Last year, Ashley D’Amboise received an opportunity to combine her childhood dream with her adult dream.
On the December 23 edition of WWE SmackDown, Ashley D’Amboise appeared as an extra amidst the Christmas-themed Miracle on 34th Street Fight. As Ricochet teamed with Braun Strowman to battle Imperium (Ludwig Kaiser & Giovanni Vinci), D’Amboise stood waiting for her cue inside a giant gift box on the stage.
Curious, Ludwig Kaiser proceeded to open the large gift, revealing D’Amboise dressed as a ballerina. “La Crème De La Crème” emerged from the box, dancing her way across the stage before Kaiser and Vinci pivoted their attention to the second present, which contained the New Day (Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods).
Speaking with WrestleZone’s own Ella Jay, D’Amboise explained how the opportunity came together. Arriving at SmackDown for the company’s double taping that night, D’Amboise didn’t quite know what to expect, until she was approached backstage. “I was pulled aside, they were like,’ okay, we read your resume and you’re a dancer, right? You’re an actual ballet dancer?’ I was like, ‘Yes, yes, my resume is correct.’ The way it was presented to me was like, ‘Would you mind doing us a favor and being a ballerina?'”
Without hesitation, D’Amboise agreed. As she tried to contain her excitement, she slid into the locker room to “have a little moment” right after. “It was a dream within a dream,” D’Amboise said. Since the age of 2, and until 28, D’Amboise danced in a variety of genres, including tap, jazz, and ballet, and now, her two favorite worlds were colliding.
“Everyone grows up with a dream and a lot of people’s dream when they were very little was to become a professional wrestler. My first dream ever was to become a professional dancer. That’s where my dance background comes from,” she explained. Once she stopped dancing, though, D’Amboise admitted she didn’t where her next destination would be, until she stepped into a wrestling ring. “I had a goal. I had a purpose again,” she recalled.
On that December night at SmackDown, D’Amboise’s childhood dream came full circle on the platform of her adulthood dream. “That was one of the most incredible moments of my life,” she said.
Jill of all trades ?? professional dancer since the age of 2, babyyy https://t.co/rvv1hJ4TKD
— Ashley D'Amboise ? (@Ashley_DAmboise) December 24, 2022
D’Amboise later revealed that her appearance on SmackDown was “added in there last minute.”
“There’s a lot of moving parts happening all the time. So, I stayed out of the way that night. All I worried about was what they wanted me to do because I got a little bit of information every so often of what it actually was that I was going to do,” she said.
The process of putting her ballerina costume together, though, yielded an interesting interaction with Chief Content Officer, Paul “Triple H” Levesque. “They put that whole costume together on the fly. They had runners going out, getting me. ‘What do you need for ballet stuff?’ I was like, ‘Well, I need shoes, tights.’ They had a corset already. They had a tutu thing, but it wasn’t like a full tutu. There was no bottom.”
Realizing there was no bottom to her costume, D’Amboise informed Levesque of the issue. “Triple H came up to me and he was like, ‘Are you my ballerina?’ I was like, ‘Yes, sir, I am.’ He goes, ‘okay, what do you need? You have everything you need?’ And I was so embarrassed to say it, but I had to. It dawned on me [that I had no pants].”
“Then he walked up to me and I was like, ‘I don’t have pants to wear. There’s no bottom on this tutu.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, that’s a problem.’ I had everything else but nothing underneath,” D’Amboise recounted. After making a phone call, Levesque fixed everything in time.
“It was so cool. I got to get my hair and makeup done, sewn into a corset. That was so fun.”
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