Here at West Coast Sound, we pride ourselves on delivering the finest breaking bands, underground artists, and outliers of music and culture directly to your generalized face region everyday. From secret Flaming Lips shows to circuit-bending freaks, we serve up only the most innovative, cutting edge material from across L.A. and the globe. But every now and again, to hone our sharply attuned discernment skills, we must experience the opposite side of the spectrum: the mainstream.

Like William S. Burrows said, “to understand the edge, one must first explore the center.”* Last night, this West Coast Sound correspondent confidently marched into L.A. Live, passing the ESPN Sports thing, the replica Trader Vics, and scores of percolating fan-girls, and entered the Deep Space 9 -themed Nokia Center for a performance of So You Think You Can Dance Live.**

After more than two hours of backflips, bouncy co-eds throwing to pre-taped clips/piano scored slo-mo montages,*** and suggestions to “make some noise,” we complied a list of five lessons learned from SYTYCDL.

5 Lessons from So You Think You Can Dance Live

1. Enthusiastic moms have no qualms giving standing ovations for every performance, for two hours straight.

Level of Nausea During the Show

2. Tween girls can spontaneously, without training, synchronize their excitement into one terrifying “Squeeee!” which may be useful to the army as non-lethal warfare/ interrogation tactic.

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3. Nacho Cheese is neither a liquid nor a solid, but some consistency in between. It smells terrible no matter how many rows away it is from you

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4. Plots are more important than the dances. Whether two dancers re-enact a quarrelling couple who wake up in bed, dance-fight, then sleep soundly next to one another, or “Dr. Funk who meets an ordinary accountant and hypnotizes her with his (hair) pick,” the dancers still look ridiculous dressed as super heroes.

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5. A dance lovingly dubbed, “the Butt dance,” is everything that the preacher from Footloose warned against, and more.

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*He never said this

**This West Coast Sound correspondent actually had never seen So You think You Can Dance, instead thinking that it was really Dancing with the Stars. He thought that there may be a chance of seeing hilarious moments with washed up celebrities and/or politicos breaking their feet, all of which would have been fantastic. But unfortunately, the error became apparent immediately inside. There would be no celebrities. No notable names. Just ordinary looking sorta kids, dancing for 30 seconds while dressed Romeo and Juliet, then reading prepared banter.

***The show was “Live” but not live, as in broadcast live. In actually, it was a taped show, interrupted by dance numbers that were recreations of earlier dance-offs. It was essentially like watching television. For $60 a ticket.

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