The overstocked opening episode of Dancing With the Stars boasted more glitter-addicted terpsichorean fame whores than ever before. As I write this right after the first show, nobody's gotten the boot yet. If, when you read this, those boot marks do not adorn the narrow derriere of Edyta Sliwinska and the more upholstered rump of not-falling-down-funny stand-up comic Jeffrey Ross, I'll just have to quote their dancing rival Cloris Leachman, 82, who reacted to her own low score by snapping, "They can't even add up the numbers. They're so stupid here!"

Sorry, Cloris. The stars might lie, but the numbers never do. Leachman was funny ("Corky [Ballas] and I have a combined age of 129 years"), but her remarkably nice gams can't dance. And the only thing comic about Ross was his inadvertent resemblance to the hippo ballerina in Fantasia, without the brio. But hey, shameful failure is half the fun of DWTS.

The other half is the startling competence of other contestants. Top-scoring Brooke Burke neither looks nor moves like a woman who's had four children in eight years, and she may hoist her blandly efficient partner Derek Hough to a new limelight. NFL hero Warren Sapp looked like a pitiful, helpless giant so sweaty I feared his snug suit would shrink under the lights and strangle him, but this man-mountain can move to the music! When he hiked Kym Johnson under his legs, she almost shot across the room through invisible goalposts. Old gridiron habits die hard.

Olympic gold-medal winner Maurice Greene showed mo dance-floor mojo than you'd expect, though he lacks Sapp's passion. Lance Bass claimed he was "the worst dancer in 'N Sync," but he and Lacey Schwimmer nailed their cha-cha routine. When I first glimpsed the cute yet hulking double Olympic gold-medal winner Misty May-Treanor, a phrase un-gallantly leapt to mind: P.J. O'Rourke's line unkindly describing Brigitte Nielson, the "enormous, terrifying womanoid." Shockingly, however, Misty wasn't at all the muscle-bound East European chromosome case she seemed. She became girlishly light on her feet in the capable hands of Maksim Chmerkovskiy (even though Mak marveled, "I never had a girl with these theengs [triceps] bigger than me!").

Speaking of big theengs, cleavage was the major theme of the evening. Mysteriously, barely contained bosoms zoomed around the stage like asteroids in a disaster movie, threatening to pulverize all in their path. I can't imagine how Julianne Hough's fringed, flapperish, backless, sideless, and at breezy moments, frontless dress stayed on.

Only one man rose to the cleavage challenge: Tony Dovolani, whose plunging neckline and peekaboo nipple glimpsed through a gauzy top tried hard to outshine the Cosmo cover candidates of the opposite sex. His partner, 62-year-old soap star Susan Lucci, looked as ageless as the vampires slain by her erstwhile costar Sarah Michelle Gellar, and as bloodless. Still, it was bitchy of the judges to give Lucci a score of 15, and Cloris Leachman a 16. They're both ageism victims.

The scariest performance was Toni Braxton's. She confessed that she's got microvascular angina, the cardiac ailment known as "Syndrome X," and then flew into a dance with Alec Mazo so athletic she wound up winded, panting, clutching Alec, her cleavage-eriffic chest aglow with more sweat than Warren Sapp could manage to work up. I was kidding when I said I worried about Sapp sweating himself to death; with Braxton, the danger seemed unsettlingly real. Which would've been a drag, since Braxton and Mazo cha-cha'd up a perfect storm. They may wind up stomping Brooke and Derek to death, dance-competition-wise. Still, if she really wanted to defy death with style, she and Alec should dance to her hit "Un-Break My Heart."

If there was one dancer I knew would blow big time, it was Kim Kardashian, who deserves an episode of South Park like the one satirizing her pal Paris Hilton. She makes the other contestants look shy, blogging about her DWTS travails on her MySpace blog (did you realize that shortly before the show she cut her toe on a hotel desk and bled like your 401k?). She explained on the show that "one thing that may slow me down is that I have terrible balance." She actually crashes into things in rehearsal. How much was she going to suck?

Only she didn't! Mark Ballas and she made a graceful pair, almost accomplished technically. Bruno Tonioli the metaphor-mad judge rhapsodized, "You're such a dusky beauty you remind me of Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, a treasure trove that everybody wants to explore." And probably has. Ironically, the one thing that slowed her down was excessively hesitant modesty. There's no sex in this Kardashian tape.

What's good about DWTS is that it's not just a booty contest, nor an athletic one. It's a chemistry test wherein personality is more important than talent. Celeb chef Rocco DiSpirito dances like a zombie, but it's fun to watch him make Karina Smirnoff suffer in his arrhythmic arms, and to observe that his pocket handkerchief looks just like Bart Simpson's spiky hair bleached white. Hannah Montana teen love interest Cody Linley looks sensational alongside Julianne Hough, and we savor her stricken grin when host Tom Bergeron inquires with a nihilistic smirk, "How does it feel to be the older woman?"

Will Julianne punch Tom in the mouth? Will Kim rediscover sex? Will Misty accidentally crush Mak's windpipe and moan, "He don't move no more?" Tune in tonight and find out.

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