Ricki Lake: The Real 'Dancing With The Stars' Feel-Good Story

So, let this much go without saying: I'm personally glad Chaz Bono has at last been voted off "Dancing with the Stars" because his underdog story has really been shoved down my throat all season.

Yet, as Bonomania was running wild, former daytime-talk queen Ricki Lake has quietly transformed herself into a feel-good story that teaches a better lesson than "You can really go a long way if enough people feel sorry enough for you to give you repeated mercy-passes."

Though she has as much of a dance background as anybody competing this season - after all, she first tasted fame in John Waters' 1980s cult favorite "Hairspray" - I would wager few probably pegged Lake as being among this season's top contenders.

Actually, it's somewhat understandable. If you looked particularly at the ladies dancing this season, it was Kristin Cavallari, Elisabetta Canalis, Chynna Phillips and maybe Hope Solo who leapt to the eyes first as the women who most "looked" like they could probably seriously dance.

Ironically, it bears noting that only Solo has been left standing of those four -- and this week, that's probably largely because nobody was voting her off after the dressing-down that partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy gave boo-magnet judge Len Goodman.

Along the way, check out Lake during Week One.

Check out her latest performance six weeks and 20 pounds later.

It's not just that Lake has been dueling week after week with soap star and war hero J.R. Martinez for the Leader Board lead, with both openly acknowledging the friendly rivalry during the Week Six performance show where both chose the same dance and notched the exact-same 29 from the judges.

That's not the big story.

It's not even that a year ago, Lake lost her worldly belongings to a fire, and her marriage to divorce. Or that she's now engaged to her boyfriend of 13 months.

It's bigger than that: it's in how you can see Lake's confidence blossom a little further with every passing week. What many people - OK, even myself included, to some extent - consider a trivial reality show is bringing out her best. Best of all, she's doing it with an endearing, humble grace, and has never pulled the whiney-butt routine that Bono did during his last week on the show when he couldn't read between the lines and took Bruno Tonioli's critique as a veiled fat joke.

Lake, meanwhile, is actually growing healthier. Keep in mind, at her heaviest, she was once 270 pounds.

"I'm definitely a size six now," Lake recently told Yahoo!. "I'll probably be a size four by the end of it. It's come to the point where it doesn't matter. I no longer wear Spanx."

She's rehearsing five hours daily with partner Derek Hough. She hasn't gotten cocky a moment, judging from the pair's weekly rehearsal packages. In fact, as I observed in this week's recap, the more pressure she puts on herself and the more nerves she allows herself to feel during rehearsals, the lighter on her feet she seems when she and Hough take the floor every Monday night.

This past week, she talked about how she wasn't sure while rehearsing the pair's quick step that she could keep pace with the younger Hough's cardio.

Yeah, that near-perfect score suggests you did fine. That, and the fact that by comparsion, Lacey Schwimmer quite literally had to dance circles around Bono each week.

After rehearsals, she says she's simply "going home and eating a balanced meal. It's really that simple." Otherwise, she said, she's big on oatmeal, vegetable omelettes and gazpacho.

For the record, not too far behind Lake? Cable talk show host and former prosecutor Nancy Grace. The mother of two has dropped a similarly impressive 16 pounds.