In your satin tights...

Tonight, the second season of Dancing with the Stars premieres on ABC--and I'm completely willing to give them that bit of unasked-for, uncompensated publicity, because I love the show that much. I love it so much that I'm staying in Indiana through tomorrow morning just so that I can watch this two-hour show with my mother, while we eat a pizza and drink too much wine. Semi-drunken reality-show-dance-watching with one's mom? with a fire? and a sleeping (or begging) dog? In my world, that's pretty much the apex.

Because of the show, and probably because of my impending traveling (and subsequent return to all those pressing matters like creating syllabi, reading assigned works, and revising articles), I'm feeling pretty scattered this morning. Thus, what you're going to get from me today is a snappy piece of verse I picked up yesterday, when my mother and I cracked into the three-DVD set of Wonder Woman episodes my parents gave me for Christmas. Now, I have long had a huge thing for Wonder Woman--enough that my Brooklynite best friend, upon coming into my Ithaca apartment for the first time, said to me, "Wonder Woman holds a talismanic power for you, eh?" Whether it was the Pez dispenser (a gift from one of my college friends, at the beginning of our senior year when I was trying to do basically everything), or the 11" posable doll, or the calendar, or the little picture on my bathroom mirror that tipped her off, I never knew. And I have also long known that Wonder Woman was one of my favorite television shows when I was a child. But it's been decades since I watched it, and I realized as episode one started last night that I didn't remember it at all. So imagine my delight--especially since I just rolled off teaching a poetry course and a course on feminism--when these theme song lyrics came flooding out of my parents' television:

Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman!
All the world's waiting for you,
and the power you possess.

In your satin tights,
Fighting for your rights
And the old Red, White and Blue.

Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman!
Now the world is ready for you,
and the wonders you can do.

Make a hawk a dove,
Stop a war with love,
Make a liar tell the truth.

Wonder Woman,
Get us out from under, Wonder Woman.
All our hopes are pinned on you
And the magic that you do.

Stop a bullet cold,
Make the Axis fall,
Change their minds, and change the world.

Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman!
You're a wonder, Wonder Woman!

I dare you to find my favorite couplet. You know you want to. And you absolutely know that I did my Lynda Carter dance in the family room throughout the song, which has this fantastic proto-disco thing going.

It turns out to be a terrific show, by the way, though I don't imagine myself bingeing on it the way I did with, say, Freaks and Geeks or Wonderfalls, both of which I watched in six-hour bouts. Somehow, I always thought it was set in the 1970s, but it's actually a WWII show (hence the patriotism), which means that you get caricatures of Nazis everywhere. And the invisible plane alone makes the show worth checking out. Plus, Cloris Leachman plays Wonder Woman's mother. But what all this love also means is that I'm now expecting a lot more from Joss Whedon's film than I would have otherwise...

(You can find audio of the theme song pretty easily using that master brain Google; I linked it up with this post for about five minutes before I started feeling really dubious.)

sources for today's images: 1) Art.com; 2) a random site that somehow got linked up with another random site.