Celeb partners tango off-stage

Forget Erin Andrews and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, rumored "Dancing With The Stars" love birds. We've got our own off-the-dance-floor romance.

"Twin Cities Live" co-host John Hanson is dating his "Dancing with the Twin Cities Celebrities" partner Amy Laliberte, an Arthur Murray Studio instructor in St. Paul. "Man," said Hanson. "It's been pretty easy with her."

While he sounds smitten, don't start selecting your wedding attire just yet, because I hear Hanson's something of a ladies' man -- although nobody's called him the Casanova Kid.

Laliberte first caught Hanson's eye when she was on his KSTP-TV show a year and a half ago. "She's pretty cute," he said. "But we kept it on the up-and-up, kept it professional for the competition [in mid-March], and then I asked her out when we were done. She's just a blast."

Nice of them to honor the studio's anti-fraternizing rule.

Many people, including the male half of the Margery and Ian Punnett morning show on MyTalk107 FM, think Hanson should explore his chemistry with "TCL" co-host Elizabeth Ries.

"We called ourselves BFFs, since before she was my co-host," said Hanson. "We found out our parents live on streets [in the metro] next to each other. We started hanging out. The chemistry part was real easy.

One of my sources said Ries is too cool for Hanson. "That's probably true," he laughed, adding, "Wait a minute now" after realizing that might seem like a shot.

Oh, that was nothing. With the Hanson-Ries chemistry being terrific, what accounts for their TV show not being very good?

"Ouch!" said Hanson. Sorry, but it's flat, lifeless and not well produced. I think it could use a few older producers who know how to pounce on popular culture and news items.

"Everybody's got their opinions," said Hanson.

After our interview, I found Laliberte's Twitter account. "Confession: I have a fetish with watching the bachelorette #notproud," she wrote June 22. With Hanson in Laliberte's life, she doesn't need any of that fakey foolishness.

"We're doing your nails again."

That's what Hennepin County Judge Kevin Burke said Lindsay Lohan's attorney should have told his celebrity client last week had the lawyer noticed the stenciled vulgarity on her middle finger before they went to court.

It's going to be a French manicure, Burke said attorney Shawn Chapman Holley might have suggested.

Holley has since quit the Lohan case.

At the hearing, Lohan got slapped with a justified 90 days in jail and 90 days in rehab for failing to meet the conditions of her probation.

Perez gets a D-minus

Gossip blogger Perez Hilton's no math wizard.

He also demonstrated no familiarity with Wikipedia (or any other Internet search functions) while giddily trashing Kathy Griffin.

"On June 26th," he wrote, "Kathy Griffin rolled into Minneapolis for a show at the enormous Orpheum Theatre. Thing is, of the 9,474 seats in the venue, only 3,629 were sold! Meaning almost 6,000 seats were all EMPTY!"

Psst, Perez: The Orpheum seats 2,579. That number gets smaller, NOT LARGER, depending on how the theater is configured to accommodate an act's equipment.

"We don't release the exact sells, but I can tell you her first show was practically sold-out, and the second show was definitely more than half full. People still love her," said Nelson.

I was at the packed first show. Bravo's "D-List" star was at her hilarious best.

Guess we can put this item, which would have still been way off even if Perez had been right about how many shows Griffin had -- not "a show," but two shows -- right up there with the time Perez killed off Fidel Castro and the day Perez called reports of Michael Jackson's cardiac arrest a publicity stunt.

While I have been by no means perfect and my math skills are poor, I can do simple arithmetic. (Hello, Ross, now THIS is catty!)