John: It takes real courage to live with such curtains. And certainly a lad who offers himself to the worldwide web in a babushka is not lacking in courage, however foolhardy. He stands like an archaic Greek boy, in the contrapposto position, weight on the back leg, pelvis thrust to the side — quite lovely.

But those curtains, with their stale vaudevillian sweep, keep butting in like a comic at a burlesque show.

How would you describe those colors? Yes, my thoughts exactly: a symphony of bile and piss, the color of sick, with a little blood braided through in the curtain stays for a pinch of horror. Surely he’s in some scared-straight bootcamp for boys, and this room is part of the shock treatment.

I bet it’s a Christian camp, and now we know what Ted Haggard is doing. He’s running a scared-straight camp for boys. It looks like a kitchen: perhaps it’s the common room. Maybe all the boys are being punished for putting naked pictures of themselves on Myspace. This boy is showing how well the rehab is working. He now poses with his underwear on.

Granted the underwear is red and thus code for Satan worship, but Reverend Ted is more than ready to do some one-on-one with the lad in closed door sessions.

Still I do see progress. The babushka suggests the boy is Lourdes-ready and may fall on his knees at any given moment at the approach of a vision, however strange, in some darkened grotto or wood.

Richard: Hernando Xavier Alejandro Garcia Williams may be a fourth cousin (by marriage) twice removed on his mother’s side to superstar swimmer Esther Williams, but that sort of pedigree won’t get him very far in today’s fast-paced, cutthroat world of aquatic choreography.

Here we see young Alley (as he prefers to be known, in honor of his favorite aquatic mammal, Kirstie Alley), rehearsing in the kitchen/bedroom of his apartment in San Juan. Although she has had numerous discussions with her son about the rough-and-tumble lifestyle that choreographers must endure—a seedy twilight world fraught with drink, drugs, and dames—Alley’s mother is convinced of her son’s talent, ambition, and drive:

“When he was five, I was giving him a bath in the kitchen sink,” she recalls, “when all of a sudden he started moving the Brillo pads in time with the music on the radio. I think it was Ace of Base. Or maybe Roxette. Or possibly the Cardigans. I can see them in my head. I know they were blond, and they looked cold. Maybe it was Abba… Anyway, from that point on, I knew he would follow in his cousin’s muy famoso footsteps,” she concludes, lighting a candle and saying a brief novena at the shrine Alley built to Esther in the family bathroom.

Steve: I used to wear a lot of bonnets too.