For a fleeting moment this week, Ashley Thames will occupy one of the rings of the great football circus.

Thames, 26, a barmaid at Duffy’s in Delray Beach, is the tight end of the Miami Caliente, a team in the Lingerie Football League.

She’s also in model-shape.

And in this league, that’s the point.

It so happens that the Caliente, young women who play the world toughest game with shoulder pads fitted over their bikini tops, is in the league’s conference finals Thursday at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood. Winners meet in the Lingerie Bowl VII on Super Bowl Sunday, also at the Seminole Hard Rock Resort.

“Of course sex appeal is what the league sells,” the 5-foot-4, 135-pound Thames said. She wears No. 13, just like Miami Dolphins great Dan Marino, one of her heroes. “But we also are very athletic women who just happen to put on makeup before we get on the field. The girls in basketball and softball, they’re butch. We’re feminine.”

(Browse through more Lingerie Bowl photos, or click on the picture below)

Thames, during Wednesday's Lingerie Football League Media Day at Hard Rock Live in Hollywood. (Bill Ingram/The Palm Beach Post)

“But there have been broken teeth and ankles among the girls,” Thames says.

Actually, Thames’ herself is nursing a disclocated shoulder, but Thames says that won’t prevent her from playing Thursday against the Chicago Bliss.

For more, look below or click (Read more…)

Blues superstar BB King, 84, squeezed in a sold-out show Tuesday night at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood as the madness of Super Bowl week kicks in. For more photos of South Florida concerts, click on the photo.

Is Super Bowl XLIV really about football?

Is it about the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts?

Nah!

It’s about hotties. And celebs, like Jim Carrey and Rihanna and Kim Kardashian. And free concerts on the beach.

So, you’re a mortal with less disposable cash than you used to, where do you go?

Well, it’s all here in the Page2Live guide to Super Bowl fun.

Believe or not, the frenzy already starts Thursday night, 10 days before the actual game, with a fashion show at the W Hotel in Miami Beach. The threads will be mostly swimwear, and the barely dressed bodies those of NFL cheerleaders. It’s one of the Miami Dolphins‘ contributions, along surrendering the team’s practice facility and stadium locker-room to the Colts.

Also this week, downtown Delray Beach has a three-day NFL sanctioned kick-off, starting Thursday. The highlight? Friday’s beachside meet-and-greet with a dozen NFLers. Organizers are promising to produce Pierre Garcon, the Colts’ breakout receiver and a graduate from John I. Leonard High School in Greenacres.

For more Palm Beach County Super Bowl activities, click here.

Fans, meanwhile, will converge on several other South Florida hot spots during Super Bowl week.

Check them out below, or by clicking (Read more…)

Foreigner’s Mick Jones (right) and frontman Kelly Hansen (Lou Gramm’s replacement on the band) perform at the Seminole Hard Rock Resort in Hollywood. The rock band was founded in 1977 and stuffed the top of the charts throughout the 1980s with catchy tunes like Double Vision, Cold as Ice and Juke Box Hero.

Click on the photo, or here, for more South Florida concerts.

Hard to figure out which is worse: The fact that the MTV show that Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi stars in, Jersey Shore, gets any ratings; Or that Opium, the nightclub at the Seminole Hard Rock Resort in Hollywood, actually paid to have Snooki walk the red carpet and pole-dance until the wee hours Saturday. The pint-sized Snook, according to published reports, gets in excess of $2,000 just to show up in a nightclub. Meanwhile Jersey Shore, which depicts eight 20-somethings spending the summer in a house on the coast, has had Italian-American groups howl, partly because the youths call themselves “guidos,” partly because they’re gross caricature of Italians. According to my Miami Herald colleague Lesley Abravanel,  Snooki arrived at the party downing Southern Comfort and applying bronzer.

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