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3, 4, 5 degrees?
January 27, 2007
Earlier this evening, I read someone's waxing about Little Miss Sunshine, in which an amazing Abigail Breslin plays a young girl prepping for a beauty pageant. Later, when channel surfing, I stopped on CMT's Pageant School, which puts the 2007 Miss America contestants through a pre-pageant training camp. I instantly recognized one of the judges: Debbie Allen.
Ms. Allen has an impressive resume: Tony and Emmy nominations, one Golden Globe, a long list of directorships (A Different World, That's So Raven, Everybody Hates Chris), and credit for choreographing several Academy Award shows. Ms. Allen also has a well-known sister, Phylicia Rashad, who starred in The Cosby Show.
But the reason I know about Ms. Allen is her daughter, Vivian Nixon, who trained at the Universal Ballet Academy (formerly known as the Kirov Academy) down in D.C. (Although the academy has retained the name "Kirov" on its website, in all other aspects, to my knowledge, it presents itself as the Universal Ballet Academy.) Vivian Nixon starred in a badly-received Broadway musical called Hot Feet, and, perhaps more importantly, danced with The Ailey School, a subdivision of Alvin Ailey. A photo of the three Allen women here. To me, they don't look particularly alike. Ms. Allen looks like she should be the mother of Judy Reyes, a star of Scrubs. Check out these photos to see for yourself: Debbie Allen and her (taken in the night by aliens and groomed in the show business tradition of her birth mother) daughter Judy Reyes. Incredible!
Another woman who dances with Alvin Ailey (but in the professional company) is Alicia Graf. Ms. Graf studied at the Ballet Royale Academy in Columbia, where my father used to accompany. Having an inside link to a subdivision of one of the finest ballet schools in the entire universe makes the world even smaller than it already is.
But that's not all. More channel surfing led to some interesting discoveries. Kim Catrall, one of the Sex & The City sex kittens, appears in Big Trouble in Little China. Little Big League features Scott Patterson of Gilmore Girls. I just noticed that Mischa Barton of The O.C. fame played a ghost in The Sixth Sense. And a recent look at The Truman Show revealed Paul Giamatti as the control room director. Such revelations will continue to occur as long as I keep catching up on older movies and at least partially resist being swayed by the sexy graphics of the likes of Pan's Labyrinth.Labels: dance, film
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