Strictly Come Dancing fans can’t get over Shirley Ballas’ surprise TV cameo as ‘worlds collide’
Strictly Come Dancing fans have been floored to uncover one star's unlikely television cameo from the noughties. Head judge and ballroom queen Shirley Ballas previously appeared on Gilmore Girls, with one of the characters branding her "so talented."
The much-loved series, which was acquired by Netflix for a limited-series reboot in 2016, follows the lives of a 32 year old single mother, Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her intellectual teenage daughter Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) whom she had at the age of 16. The mother and her daughter, while living in the small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut, have big ambitions they desperately try to achieve: Lorelai wants to own her own inn, while Rory wants to attend Harvard University. They also deal with Lorelai's appearance-obsessive upper class parents, Emily Gilmore (Kelly Bishop) and Richard Gilmore (Edward Herrmann).
In the first episode of season four, titled Ballrooms and Biscotti, Rory attends Friday night dinner at her grandparents' house. Following their meal, Emily sits bored teenager Rory down to watch some of her favourite ballroom dances. As Shirley appears on screen, Emily points her out to her granddaughter, saying: "Oh look, the couple in the purple feathers. That's Corky and Shirley Ballas. I love them. They are so talented. Corky's actually writing a musical based on their life as ballroom champions, and their son, Corky Jr, is going to play him as a young man."
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"Wow. Two Corkys in one show. You don't see that every day," Rory replies, unenthusiastically. Fans of both Gilmore Girls and Shirley took to X, formerly known as Twitter, as they expressed their surprise over the shout-out. One person said: "The episode of the Gilmore Girls (filmed in the mid 2000s) where Emily Gilmore says that Shirley Ballas is her favourite ballroom dancer still hasn’t fully sunk in for me. What a weird collision of worlds."
"The Shirley Ballas reference in Gilmore Girls always gets me," another agreed, while someone else pondered: "I want to know how aware Shirley Ballas is of the fact that she’s mentioned in Gilmore Girls." The reaction continued, with one person exclaiming: "SHIRLEY BALLAS SHOUT OUT ON GILMORE GIRLS????"
A different fan penned: "Of the millions of pop culture references that they make on the Gilmore Girls (sometimes in a single episode) you could never predict that one of them would be about Shirley Ballas . Yes, that Shirley Ballas." Another fan concurred saying, "I'm watching all of Gilmore Girls on Netflix all the time these days and in the middle of all the excellent pop culture references, Emily has just name-dropped Shirley Ballas while watching ballroom dancing and it's like all my TV worlds colliding in the weirdest way."
Shirley was previously married to Texas-born Corky, whom she met at a dance competition in Canada in 1982. The couple welcomed their son, Mark Ballas, in 1986 but ultimately separated in 2007 after 22 tumultuous years of marriage. During their marriage, Shirley claimed that Corky fat-shamed her, which caused her to have a "difficult" relationship with food.
