked at Twitter for the pairings too much, but I’ve got an idea. If you watch the show, they seem to be trying to playing two people against each other in multiple pairs. So maybe they’re trying to encourage that, but in all honesty I don’t really care because I hope to go back to Peta. I’ll have fun with whoever, but I really hope it’s temporary.
Next week, we’re dancing the jive. We want to show another side. To do the same thing we did for salsa wouldn’t be as exciting, so we’re going to make it fun. We’re talking about the most memorable year of my life, which turned out to be a very positive message and the reason I’m doing the show is to spread that positivity and encourage people to follow their dreams. I think we’re going to maybe even go back to my musical theater roots, so there might be more of a performance aspect, which will be fun. We haven’t started addressing our costumes yet, but it’ll probably start out a little more conservative than we did for the salsa– we’ll have some fun pieces, maybe some props or something to play with.