I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  “Oh, man, Tamar—you don’t look so good!”

  “You tried it!” she responded automatically. But her husband, Vince, noticed her condition, too. He jumped up to take command of the situation.

  “I’ve got to take her to the hospital!”

  At Cedars–Sinai Medical Center, doctors hooked her up to an IV and began running different blood tests, but the results weren’t instantly available. She wasn’t an athlete, and she wasn’t in her twenties, and in the end her health just caught up with her. She hadn’t had a stroke, we knew that fairly quickly, but certain other conditions that could still be life-threatening hadn’t been ruled out. It was an extraordinary situation, like nothing I had ever experienced before. As difficult as the process can be, none of what happened was the show’s fault, because none of it could have been predicted.

  Dancing with the Stars was set to go live at five o’clock (it aired at eight on the East Coast, but in L.A. we were live at five). We had two dances for that week-nine episode, a solo contemporary to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and then a group dance to “Hey Jude.”

  The episode ran through the other couples and then came to our slot. With me standing there alone like an idiot, host Tom Bergeron conducted an interview on camera. “Where’s your partner?”

  “My partner’s in the hospital because she almost passed out during dress rehearsal.”

  “The judges will stay tuned to what is happening at the hospital,” Tom announced. “But here’s footage of Tamar and Val from dress rehearsal today.”

  The rule was that if you couldn’t dance in the actual show because of an injury, the producers would play rehearsal footage, and the couple got judged on that. I could see from the dress rehearsal recording that Tamar had been close to fainting the entire time she was dancing. The footage sucked, but I didn’t care anymore about what was happening on the show. As competitive as I was and as serious and committed as I was to my craft, her health was my number one priority. Maybe I had changed, maybe I had grown up a little, or maybe my Mirrorball win had taken the edge off, but for once I didn’t care about the competition. I just wanted to make sure my partner was all right.

  Across town at the hospital, though, Tamar had been battling it out with her husband and doctors, insisting she was well enough to hit a TV dance contest being shot a dozen blocks away. This wasn’t the Grammys, this was a ballroom dance competition with a partner she met two months ago. She probably thought she would never be this invested into this process. She had joined the show to have a good time and learn a little something. But she had grown into her commitment, until now here she was, literally putting her life on the line. How far she was willing to go was absolutely incredible to me. There was no rehearsal footage of our second routine. If she didn’t make it back to the set that day, we would be eliminated.

  “I’m not going to let Val down, not after all we’ve been through.” She finally decided to go against doctors’ orders, got into her car, and headed the mile down Beverly Boulevard to the studio.

  Our scheduled second number was coming up, and the clock was still ticking. She quickly slipped into a dress, slapped on some makeup, and tied her hair back, all the while barely seeing what was in front of her. She wobbled out toward the parquet as the stage manager counted down the seconds.

  “Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

  And suddenly there she was, much the worse for wear, maybe, but present nonetheless. Part of me was saying “This is stupid and ridiculous,” but another part of me was so proud that here was a true teammate and a friend for life.

  We did the rumba number, one that she hadn’t even had time to fully learn yet. I led her through the entire routine and she just followed, as if she had been doing it for years. We finished and she took her seat, where fellow celebrity contestant Nick Carter, formerly of the Backstreet Boys, sat next to her, holding her upright. Nick’s pro partner, Sharna Burgess, and I stood behind them, all of us in shock about what we had just witnessed. Tamar’s eyes were rolling around in her head again, and she was about to pass out on live television.

  “The marks are in, Tamar!” Tom announced. “The results are in and both you and Nick are in the semifinals!”

  The audience erupted in cheers. The whole place went nuts.

  “What just happened?” Tamar whispered.

  I gave her a hug. She murmured, “I don’t understand. I’m still about to pass out.”

  The show went into a commercial break and Tamar went straight back to the hospital. There doctors discovered she had a burst of blood clots, a very serious condition. The dance we had just done featured jumps, lifts, and runs, moves which could have had serious consequences for Tamar’s health.

  “If just one clot gets into your heart, it could be a wrap for you,” the doctor informed her, telling it like it was. “What don’t you understand about this? You cannot continue in this competition!”

  I remember when she broke the news to me. I came to visit while she was still in the hospital. “You tried it!” I said, and we both laughed. But we were so proud—I was proud of her, and most importantly she was proud of herself.

  What a trouper. In fact, Tamar Braxton proved herself that day to be what I consider a great teammate.

  DANCING WITH THE STARS WAS AN ABC SHOW, SO WE NATURALLY did all of our premieres, cast reveals, and finale events on the network’s hit flagship show, Good Morning America, which everyone knew as GMA.

  From the very start, I wanted to fit in on the GMA set, wanted it to be like home to me the same way it was for my brother. When he showed up at the show’s production facilities in Times Square, he was treated like an old friend. I loved the fact that host Robin Roberts would greet him with a “Damn, Maks! You look good!”

  It was actually through Robin that I became a member of the GMA family. Our friendship began the year before I became a pro on Dancing with the Stars. As part of the celebration of her fiftieth birthday in 2010, Robin made a running riff out of ticking off items on her bucket list—things she wanted to do before she kicked the bucket. “Dance with Maks Chmerkovskiy” was one of the entries, a fantasy she had evidently nursed for a long time.

  My brother was of course game, but Robin didn’t consider herself a natural dancer, so she felt she needed to take a few lessons beforehand. I was the obvious candidate for a dance teacher, because I was nearby, on the East Coast, and working as a coach and instructor at our Dance With Me social dance studio in Soho.

  It was nothing much, just a half-dozen sessions, but Robin proved such a warm and engaging person that we bonded instantly. Back then, I wasn’t by any means a known entity, having made only a few appearances on Dancing with the Stars for dance-offs or routines with my brother. I wasn’t a fan favorite. And no one gravitated to me because of my TV popularity.

  During the in-between period before I signed on as a pro, I found the whole Dancing with the Stars scene difficult to navigate. That world was very well stocked with really flashy go-getter personalities, people who had aggressive ways of establishing their spheres of influence. At times the show’s set in West Hollywood seemed to me to be where a pack of wild dogs peed to mark their territory. I thought that kind of shit was foul, and wanted to tell people to go pee in their own corners, not in the commons where we all were supposed to coexist. Even beyond that, they also all knew each other, and here I was a newbie, with a “kid-brother” reputation to live down.

  Maks flew to New York to dance on GMA with the birthday girl. The routine they did was nothing fancy—she wore a leopard-print dress and Maks wore jeans—but the other hosts gathered around to act as “judges” and a fun, goofy time was had by all. The paddles that the judges held up offered only one possible score: 10.

  The time spent rehearsing with Robin allowed me to feel a little more like an insider than I had before—both in the world of GMA, but also in the TV community that existed around it. So I got to know Robin, but I wanted more. With GMA I always had this fantasy of
me coming into the Times Square studio and being recognized and welcomed. The image floating in my head had me glad-handing my way through the staff. “Hey, what’s up, Lara? Hey, George, how are you?” Being from New York, the Times Square GMA studio was like a landmark to me. This wasn’t some soundstage in Hollywood—though those were pretty cool, too—this was like holy ground, a studio right next to the Dow ticker, the news zipper, where they held the biggest New Year’s Eve celebration in the world. This was Robin Roberts and George Papadopulous, faces of every single one of my mornings growing up. They were interesting people, and like always, I just wanted to connect and have conversations with people who I respected on a very high level.

  Fast-forward to the spring of 2016, when I finally had a chance to realize my fantasies. In March of that year the cast of the upcoming Season 22 of Dancing with the Stars was announced on GMA. The audience and staffers went crazy with applause when it was revealed that I had been matched with a GMA favorite, Ginger Zee, the show’s in-house meteorologist. Through that alliance I not only made a friend for life, but was granted the keys to the inner sanctum at GMA. I got to know the sound techs and the grips, the camera operators and the other hosts. That’s the level of friendship I have with GMA now, after my Dancing with the Stars season with Ginger.

  And an awesome season it was. I was just coming off a show that ended with my partner checked into a hospital. Thankfully the situation sorted itself out without serious repercussions, but it still served as something like a reality check for me. After my season with Tamar I had to step my game up to another level. I realized that not every dance partner would be a twenty-five-year-old Rumer Willis, someone whom I could push physically, mentally, and emotionally to be all that she could be. Going forward, I would have to learn to make accommodations for partners who were mothers, wives, and other adult women who had a lot going on in their lives beyond Dancing with the Stars.

  Husbands were part of the equation now, and I had to consider the natural, instinctive reaction a husband might have, seeing another man fully in his wife’s business. I was never physically disrespectful, always mindful and classy, but that didn’t mask the fact that I would be holding another man’s wife five hours a day every day for three months.

  My partners and I sweated blood during rehearsal in order to create art every Monday night. That sort of experience brings people together at a very tight level. When my partner happened to be a twentysomething girl from Hollywood, she’d fall in love. But with a grown-up mother and wife, the relationship had to be compartmentalized. She might fall a little, but she had to go back to her real home and real love afterward.

  The situation itself tended to bring out the green-eyed monster of jealousy. A husband might ask his wife, “What are you so in love with? I’m right here, and you’re in love with your tango? Are you in love with your tango or are you in love with your dance partner?”

  That’s the dynamic I had to keep firmly in mind, that no, this grown-up woman next to me, who had her own adult life and loves and family—she wasn’t falling in love with me. She was in love with the process, with the prospect of winning the Mirrorball, with the whole intense circus of Dancing with the Stars.

  So before every rehearsal period I asked myself what kind of season this was going to be, what kind of dance instructor I would become. I needed to be a little bit more mindful, adjust my methods a bit more carefully, and fit my style into the lifestyle of my partner.

  The old distinction between lessons at Rising Stars Dance Academy and those at our Dance With Me studios served me well. One was a boot-camp-style affair where we prepared young souls for the world of competition, and the teaching was very much hard-core and authoritarian. Do this, don’t do this, shut up about it. The other was a grown-up social affair, softer, warmer, more a case of “What would you like to do?” One was tailored to children, the other to adults.

  With Ginger Zee, I knew immediately that I had a partner who was very much an adult. She was a mother of a newborn son, just six weeks old. She had joined the show a month and a half after giving birth. It was as if her placenta had just dropped and the umbilical cord was still pretty much intact.

  She was one of the coolest people I had ever met, and if we had met ten years earlier, in a different life and in different circumstances, I would have probably married her. As it was, we developed a great friendship that never once strayed into the romantic. I got a contact high seeing this young couple, Ginger and her husband Ben Aaron, still practically newlyweds, riding the euphoria of having their first child. I became the really cool fifth wheel on their baby stroller.

  Ginger did Dancing with the Stars to help her rebuild her body after the atom-bomb impact of pregnancy. But I had to ask myself, Was it too soon? The physical part of the process was hard for her, and meanwhile she was still working as a meteorologist on GMA. For all that, I was overjoyed to once again be able to spend a rehearsal period in my city, the first time since I was paired with Sherri Shepherd during Season 13.

  It was spring, and if there is any place better to be in springtime than Manhattan I don’t know about it. Keep your Aprils in Paris, I’ll take a day in May strolling down a street in the Village. New York had become even more of my town during that period, because the family had opened a Dance With Me studio in Soho, the trendiest and high-endiest of all high-end neighborhoods in Manhattan. It served as a signal the Chmerkovskiy ambition had fully realized its American dream.

  I could walk on a sidewalk crowded with thousands of interesting people, head into the rehearsal studio, hit the parquet, and teach an incredibly fun woman how to dance. I was working, but I was living my life at the same time, and that allowed me to be a little looser than I’d been lately, not take things so seriously. It’s that feeling you have when you genuinely want to come to work. After we finished our rehearsals I became that most enviable creature in all the world, a free man in Manhattan.

  “See you later, Ginger,” I’d say, already halfway out the door. “Good rehearsal, girl, practice your steps, okay?” Then I would hop right on the phone with my homies. “Hey, whatup? Whatcha doing? Wanna grab some snackage? Fuck, yeah, let’s go!” It was my dream life, being surrounded by my friends and family working at my dream job.

  Yes, there were challenges. Could she dance? No. Was she physically fit? Not really. But Ginger Zee was the perfect teammate because she was intelligent as fuck, which for me was everything. We talked about every subject under the sun. I learned a lot from her, and got to vent to her about situations large and small. She always gave me a measured, interesting response. As a teacher, I’ve only ever been as smart as my student.

  We developed a great, easy banter. When I first met her, I said, “Oh, we’ve got a little generation gap here.”

  “Fuck you!” Ginger returned. “I’m only six years older than you!” I teased her about being a meteorologist, meanwhile secretly thinking, How dope is that?

  “You’re a weather girl,” I teased her.

  “I’m a meteorologist!” she said, pretending to be offended. “There’s a difference. I am a scientist.”

  “Listen, I’m just saying that you could pass aesthetically for a weather girl, because weather girls are hot and you’re hot. If you’re a scientist, too, good for you.”

  Forget the physical process, because physicality was the least complicated part, since I could act the dictator and simply order Ginger to get it done. I pushed her to her physical new-mom edge.

  I remember at the first rehearsal we were working out some basic stuff when she put up her hand and called a halt.

  “Hey, listen, I need to pause for a second,” she said. “Do you mind if I take a ten-minute break?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  We were in a studio right next to the Empire State Building. She crossed over to the side of the space where we’d been dancing, sat on the couch, and unpacked an apparatus, all tubes and buttons and motors. Then she undid some buttons, sla
pped the apparatus aboard, and started pumping.

  “I’m still breastfeeding,” she said, explaining the obvious.

  I recorded a little video of her pumping and put a soundtrack over it: Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.” Ginger had a good laugh about it. I realized that we had become family. I always put forth my willingness to connect, and whenever it was reciprocated, the other person and I reached some sort of family status. I was happier than I had ever been working with a partner.

  Because I had been able to remain in New York during the rehearsal period, I got to celebrate my birthday surrounded by old friends, new friends, and all my family members. It was a milestone, my thirtieth.

  “What do you want to do?” everyone asked.

  “What do I want to do?” I knew exactly. “I want to go back to Brooklyn, to Brighton Beach, to the most Russian club in the city—that’s where I want to go! And I want to bring all of my Hollywood friends to that bitch!”

  Rasputin, the place was called, closed now. Rasputin, named for the mad Russian monk who mesmerized the czarina. Rasputin, on Coney Island Avenue near Avenue X, just blocks down from my old grade school.

  The Russian community of Brighton Beach by then wasn’t what it once had been. But Rasputin represented the nearest thing to the old clubs where I used to dance with my brother and our partners on Friday and Saturday nights. Even though they were now more than a decade in the past, I always held those gigs close to my heart. No one could have been happier than I was then.

  South Brooklyn, Gravesend, Brighton Beach: the essence of where I came from. At some point early in the night at the Rasputin, I managed a toast—I know it was early because I was still able to speak.