“Sean, when you’re lipsinging during the finale, don’t open your mouth so much; if I can see the spotlight glinting off of your tongue stud, then the audience sees it, too.”

- The P.D. (Performance Director), giving us notes at half-hour call.

…

When you’re a performer, your body is your livelihood. It’s your paycheck. It can also be your limitation, and eventually will lead to your retirement. You have control over your body, and what it does, but there’s a sense that your ability to control your body is finite. You’re always butting up against that barrier. You slip, you fall, you get up, and you keep smiling and pretending to sing along with the music. Your body starts to hurt, but you force it to keep going. You’re always stretching, pulling, pushing, clenching, and moving your body around. Over, and over, and over again.

Performance can be art, figure skating can be artful, but it doesn’t always feel like that. Sometimes, it’s just work. Like when you do three performances on New Years Day – it’s work. That’s the rub about being a professional figure skater: when your art becomes work, it’s hard to stay intimately connected to your body and what it does all the time. Sometimes, like when your sick, hurting, tired, or just don’t want to be doing holiday shows in arenas that are less than 1/4th full, it’s just pushing your body around. Or sometimes, it feels like your body is just pulling you along for the ride. You don’t always want to feel personally connected to what your body is doing, or proud of what your body does, because it can get depressing and leave you feeling empty and disenchanted. Like, whatever, it’s my body…

But still, you want to feel in control. You want power over your body. Or maybe, you’re just feeling rebelious, because…well, I dunno, maybe because when you grow up figure skating, it’s hard to shake that glamourous, prissy image. And yet, behind the scenes, puppeteering those polished and shiny, lithe bodies you see on the show is a anorexic, starving, self-loathing, occassionally coke-sniffing, miserable person who is still hearing the echoes of a voice that told them their body was too fat and not talented enough to be a great skater. It’s hard to have a nice, proper, devious rebellion when you parade around in sequined lycra half the time. So what does a skater do to rebel against this image? Join Disney on Ice, wreak all kinds of havoc on their body, and get pierced and tattood at every possible occasion.

No lie; the dressing room was tongues, noses, and nipple piercings galore! About half the showgirls on my tour had their nipples done. The boys did this as well. In fact, I almost did mine, but opted for a naval ring instead. Sean, and two other showgirls were going to this place in Tacoma, where a few of the other skaters had recently visited to get some work done, and I decided to tag along. Sean had his tongue done, and my friend Sarah and this other girl, Lisa, were going to get their nipples pierced. I jumped on the bandwagon.

We were all surprised when Lisa said she was going to get her nipple pierced. Lisa had a well-known low pain tolerence, and was squeamish as all hell. She also had fainted several times at the sight of blood. She had a naval piercing, and whenever she had to remove it to go into the Jasmine role, which was a two-piece belly-baring costume, it took two showgirls to get it back in: one to hold her down, and another to actually put the piercing through. No one thought she’d go through with the nipple piercing. In fact, there was an informal pool going around, as to whether she would go through with it or not, and if she did go through with it, would she faint?

Sean and Sarah went first, then it was me and Lisa’s. We agreed to hold eachother’s hands. Lisa wanted to go first. The moment of truth arrived. She went through with the nipple piercing, and not only did she not pass out, she didn’t close her eyes, look away, or even flinch as they stuck a needle through her nipple and inserted the piercing. I can’t say the same for me. It looked damn painful, and I was solid in my decision to go with a naval ring over a nipple piercing.

After much commendation and acknowledgement of Lisa’s having the balls to go through with it and not passing out or anything, it was my turn. Lisa sat there at held my hand as they stuck the piercing needle through my naval. Lisa watched as they pushed the bellyring through, and then it happened.

“I think I’m gonna be sick…” she said.

Next thing I knew, I looked over (while the piercer was still threading the ball onto my piercing) and Lisa had passed out on the floor.

I will never really have a healthy body image. I am pleased with my body, now. But I’ll never love the way my body looks. I constantly remind myself to quiet that disaproving voice, because I didn’t like how my body looked even when I was at the peak of my form, on tour. I recently viewed an old tape of me on the road, and, while I wouldn’t say I was too thin (I’ve always been very well muscled), I had no curves. Like, none at all. Ok, well, I had a little bedonkadonk, but not much. You could draw a line straight down from my armpits to my hips, and my legs…well, I do miss those legs and what they could do, but good god, my body looked nearly pre-pubescent at the age of 18! And back then, I thought I was bulky. What the hell was wrong with me?

I’ll tell you what was wrong with me: I grew up skating. Oleg Protopopov used to tell me I was fat when I was 15, that I was too big, and my legs didn’t extend properly. Of course, Oleg also used to insist that the secret to good health was drinking your own urine. But 15 year-old girls are very sensitive to the F word. I imagine that having to wear tights and spandex only lended itself to body insecurity.

I didn’t let it get to me as badly as some of the other skaters I knew. I wanted to be one of those thin, perfectly cut skaters, but I wasn’t, and I liked to eat. One of my best friends, Cate, trained at the same center in CT that Oksana Bauil and her coaches relocated to after Oksana won the olympics. She took lessons from Oksana’s coach, who used to call her “a stupid girl, with stupid fat hips.” Cate is a size 2 – now. Back then, she was a 0. She told me that one of her other coaches actually did coke with some of the skaters who trained there. Cate eventually ended up in the hospital because her kidneys were close to failing, and she weighed less than 80 lbs. Cate is beautiful and tall, and still thin, though a healthy-looking thin. But she still thinks of herself as fat. We always joke how the two of us enjoy ice cream more than anyone else can possibly enjoy ice cream, because ice cream was categorized as “junk food,” and eating junk food was “naughty.”

I never starved myself like Cate did, and I couldn’t stick my finger down my throat, or go on cocaine binges. But there were other ways in which I exacted nutritional attrocities upon myself. See, we had weigh-ins every two weeks. We were hired at specific weights, and we had a range of 4 lbs up or down from that weight, and they liked it if you stayed within that range. The reason for weigh-ins, so they claimed, was actually to prevent girls from losing too much weight on the show. But really, all it did was make you feel nervous and insecure. Our P.D. wasn’t as militant about the weight rule as other P.D.’s, and no one was fired because of their weight while I was on the show. Still, forced weighings were – and are – a demoralizing experience.

Despite performing 12-15 shows per week, weight gain was a fact of life on the tour. I mean, you’re either eating out, or ordering pizza to your hotel room every night of the week. If you went out to the bars, or if someone else was supplying you with booze, you have a nice big calorie supplement there as well. It was hard to eat right, period, so I aimed to simply enjoy eating. At each new city on the tour, I looked for a place with good pub food, and a good thai restaurant. I was also hooked on Papa John’s cheese sticks.

I had a pre-weigh-in ritual that I went through. I don’t know if it made a difference – I never did a control study, but I figured it would help me shed at least a pound or two before getting on the scale. Two days before the weigh-in, I would drink copius amounts of CrystalLight so that I would feel full and would not want to eat very much. Then, the day before weighing in, I would snack lightly and intentionally dehydrate myself. Like I said, who knows if it made a difference in my weight, physically. Mentally, it was my routine, it was what I did to attenuate the imposition of being weighed for work.

Malnutrition wasn’t the worst thing I did to my body on the tour. I was something of a walking distaster, when it came to injuries. All in all, I took four trips to the emergency room on my first tour. And that doesn’t include the injury that signalled the beginning of the end of my career as a full-time professional skater.

Next Chapter: The Breaking of a Showgirl