…sometimes it’s what on the surface…as in what you wear on your body that matters more than what’s underneath.
There are things I miss and things I do not miss about my days as a showgirl. The number one thing that comes to mind is that I miss my sick abs. I had really sick abs. It’s a huge perk to being a professional athlete. When you are working out for 10 hours/day, your abs look like this:
Yes, those are actually my un-photoshopped abs. And the crazy thing is…this picture was taken in 2005 – 4 years after I left the show and became a lazy college student!
My abs don’t look like this anymore, and no, I’m not going to post a picture of what they look like now. They don’t even look like that when I flex. Not. Even. Close.
I have a few friends who still perform on shows, and most of them have left Disney and are on cruise ship shows these days. Which means they spend a lot of time in tropical areas posting pictures of themselves in their bathing suits on gorgeous beaches, looking gorgeous. I envy them their 6-pack abs and still-athletic bodies. It makes me sad that I will never be that athletic again.
But then I see that they spend their day job dressed up like this….
…and I think, “THANK GOD I’M NOT DOING THIS AT AGE 30!”
*I actually know the girl wearing the octopus in the photo. She was the line captain on my show. She likes the cruise ships. I’m glad she thinks it’s worth the charade to live the lifestyle. And more power to her, because I don’t know a lot of people who can do this for 10+ years.
While in California for the Big Electrochemistry Conference (that’s what I’m calling it because they have very strict policies about disclosing any details in public), I met up with an old friend from the tour. Pasha was my first roomate on the gig. We were both new girls, and we were the tour babies; Pasha was, in fact, the only person on the show who was younger than me, and that she was by almost a year. Thinking about how young we were then, 17 and 18 years old, and what an odd world we lived in still amuses me to no end.
The odd thing about me and P, as I still call her for short (um, her name really isn’t “Pasha”, but I do actually call her P…), is that we didn’t get along for most of the tour, but she’s the only person from tour I’ve remained in touch with and can still say is actually a friend. We roomed together on the road for about a month and a half, afterwhich, we were so sick of eachother and unable to get along that we were both almost fired for having a shouting match at work and spent the rest of the tour – save a few gracious moments here and there – avoiding eachother like pig flu.
In retrospect, it all makes sense, given our ages, the incredibly f***ed up environment that was the tour. Blame it on the rat (Mickey Rat), and a couple of bitches. It’s truly regrettable and screwed up how the showgirl lifestyle manages to tear apart people who otherwise could’ve been terrific allies and friends in the shitstorm that was Disney On Ice.
Both P and I came to the show as independant personality types, and we were very, very wet behind the ears. P got a bad rep early on because she was a bit of wreck. Part of it was being 17 like she was. She was wild, a little too much so. She was also not obsessed with being a showgirl, which ticked off the older showgirls. They gave her a really hard time whenever she messed up in the show, and because her attitude was to take it lightly, this made things worse between her and the majority of the cast. She wasn’t dismissive about it – we got fined for screwing up and she didn’t like that any more than anyone else – but she didn’t let it get to her.
God, I wish I had it in me then to have been more like her. I was a good skater with good presence, and I wanted to do a good job and get respect. I didn’t miff my numbers as often as P, and I was at the beginning, more interested in skating professionally than she was. She was just livin’ her life. Of course, living her life meant taking strangers back to our hotel room, borrowing my laptop, razors, toiletries. We were too self-involved to see that we were both having a damn hard time adjusting to our new lifestyles and before we knew it, P and I were in a one-upping competition. I locked her out of the room one night, she turned off my alarm clock off packout day and I missed the luggage call in the lobby and half-hour stage call at the arena and nearly missed opening number. That’s when we had the shouting match that almost got both our asses canned.
P was exactly how I remembered her. She drove up from San Francisco to hang out for a few hours after the talks concluded at the conference. I brought her up to the room where a good handful of scientists were all drinking and hanging out after hours, and we had our little catch up. I asked her if she had bad show dreams, like I do. Oddly, though not really that odd, is the fact she has almost the same type of bad show dreams I do, which revolve around being late or not being able to find our skates or costumes, or the building, or get dressed fast enough to make our stage call or our numbers.
We talked about our adventures on the tour, the f*ck ups, the people we actually missed, the good times, and of course, how Disney On Ice ruined Disney movies for us for a long time. At one point in our join recollections of our touring days, we found ourselves standing in the corner of the room, drunkenly shouting together at the wall of the room. P turned to me and said Oh my god, do you realize what we’re doing? We’re shouting at a wall! It was then that we came to the realization that we’re still not over the traumas of the tour, and that the best therapy was probably to hang out more often and engage in more theraputic yelling sprees. We’ve resolved to not go 10 years in between hanging out again.
And, of course, in addition to catching up and drunken apologies for being so young and stupid on the tour, we talked a lot of shit. Why, we asked mutually, were we friends with the same people on facebook who made us miserable on the tour, who we were anything but friends with? There was one particular bitch who ruled them all. Her name was Cinderella. I joke that the reason she hated P and I was that we had both slept with Prince Charming! The fact was that this girl was just mean. She was a good skater, but a terribly frigid, self-obsessed drama queen attention-whore. She scared the living sh** out of me, and I’m sure that’s why people were friends with her – because they feared her. She was the quitessential ice-queen, a girl so enveloped in the show life that she would do everything in her power to stay the center of attention, to keep up the facade, and whenever that started to slip, whenever she needed affirmation that she was still queen bee and living the good life on tour, she would stir up a pot of evil and dump it on someone elses head. My personal experience with this girl was that she was the one who told the manager that she saw me doing cocaine at the arena. I hadn’t done anything to her to deserve her wrath. I was a convenient target: newgirl/vulnerable/unstable/easily made into fodder for her own amusement. I stayed far the f*** away from her for the remaining year and half I spent on the road. AND THEN… the night before I left, when I went to say goodbye to everyone – they were all hanging out at the Hard Rock Cafe after closing night in Fukuoka, Japan – she comes up to me, takes both my hands and puts on her best ‘I’m being so genuine’ face and voice , and says “it sucks that you’re leaving! I feel like we never got to be close as friends, promise me you’ll stay in touch, ok?”
Man. So, why on earth are we “facebook friends” with her, I asked P.
P hit the nail on the head:
“Yo, I jus’ wanna know what happens to a bitch.”
True that.
There were so many unsavory characters. Some, like P and a few others – mainly stagehands – I would love a chance to catch up with. Others I am friends with on facebook for the same reasons I’m friends with my ex on facebook. Sometimes, I need to look at their face and say “I’m so glad I’m not like you.”
That’s not healthy, is it?
It isn’t. I know this. It sounds kinda stupid, but being a showgirl I realize is kinda like being marked men. It gets to you, the show does. It makes it’s mark, it comes with some good, though most of the good comes from trying to deal with being on the show, but mostly it just stays in your skin. I’m not sure I’ll ever really leave that behind or get over it. I did enjoy shouting at that wall about what a horrible bitch Cinderella was. It’s good to have a friend like P, to get together to compare showgirl battlescars, to laugh and joke at what an insane time that was, to provide much needed therapy of an actual showgirl bond.
(hmm, I might have to stop calling out future chapters, since this is my second consecutive deviation from my predictions…)
Flying has not grown on me with experience. I loved it as a kid: the take-off, the whole idea of flying, and travelling in general. What can I say, other than “the thrill has worn off.”
I’ve had my share of travel with Disney On Ice. Every week for 10 months, I’d pack my life into two suitcases and head to a new city, a new hotel room, and a new work building. I mastered the art of packing while drunk at 2 a.m, 4 a.m. lobby calls, and I knew just how to configure my suitcases so that I could sit and recline a top them while waiting to check in at the airport with the 50+ members of the cast and crew.
Sometimes I miss my quasi-jet-setting full-time performer lifestyle. What I don’t miss, however, is flying. I took a nice long break from flying after I got off the road. This was in part due to having been in downtown Manhattan during 9/11. My life, I felt, would not suffer for lack of airplanes. I started college the following spring, in ’02, and didn’t leave MA for 3 years.
Eventually I got over the airplane thing, and I got the urge to travel. I remember exactly when the travel bug came back and bit me: I was working as an undergrad in a chem lab at UMass, having just decided to become a chemist, and I walked into lab my first day and caught a whiff of something, probably some solvent residue, or the clean smell of the instruments. I don’t know what it was, but I thought it smelled kinda like the way airplanes smell, and I thought, “I desire a trip that involves airtravel.”
At that time, the only friend I had who was a plane trip away was, interestingly enough, the man currently referred to on this blog as “boyfriend.” I called him up (we were friends at the time) and said, “I have this urge to get on an airplane. What say you to a visit?” To be honest, there were a few other factors that made me want to jet out of town at that particular time, but the airplane smell in lab was what set my mind to it, and so it went.
Since then, I have taken 22 trips involving flying on planes. Yes, I can remember, and I did count back in memory to the trips that proceeded that, dare I say fatefull (?) tirp to Tucson. All in all, considering that all but a mere few of these trips involved changing aircrafts at least once, and were round-trip flights, I have boarded over 60 airplanes in roughly 3 years.
I have cultured a special loathing for airports, especially the drive to and from Austin-Bergstrom because I associate it with driving back, tired and alone, from a nice weekend with the boy, or tired and alone after dropping the boy off for his return flight. My own experience with being dropped off at Tucson International is not much better. Worse, I’d say, because I’ve always been a sentimental fool when it comes to goodbyes. Sometimes – alright, most times -it gets the best of me. Being a sobby bitch while interacting with the TSA is never enjoyable.
In my ripening maturity (snark), I’ve grown increasingly aware of the temporal nature of life as a human: the fragility, the plasticity, and, oh yeah, the mortality. The emphasis of the latter increases in my mind in light of the reckless stupidity of other humans during activities such as drivng automobiles, and my own increasing experiences with the fallibility of technology.
Airplanes, luckily, are old hat in our technologically advancing world. The engines are still very basic, and Bernouli’s principle is still upheld. Despite all this, and the fact that I am perfectly aware of the statistics regarding the safety of air travel compared to driving, my fear of falling out of the sky while trapped in what is essentially a jet-propelled aluminum tube has not receded. This fear is second on my list,. It sits just below my deeply ironic fear of falling through the surface of a frozen pond or lake and getting trapped beneath the ice and drowning. Now, I don’t believe in a specific god, and I don’t practice a religion, but I make peace with my maker every time that aluminum tube containing my mortal flesh and bones begins barrelling down the runway.
I wish I were the type of person who falls asleep as soon as the plane is in the air. Despite my hatred of flying, I’m not too bad at sitting through a flight – not counting the immense pain I’m usually experiencing in my back. While it is true that from the moment of take-off straight till the captain announces those glorious words: we’re beginning our descent, that all I’m thinking in the back of my mind is “get me on the ground, get me on the ground,” I’m not the type who will drive those near me ’round the bend with my crazy ruminations about my fear of plummetting to my demise. I like to stare out the windows, listen to music, sip on a bourbon on the rocks, and chit-chat with my neighbors. Unfortunately, 6:00 flights are not all that conducive to conversation, and the acquisition of the bourbon is sometimes problematic, if not tacky, on those early flights. When I must roust myself and endure the airport at 4:00 a.m., I do tend to acquiesce to dleeping on planes.
Sleeping on planes is a bit of a feat if you don’t have a poofy neck pillow, or can’t sleep sitting upright (I can’t, even with said poofy neck pillow). Being small, compact (I’m 5’3″) and easily pretzelled is an asset for plane-sleep. It also helps to have something bulky and soft in your carry on. I like to bring my backpack and stuff it with a big hoodie. This lends itself nicely to the position I call the “face flop.” To accomplish the flop, simply pile all your gear ontop of your tray table and lean forward into it. There are several pros to this position. First of all, no one will see you drool. Secondly, you’re securing all your in-flight belongings. On the flip side, it gets a mite uncomfy if the person in front of you decides to lower their seat. And you’ll get pillow-lines on your face. But it’s travel, and no one looks good at the end of a long travel day. Tried and tested: all the damn time.
Now for my piece du resistance: the airplane lazyboy. This one requires being somewhat small and bendy. Oh, and not caring if people stare at you. First, take above mentioned soft bulky materials and sit on them to boost you up by a bit. Now, bring your knees up to your chest and extend your lower legs upwards as if to rest them on the back of the seat in front of you. Reach behind your legs now and lower your tray table. Next, hug your knees to your chest again, but this time allowing your knees to separate. Rest your feet on the tray table with one ankle crossed over the other in a kind of quasi indian-style. Thats it. Tried and tested: LAX to Nagoya.
Sometimes, however, the gods just wont cooperate with my wishes for smooth travel. I’d be willing to bet – scratch that – I know some of you have had way worse travel days than myself – but here are some of my more memorable hellish travel days from the showgirl years:
1. Sioux Falls to Tacoma
Culprit: Airport related issues
Total travel time: 24 hours
This is one of the foggier memories in my book, mostly because travel started and ended at 3:00 AM. This was the first real blunder of a travel day. Due to delays and overbookings, we weren’t able to get onto airplanes. It was pretty much a classic run around the airport and wait at the gate to see if you can get on the plane. I know several of you have had this experience. I’ll dare to one up you on the exhaustion factor: I did three shows (noon, 4, and 7pm) then got up at 3:00 am to go to the airport.
Sure, 24 hours isn’t all that bad. I know some folks who got stranded for multiple days due to weather. But the thing about the road is that you’re constantly travelling. Every. Goddamn. Week. We kinda had a little mantra on tour, for fucked up stuff that happens on the show with predictable regularity: “It’s normal,” we’d say to eachother. Thing is, travelling a lot, for a long time, was normal. But you didn’t realize how travel-weary you were until you hit a snag and got stuck in perpetual airportting for 24 hours.
Not all my bad days involved airports, however…
2. Vancouver to Spokane
Culprit: Bandits, weather
Total travel time: 14 hours
The travel day started off on the wrong foot to begin with, though, it would’ve sucked anyways. Three show day and immediately shipping out via bus. One of the loathsome factors about the bus rides in general was that we typically departed immediately after the 3rd show – the bus met us at the building. Travel days always leave me feeling grimy and in need of a relaxing shower, but it’s worse to begin the travel day all sticky and sweaty after three shows.
There was word of a snow storm earlier that day, and the flurries started as we headed into word for the first of the 3 shows. The snow was heavier when we left the building. The arena was just accross from the hotel, so we returned to retrieve our baggage from the luggage room and load up. I grabbed my bags and stowed my large suitcases under the bus, taking my backpack and laptop into the coach for the trip. That’s when I noticed that my laptop case felt unusually light. Sure enough, someone had stolen my laptop out of the hotel luggage room. Bloody marvelous start. Totally tarnished my Vancouver experience; up until that point, I’d had a lovely time. Now I had no laptop. Oh, and it happened to be my birthday as well. ABsolute killjoy.
The bus ride started off slow, due to the weather, and only got slower. Apparently, there were some mountains that needed to be traversed enroute to Spokane. Soon we found ourselves in a line of vehicles, dead stop, on the slope of a mountain. Apparently, they had blocked off the road and would only permit travel if you put chains on your tires. Sooooo we pulled over and commenced the chaining of all tires. It seemed a several hour process. Then again, that particular time frame may have bled into the next one where we remained stopped off on the side of the mountain for another 2 hours. And then they closed the mountain pass, so we all had to do an about face and rerout or wait until the storm cleared.
Due to the weather, we hadn’t stopped off for food. We were warned that we might not make a food stop for dinner due to the snow prior to boarding and I had time to grab a croissant from the starbucks nearest the hotel. One croissant does very little to temper hunger after 3 shows and 8 hours on a bus. Everyone was in rough form.
We pulled off to a truck stop around 3 am so our driver could grab some zzzs, and we cought a very very late dinner. I was still upset about my laptop and called my parents. This turned into a wakeup call for me as well, but of the other kind – the reality check type. In my tired, pissed, and hungry mind, calling my parents about my stolen laptop (which they bought me as a graduation present and given me just prior to my departure for the tour) would help solve my problems. They were not in a problem solving mood at 6 am on a Sunday, less than happy to be woken up by their irate whining just-turned-19 year old daughter, and told me they’d discuss this later. Welcome to life: calling your parents from across the country about petty stuff like laptops when you’re 19 years old is not a problem-solving strategy.
The rest of the travel day went off without a hitch. We pulled into spokane around 11 am. To put the icing on the cake, I was “quading” that week, meaning I was sharing a room with 3 other skaters, so two to a bed.
3. LAX to Nagoya
Culprit: seemingly conspicuous materials
We arrived in Japan at Nagoya, which served as a stopping point enroute to Sapporo. The plan was to go through customs and meet up with the tour coordinator on the other side to receive our next plane tickets. I got separated from the group when I was flagged down for an apparently random search.
They took me into the back room, and I sat down as one of the Japanese TSA agents open my suitcase and began rummaging through my stuff. Then the second suitcase. Remember the incriminating photo from New-Girl Initiations that I mentioned would later surface and cause an awkward moment? I had up until this point been totally non-chalant regarding the luggage search. I carried no unlawful materials and was not worried. Then the TSA agent pulls out a folded-up photograph from one of the side pockets – talk about being thorough. Being tired from the international flight, I hadn’t realized what this photograph was. The TSA agent passed the photo to the other two agents in the room, and then showed me the photograph and asked if it was me in the picture. It was me, and I was buck-ass naked. What else could I do but shrug. There was some nervous/ embarrassed laughter in there as well. At this point, the only english they’d spoken to me was to tell me that they were going to search my bags and to ask if the naked girl in the photo was me.
Next they searched my carryon bags. I had taken to carrying a pouch with bags of green tea with me at all times. (Funny, I almost forgot about this…) I went through a bit of a green tea craze from ages 17-20. I drank about 4 cups a day, and had never had problems carrying my tea through airports. Then again, I’d never tried to bring it through customs.
The tea bags aroused much suspicion. The TSA agents were now talking to eachother in Japanese, and I realized how unnerving it is when everyone around you is speaking a foreign language. It was made worse by the fact that they had me in a back room in an international airport and had recentally passed around a nudie pic starring yours truly and seemed obviously perturbed by the bags of tea I was carrying in my backpack, which I picked up on by the changes in tone of voice and decible level and facial expressions.
“What is this,” they asked.
“Green tea,” I said. “Tea,” I repeated making a sipping-from-a-teacup jesture.
“Please come with me,” said the female TSA agent, and she motioned for me to follow her to the back-back room.
Fuckfuckfuck! I am in no mood for a cavity search right now, I thought. I imagined that I was bound for a cavity search, given how things had processed in the first back room.
“Take off your shirt, shoes, socks and pants.”
Oh, balls……
Lucky for me, I did not have my cavities searched that day. The TSA agent checked me for things strapped to my exterior, and checked my pockets, and told me to get dressed. I then followed her back to the first back room.
“Are you staying in Nagoya?”
I knew our first tour date was Sapporo, but we were rehearsing in another town and I didn’t recall what the town was called (it was Tomokomai)
“No…”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It was at that point that I realized how exasperated I was. I had just flown accross the US and the Pacific ocean, I had no idea where I was going, had some sensitive materials viewed by three strangers with the capacity to retain me indefinately, and was then strip-searched. And I could hardly understand a word they were saying.
“Where is your ticket?”
“I don’t have one!”
They all looked at eachother and spoke in Japanese.
“I’m with a group,” I tried to explain. “I’m supposed to meet my group and get my tickets.”
(Haven’t gotten around to developing my negs or digitalizing my VHS footage yet, so the media blitz will have to wait, until then, here’s something to tide you over – spellchecked extra special for tgirsch…though my grammer is beyond helpless.)
I started to feel a little more at ease after receiving my second contract. I’m the type of person who hates not knowing what the immediate future holds. I’m a contingency planner and I’m not a patient person. I need to be able to put a least a few ducks in a row. So, once I knew what I’d be doing for the coming year, I started to get into the groove. Getting a second contract also meant I would be transitioning out the “new girl” phase at the end of the tour. But first, there were some new girl rituals.
One of the new girl rituals was something I seem to have started at the cast/crew auction. Towards the end of every show, cast and crew members auctioned off belongings to raise money for the closing-night party. Mostly little commodities like hot-plates and hot-pots, or travel-TVs and mp3 players. I decided to auction off myself as a show-laundry bitch to any of the other show girls. When this proved popular, I auctioned myself off again for “3 genie spares;” (skating someones position in the genies number). It was a fun little game.
New girl initiations were held in Miami, our second to last stop on the tour. We threw a girls only party on the beach, complete with a party punch aptly titled skip-n-go-naked. Also known in some circles as the pink panty dropper, which consists of beer, vodka, and pink lemonade. It sounds gross, but properly proportioned, it tastes like fizzy alcoholic lemonade. Since the drink was called skip-n-go-naked, it was fitting that our new girl initiation involved doing just that: streaking across the beach. Though we didn’t really streak, we skipped. A few blackmail polaroids were taken, and we received our blackmail photo-mementos to destroy if we desired to do so. ( I didn’t destroy mine, but rather tucked it into my suitcase and forgot about, and it happened to surface later, making an already awkward moment at Nagoya Airport even more awkward. More on this later.)
Closing show was a blast. We were in Jacksonville, FL, and giddy. I didn’t know this before hand, but there’s a tendency to go a bit buck-wild on the last show. As I’ve said earlier, we all took some liberties with choreography, anywhere where liberties could be taken. One such part, to give an example, was in genies. While the principle genie does his showboating, all us little genies were to stand around the sides of the stage and dance. Sometimes we did the macarena, sometimes we did greased lightening, sometimes we did a little Janet Jackson, etc. The game was “how much can we get away with before the PD notices and tells us to knock it off.” So, at the closing show, when our PD finished giving us notes and said, “show me what you’ve got,” the gauntlet was thrown.
First of all, there were the deviations from standard show makeup, where we were prohibited from using bright, non-neutral colors. We hit the green and magenta eye shadows like motherf***ers. Some showgirls did outrageous eyelashes, and some showboys got a little glitzy as well. For some numbers, we donned ever more extras. For clouds, I glued about 6 sparkly rhinestones around my eyes.
The on-the-ice folly commenced. The number I remember as most deviant was the chinese-huns fight in Mulan. Several huns appeared wearing sunglasses (THAT was too far, according to the PD, and they were warned not do that again). At one particular point in the choreography, myself and my fighting partner, along with another hun and her partner, did a lift sequence across the ice. It was called a “cartwheel” lift, and our lift typically went all the way up into an airborne toss at the highest point. It had been my favorite part of the number because I got to fly. It designed to look like the chinese were picking up the huns and throwing them heels-over-head into the air. For closing night show, we decided to ditch the fight-like choreography for something a little more…affectionate. Rather than throwing us, our partners scooped us up into their arms as we pretended to swoon and hold lovingly on to their necks. Very un-hun-like.
For the finale, I bid a special farewell to my candlestick costume. The choreography had me drifting along behind belle and her prince as he carried her in a lift across the ice. Rather than diligently following them, I stood at center stage and did N’Sync’s “bye, bye, bye” dance – in the candlestick.
After the closing show, we packed out and many of us went our separate ways for the interim. Most of the crew went to refurbish the set before finally shipping it off in crates to Japan. Many skaters returned home for the 2 month break. It wasn’t a paid break, and I wasn’t able to collect anything substantial for my temporary unemployment, so I spent mid-april through mid-june of 2001 in New York City skating with the Ice Theatre of New York and my friend Greg on his particulary innovative and racey Freezerburn project.
If I had to pick the funniest moment from my first tour, it would be from our run in Miami. We were all gathered back stage for notes from the PD when a few of us noticed that there was a little girl of about 5 years old girl, in a princess outfit and skates standing on the back stage ice. What had happened was that her parents had told her there would be a Mickey Mouse Club in the show. Somehow they came under the impression that their absolutely darling child would be able to join in the skating during the Mickey Mouse Club. So they laced her up and on the ice she went, much to the astonishment of the stage crew who first saw her as they went about preparing for half-hour call. Like any kid in her position would do, she immediately “entered” the castle, leading her back stage, where she was discovered skating around. She said she was all warmed up and ready to perform with the mouseketeers. Nothing like that had happened before on the tour. It was a bit ashtonishing and 100% adorable. Sadly, she was not allowed to skate in the Mickey Mouse Club number because of liability issues.
The Showgirl Chronicles will continue on with my NYC escapades. And pictures and footage – eventually. I plan to carry it all the way out through the Japan tour, my departure from full-time professional skating, and leave you with something of an epilogue (my last performances during my college years, total retirement from pro-skating and my transition into a trapeze artist.)
Never, I repeat, never do to your back what I did to mine on the show. If you strain or pull something, for godsake, stop doing whatever you were doing, take some NSAIDs, and rest. If it doesn’t feel remarkably better the next day, go see a doctor. Don’t be tough. Really. I’m dead serious: be a wimpy little pussy when it comes to back pain.
I was all of 19 years old, having just turned 19 on the show, when I strained my back – the first time. At 5’4″, I was considered “character height”, meaning I was of the appropriate height to don the classic disney cartoon character costumes. Most of the characters, ‘cept for Goofy, were played by girls. I was Lumiere, the candlestick from Beauty and the Beast, during the Beauty segment of the show. The costume was horrendous. I wore a big fiberglass tube – the part that made up the midsection – over a long skirt. The tube was cinched just below my knees and went all the way up to my armpits. It posed a tremendous restriction to my normal range of motion. On the very top sat the character head, which towered a good 4 feet over my actual head and weighed 15 pounds. The head wasn’t supported by any other part of the costume, but rather it perched on top of my shoulders. The only attachment from the head to the body was two nylon straps running down to the fiberglass midsection. The head was free to move and bobble around. See, Disney characters talk by moving their heads around. Part of my routine was to bow several times, and each time I bowed, the 4-foot tall head would lob forward and yank my head down. The rest of the costume made it impossible to properly compensat for this motion. Instead, I would end up pitched forward and pinned against the fiberglass tube around my torso with the character head pulling on my neck and back muscles. There was no good way to get back upright from that position due to the restricting costume, so I had to throw my weight backwards into my straining back and jerk myself up.
I strained my erector spinae, latissimus dorsae, quadratus lumborum, and I sprained my sacro-illiac joint.
And then I did it again twice more within 6 months of the original injury. In laymans terms, I permanently damaged the ligaments that fastened my spine and sacrum to my pelvis, and I did this all before I was 20. I’ve been in near constant pain ever since.
Amazingly, my spine remains absolutely perfect. I’m just a little too bendy for my own good. The problem lies in the muscles and ligaments. The ligaments are too loose, due to my injuries, to stabilize my spine, which causes my muscles to be in a constant state of clenching, otherwise known as a “muscle spasm.” A muscle spasm is like a knot in the muscle. It doesn’t spasm like you might think a muscle would spasm – it’s not like a great big uncontrolled twitch. Rather, it’s the muscle tightening up on itself because it’s getting the signal to tighten up, due to be pulled on, in my case, by my spine flopping around all willy nilly. The muscles begin to accumulate little tears, and swelling and irritation ensues, restricting blood flow and prolonging healing. When muscles are damaged, they become tight and weak. The weaker the muscle, the more it strains in effort to contract, causing the unremitting tightness and soreness that is “the muscle spasm.” Sounds fun, doesn’t it?
I’ve spend hours laying on the floor, my injury keeps me up at night – sometimes all night. Sometimes several nights in a row. Ibuprofin, and other NSAIDs make it worse, since they effectively relax other supporting muscles and cause more strain on the weak, damaged muscles.
I’ve asked to have my vertebrae fused together, to releive my muscles of the arduous task of supporting my excessively mobile spine. I was turned down. They tell me that my condition will improve when I get older and get arthritis, that the stiffening of my joints will help relieve my muscles. Great – I can look forward to arthritis. For now, I’m just glad my spine itself is free from damage.
So…yeah. I get to look forward to arthritis. Dude, seriousely, if the devil incarnate came to me and said, “yo, I can take away your back pain for the rest of your life…all you need to do is kill a man,” it would give me a moment’s pause, like, I would think, “Ok…let me think…uhhhh…yeah, well, you see….no.”
I wouldn’t kill someone to relieve my pain, but ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh I’d cedrtainly entertain the idea for a moment or two.
Before all that shite, however, I managed to have a relatively injury free, normal career as a D20 showgirl. Key word being “relatively…”
But that’s kinda towards the end of my story. And I’m not quite there yet. Before the big injuries finally did me in, there were the minor not-so-serious injuries. Oh yeah, and some bloopers as well. Have I mentioned the time I fell off of the castle?
I fell about 10 times during the show, over the course of the states tour. And I fell at least once in every costume I wore…except the candlestick (Lumiere)….and thank jebus for that, because when you fall in the candlestick, so I heard, two stage-crew guys had to run out onto the ice and prop you back up because it was imposible to get yourself upright again on your own, due to the limitted mobility of the costume. In the mean time, I was instructed – in case I took a spill, you had to continue speaking your lines, meaning moving your hands around while laying on the ice. The line-captain, a 30-year old seasoned brittish showgirl, was the candlestick before I took over her part, and she fell once, and it put her in tears.
“Pretty little clouds”
My first fall was in my second show. I was a cloud in the blue-fairy/pinnochio number. The cloud costume, unlike what you’re probably imagining, was a pretty, sexy little dress. The “clouds” were the ensemble skaters during the blue-fairy’s entrance. I have one picture of me in the cloud, and it is in MA, and I’m trying to get it sent down here. For now I’ll have to describe it to you: it was a sleek dress with a low back, and a weird sparkly headpiece. During the clouds, we carried, uhhhh, “clouds”: big 12 foot long silky scarfs, which we twirled around and ruffled etc., etc. If you don’t hold your cloud high enough, or move it properly, it drags on the ice and, well, can get caught in your skates. I have to say, I’m quite proud of the fact that I fell quite gracefully as a cloud, hitting the ice and managing to grab my “cloud” and strike a pose as I slid across the ice, narrowly avoiding hitting the wall.
Ok, that one is admittably, no fun. There was another cloud issue while I was touring, involving multiple cloud girls. This one happened to occur opening night of the Japan tour. See, the blue fairy enters first, and then lead us clouds out onto the ice from the side of the castle about 2 minutes into the number. Before our cue, we had to wait, all lined up at stage left. I mentioned those unwieldy headpieces and flowy bits of cloud…the costumes, by and by, were also silky and flowy. The head pieces were – oh geez – how to explain them – kinda wire-y curly-doodles that spiralled and twisted upwards, with some sparkly shazamms on them. Again, I apologize for the lack of photo, I’m workin’ on it. So, there we were. I was the third cloud in line, cloud #3 if you will. Cloud #1 was straightening out her cloud-scarf thing, and managed to get her cloud ensared upon cloud #2′s head piece. Cloud #1 then turned around to held untangle cloud #2, and in the process, their headpieces because entwined. Keep in mind, we had about 20 seconds before our entrance cue at this point, and clouds 1 and 2 were all tripped up in headpiece bangles and fabric. Me, being next in line, then attemped to seperate them, and you guess what happened there, and cloud #4 – there were six of us total – followed suit as well.
[Todd - the stage right carp: "Cue clouds"]
“shit! shit! shit!shit…..”
[Our P.D., over the walkie: "Todd, why are there only two clouds? What's going on?"
Todd:" Uhhh, they got stuck."
P.D." Stuck?"
You ever see the string of circus elephants walking around in tandem, each one using its trunk to hold onto the tail of the elephant in front of it? I imagine we kinda looked like that, the four of us, as we manuevered our way off of back stage.
"Genies"
Looking back, the genie number was great fun. It was the "never had a friend like me," number from the Alladdin seg. The lead genie, Scott, was awesome, and did a full-layout backflip on ice. There were about 20 of us back-up/replicate genies, you know, from when the genie replicates himself in the disney film. If you haven't seen it, never mind. At the time, however, I remember that I never liked being in the genie number. No one really did. The genie costume, like much of the other costumes, was bulky and unwieldy. The upper body was padded to a great deal. It was like wearing several fluffy pillows. The genie slippers fastened over the skates, and the head was a full head rubber mask, under which we had to wear a hood so that no bit of neck or hair could peek through.
I fell several times in the genie, and I have to say, I remember it being kinda fun. I mean, my upper body was essentially one big pillow, and made for some good slidin' on the ice. I had one other not-so-fun genie accident. See, the ensemble genies entered through a big cloud of smoke. The stage effect of the smoke cloud was accomplished by Lee - yes - the same one I happened to be dating - spraying a canister of compressed CO2. There's this really neat thing that happens when compressed CO2 is released from a canister: the drop in pressure within the tube causes it to become very cold at the point where the gas is being released, and water vapor will condense to form ice on the nozzle. It just so happened that, one day, as I was going through the CO2 cloud in the genies number, that a piece of ice managed to fly though the very small eye pieces in my mask and strike me in the eyeball...right as I was emerging on stage. And hoooooooly f*ckberries, that sh*t hurt. I was then presented with another problem: I had one eye which I could see out of, and no peripheral vision as it was because of the full-head rubber mask, and my eyes had promptly begun to water up. I could see the blue blobs of genies around me with just enough contrast to tell where they were, and so I could guide myself appropriately to effectively remain in place during the number. Really, what I needed to do was get my ass off the ice to have my eye checked out, but I was scared shitless about getting in the way of the principal genie, whose routine was one big slew of acrobatic feats. Scott, the principal genie, happend to be a tall guy, in a similar costume, with similar restrictions to his vision. Colliding with him would've been like an F150 crashing into my ford focus hatchback, so I finished out the number, all the while yelling to Kit and Sarah, the genies to my right and left, that "you have to help me out, I can't see!"
So I finished up, tore my mask off and was off to the e-room. Thankfully, my cornea remained in tact and unscratched, and I missed only one show due to having to wear an eye patch. I got chewed out for not exiting the ice promptly, which, truthfully, I don't know how I was supposed to do that; I couldn't see, and communicating through a full head rubber mask is not easily done. Lee felt damn bad about the incident, since he was the one who had been spraying the CO2. He ended up carrying me to the e-room on piggy-back after the show. On our way, we passed another one of the skaters, an acrobat, who had just come from the e-room himself. It really was a circus, that show, I tell you...
One of the stage hands, Tommy, took to calling me "patchy" for a spell after that. He later gave me another nickname, "stitchy." Y'all can guess the outcome of that accident....
"The skater scar"
We call it the skater scar in the skating world because many skaters have it: a scar that runs from left to right on the underside of the chin. One acquires this scar from falling face forward and sliding their chin across the ice. It's not a painfull injury, but it bleeds a lot and typically requires a few stitches. I've done this to my chin twice: once, when I was a wee skater of 5 years old, and once while practicing after the show. Yes, I have fallen on my face. To give you a visual image of how this happened, the move I was doing when the fall occured looked like this:
That’s not me, by the way. We made our own ice on the tour, and it wasn’t always of the highest quality. We had some issues with the compressors and pumps going down, and the ice melting, or becoming too thin. I was in the middle of what we call the “stars,” the move that the guy in the above video is doing which involves toe-pick-kicking while swinging your body parallel to the ice leading up to the fancy gravity defying jump-spin, called “an arabian”. If you watch closely, you can see that this involves really leaning into a deep edge to generate the angular momentum. However, inorder to stay on the foot and not fall on your face, the edge of the supporting blade needs to cut deeply and securely into some ice. As I prepared to kick up into the arabian, which meant one great big push with my toepick whilst swooping my torso in a big parabolic arch, I hit a spot with insufficient ice. Rather than the momentum of my legs carrying me aloft into a sort of vertical twisting hurdle, I effectively cartwheeled my self directly onto my face. The whole thing was rather fast, and I’m happy to say, not too painfull. The skin on the underside of your chin, you see, isn’t all that sensitive. I’d never fallen on this move before, and finding myself suddenly on my face and bleeding was a bit disorienting, but I was fine…except for the bleeding bit.
F*ckSh*tPiss! I hate going to the e-room, I thought. I really didn’t want to go to the e-room…again. Especially for a scrape which didn’t even hurt. But at the urging of everyone else who saw me oozing blood all over the ice, I was prompted to scuttle off to get some stitches.
“Stage-left hunnies.”
The Mulan segment culminated with a fight between the chinese and the huns, and it was actually a pretty cool number. All the chinese soldiers, save Mulan herself, were played by boys, while all the huns were showgirls, reason being that the “fight” involved the chinese picking up and throwing the huns. It was pretty fun.
I was a stage-left hun, meaning that I entered the scene by climbing over the stage left turret of the castle. It was good to be a stage-left hun. Todd worked the stage left turret, and did something he was not supposed to do: he gave us treats. Third-show treats, he called them. Typically, on the third show, as we passed him to scale the castle – skates and hun-costumes and all, he would feed us pieces of candy, usually a starburst or some skittles. Eating in costume was a bigtime no-no, and so was eating in costume while skating in the show. But it was our thing. We got a bit goofy in some numbers, when we could get away with it. We liked to make with the humor to keep spirits up at the end of tiresome three-show days. One show, the hun in front of me, in an effort to make a humorous un-hun-like emergence atop the turret, as we were want to do out of fun every now and again, paused and kicked one leg outwards in a sort of arabesque. I, however, was not aware that she was going to do this, and, being right below her on a ladder, received a swift kick to the forhead and fell about 8 feet off the castle. Luckilly, Todd managed to heroically catch me.
“Whoa, thanks! I’m ok,” I insisted. “I’ll just go out the bottom of the turret,”
“No, I don’t think so. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Wha – I’m fine, I’m not bleeding, am I?”
“No, but you just got kicked in the head and fell off the castle. I’m not letting you out there.”
I took a few other bruises during that number. Amidst some light stage-fighting, I caught a solid elbow to the eyesocket when my fighting partner slung me a little too agressively and I flew into another skater’s arm. I imagine it looked quite comical: me hitting him, and then me hitting the ice. Sorta like Wiley Coyote running into the wall.
It’s a goddamn oddity that I didn’t accrue any significant permanent damages to my body resultant from all the flying through the air and landing on parts I was not meant to land on. *Sigh* Noooo, it had to be that stupid, f***ing candlestick costume.
The first injury was slightly gradual. It was discomfort at first, and not pain. After the pack-out show, I would bring bags of ice onto the tourbus and ice down my shoulders and mid-back, which felt like the sore parts at the time, and I would ice myself down as we bused to the next city. I didn’t want to go straight out when the pain intensified, because, in addition to being a candlestick, I was also a principal understudy, which involved some actual figure skating. I went to the office and I told them that, truthfully, I don’t think my body can take being in the candlestick, that it’s causing me pain and making it damn hard to perform. I asked if I could not do the candlestick and still do my other numbers. The answer was not what I wanted to hear.
See, D20 was a popular show, not just for audiences, but for skaters as well. It had a lot of big musical numbers, and very little stupid dialogue. A lot of skaters wanted to get onto the show, and a lot of skaters with years of experience on other tours wanted to transfer over. I, as an ensemble skater, would be easily replaced. My options were to go out, heal, and come back and do my parts – candlestick and all, or to quit. I believe the exact words said to me by Mike, the tour manager who I swear wanted to see me quit – or at least that’s how he acted, were “there are about 10 skaters waiting to take your place if you want to leave.”
At that point, I began to realize that I might not want to committ myself to showbiz for the longhaul. It really was stupidity that made me say, “sure, I’ll keeping doing the candlestick. I love doing character work,” during contract negotiations. The problem with being a full-time salaried perfromer is that there’s typically a contract involved. The Disney contracts didn’t give much room to wiggle. I didn’t have a lot of say with my contract, being a new girl and all. The contract I was offered, take it or leave it, essentially said, “we own you, baby, and you’ll do whatever we tell you to do baby, and wear whatever we tell you to wear, baby, or else.” F***ing showbiz circus. Like I said, we ensemble skaters were a dime-a-dozen. They really weren’t concerned about replacing skaters.
The tour would be heading to Japan and South East Asia next, and Lee had already been offered a spot on the crew for Japan. I wanted to stay with him, so I talked myself into signing away my body for another year.
I would be heading to Japan – yippee!
Ahhh, me and my youthful abandon, thinking I was invincible, not caring about too far down the road….
There was a two-month break in-between the states-tour and the Japan-tour, and I would be spending the break in NYC, skating with the Ice Theatre of New York and doing a nifty little avante-garde show, Greg Wittrock’s Freezerburn, on the side. I also reinjured my back while in New York, but that bit is still to come. I still had to finish out the first tour in the states.
Next Chapter: Media Blitz!
(That’s right, I have some actual footage for you!) Here’s a preview:
Shoothouse Barbie, age 19, pre-show in stage make-up: my "Betty boop" false lashes and the "Disney smile"
“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.
I never really got used to life on tour, whereas the girls who had been there for long periods of time put up the pretense that life of tour was “the life.” You could see when it would get to people, you could see a girl break down every once and a while, but she’d usually find something else – or someone else to blame it on, or some other bit of drama to stir up in order to displace her ordeal. About one month into the tour, just as I was starting to feel slightly settled, I was called into the manager’s office. Mike, the tour manager, asked me if I was aware of the company’s policy on drugs, that I could get fired if caught doing drugs, or if I tested positive during a random drug test. From that meeting, I got the distinct impression that Mike did not like me very much, and I didn’t really know why he was throwing me on the grill, though it seemed like he really was meaning to make me feel intimidated.
I later found out that one of the older showgirls had gone to him and claimed that she saw me carrying a bag of cocaine around the building. Having never done cocaine, you can imagine how perplexing and intimidating this experience was. I never did do any drugs on tour. I’d already been threatened about doing drugs having never done any, and that was enough for me. Two other skaters were busted by the cops and arrested in a coke deal during my first tour. They were fired immediately. They had been well liked skaters, and had been on tour for several years. Some of the older showgirls, including the chick who made the bogus claim about me doing blow, were all torn up over Danny and Sean being KO’d. Ironic, isn’t it? See why I never really gelled with some of these folks?
Drug use on tour was obvious. There was one showgirl who was bone-thin and had regular nose-bleeds, and everyone knew she did a lot of blow. Skaters like blow. A lot of skaters start sniffing the yeyo during training, in order to stay super-thin and keep their energy up. I know of several world-class competitors who are coke-heads. Don’t believe it? One word: Oksana. Ya think she only got into boozing and drugs after she moved to America? Anyways….A lot of the stage crew carried in their crates those drinks which temporarily flush the drugs from your urine because we had random drug testing. As to which kinds of drugs were rampant on tour? Stuff that is legal in Amsterdam, for the most part, and pharmaceuticals. The tour was like a traveling pharmacy when it came to pharmaceutical drugs. Screamers, laughers, uppers, downers, you name it. Even antibiotics. Later on, in Japan, as a matter of fact, this pharmacy served me quite well. I felt a bit streppish towards the end of rehearsals, and one of the Russian girls, Julia, had a large supply of ammoccicilin. She took me up to her room, and her husband Joe checked out my throat. I remember – there I was, with Joe peering into my mouth with a flashlight as Julia counted out a full 10-day dose of antibiotics. Not the brightest thing to do, I know, but hey, neither was joining Disney On Ice….
I almost quit the tour 5 weeks in, shortly after my nasty meeting with the tour manager. Then I starting dating Lee, one of the crew guys. My first interaction with Lee was back in Mobile, while I was stuck in my room with a fever. He called because his roomate, Will, happened to be the guy who took me to the pharmacy where I picked up that hydrocodon-stuff that I’d never heard of before, had mentioned that “the new girl has vicodin.” My first conversation with Lee went something like this:
“Hey it’s Will, how are you feeling?”
“Shitty.”
“Hey, Lee wants to talk to you, here…”
“Huh? Who?”
“Hey, this is Lee.”
“Who?”
“Lee.”
“Ummm….”
“I’m Will’s roomate.”
“Ok…”
“How are you feeling?”
“Shitty.”
“I heard you have hydrocodon.”
“What?”
“Hydrocodon”
(to be honest, I had no idea how to pronounce the Rx name on the bottle of pills, and had no clue what Lee was getting at.”
“Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about…I don’t feel well, I’m gonna go…”
“No, wait, can I come down there and…”
“Dude! I have a f***ing fever! I’m in bed, I’m sick. I’m getting off the phone.”
….
Yeah….and I ended up dating him. To be fair, it wasn’t a bad relationship – on the road, that is. Lee was very supportive. He played guitar, he was charming, and we got along great. I even got him to stop doing coke and quit smoking.
I fit in better with crew than I did with the cast. I was a “crew-bitch”, instead of a “show-bitch”. There were a couple of other crew-skater couples, as well. We hung out back stage, around the crates in-between shows. Lee and Clint, another member of the crew, would jam on the guitars backstage during the breaks. During the long, three-show-days, I would often take a nap in an empty crate, a top a pile of dirty packing blankets, to the sound Clint playing some freestyle bluesy ditty.
Off the road, things didn’t work out for me and Lee. It’s amazing how facillitating the tour was, in the sense that it allowed us the freedom to live a carefree and lifestyle and enjoy frivolous things, not worrying about the long term stuff, all the while traveling the globe and feeling worldly and independent. See, when you live in a hotel and have a steady paycheck and your whole job/life routine is unvarying from week to week, when there aren’t really other variables because it’s a touring show and stuff really stays the same, you don’t have to worry about too much; life is simple and fun, and relationships are easy; you just coast. After the tour, it became apparent that we really weren’t very compatable. I went to college, and Lee’s inner traditional southern-male (Lee was from Louisiana, raised in a southern-baptist household. His mother continually asked him if I was “still jewish.”) control-freak began to emerge. On tour, when all decisions and plans are made for you, I realized, there was no need or place for this aspect of his personality, and it stayed bottled up, but off the road was a different story. We broke up after two years, and one of the reasons I have very few pictures from the tour is that Lee took them all with him and never responded to my requests that he send me the negs.
As I mentioned earlier in the post, I didn’t get sucked into the boozy-druggy world of the tour. But that doesn’t mean I treated my body well. There are other ways a girl can do harm to her body without putting a finger down her throat, or a white powder up her nose. Some were harms I imposed on myself, while others were harms imposed on me by the nature of touring. And some weren’t exactly harmful, but more like frivolous exploits of youth. Let’s just say we skaters have a special kind of f***ed up relationship with our bodies, and we also liked to get a bit rebellious…..
There was one other “new girl” who arrived at the show the same time as me. Her name was Portia*, she was the only one on the show who was younger than me (Portia was 17), and we roomed together for the first three months of the tour. By the end of that period, neither one of us was speaking to the other, however, today, she’s the only showgirl I’ve kept remotely in-touch with over the past 9 years.
Breaking the ice with the other showgirls – and boys – was not easy. I imagined it was sort of like pledging a sorority. There were girls in their 30′s who’d been on the show since they were 18, so it was a very tightly bonded group of people. And also a faux tight-knit group to the extent that it was pretty much like a very large highschool clique. Pretty much exactly like that.
On my first day, almost no one spoke to me unless they had to. Some of the older showgirls – and boys – didn’t even speak to me until several weeks into the tour. I made friends with one of the other newgirls, Lisa*, who had been with the tour for a few months by then. She was a former U.S. pairs champ who had competed at the world championships. I remembered watching her on tv, and now we were both in the ensemble for Disney on Ice.
When people ask me which character I played on the show, I tell them, “pretty much all of them.” See, when you are in the ensemble, you have to be prepared to step into almost any role on short notice if another skater gets hurt. Most skaters start at the ensemble level, regardless of their talent. Thats how it works with DOI. Being in the ensemble takes work; it’s not, by definition, a less demanding part. Lisa was by far the most talented skater on the tour, but her height severely limitted her. Lisa stood at barely 5 foot, which was perfect for a competitive pairs skater, but on the short side for Disney. The preferred height for principle soloists was 5’6, and 5’2″ for pairs. The reason for this was that the ice was essentially a stage, and being too short caused main characters to look too diminuitive. It was a pity, because Lisa later teamed up with Tomo, a 2-time Japanese Olympian, to understudy the principle pair, and they were deemed too short and only “went in” a few times. Their skating was fantastic.
The rehearsal schedule was intense and harrowing. The regular cast rehearsals ran roughly from 9-5, with breaks every few hours. As new members of the cast, however, we only got to break for lunch. We spent the rest of the cast breaks on the ice, and rehearsal didn’t end at 5, as it did for everyone else. I was used to training 4-6 hours a day, but I’d never spent 10 consecutive hours in my skates before. My legs felt wood-like and stiff by the end of the day, my feet felt like lead weights and were nearly numb.
Skates, by the way are disgusting. If you’ve never seen a pro-skater’s skates before, they’re big, thick, heavy contraptions, not like the flimsy things you rent at the local rink. The upper part of the skate, called the boot, is made of layers of leather (or synthetic leather) and padding. I was trained to skate barefoot because it gives you better contact and control over the boot. After days of 10-hour rehearsals, my skates were so disgusting that they’d still be damp with sweat when I arrived at the rink in the mornings. Simply showering at the end of the day wasn’t enough – I had to scrub my feet for ten minutes to remove the stench of dank skate and foot from my skin. It’s a glamorous sport, let me tell you.
Dragging my ass onto the ice again the second day was damn hard, but it got easier after that – physically. Well, sort of. I had some ups and downs during the rehearsals and first few weeks on tour.
I wasn’t eating right from the get-go. I’d never lived out of a hotel for more than a few days before. Eating on the road was somewhat of an art form. Not all hotels offered mini-fridges, so our food options were limitted to eating out and anything we could smuggle from the free continental breakfast – when there was one. I was also somewhat depressed and not adjusting to my new lifestyle very well, and I don’t eat enough when I’m depressed.
About one week into rehearsals, my legs gave out on me. I went to the e-room with a slight loss of sensation in my limbs and a slightly elevated temperature. This was when I first discovered that I have extremely low blood pressure. Alarmingly low blood pressure. As in, “you appear to be dying” low blood pressure. Apparently, low bp runs in the women of my family, but I didn’t know it at the time. I ended up recovering from “exhaustion” with saline drip for six hours. I lost my shpadoinkle when they stuck the needle in my arm. Being hooked up to an IV was the most miserable, helpless feeling I’d experienced thus far on the show. Plus, it’s downright unpleasant – your arm gets cold from the fluids entering your blood stream.
I was released and given a prescription for vicodon. No wonder celebrities are always going to the emergency room to get treated for exhaustion – doctors, it would seem, like to give out ‘scripts for vicodon.
I had recovered all of 6 hours when I came down with a full-on fever. Rehearsals ended and I spent the opening night of the tour in bed with the flu. It was a miserable beginning.
I rejoined the show towards the end of the run in Mobile. Coincidentally, one of the principal skaters had become injured and “went out” at the same time I came “back in.” Her understudy took over her roll, and so my first show began with me “sparing” two extra positions. Sparing is when you cover someone else’s role in an ensemble number. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an exciting return to action. My first show was a surreal experience. It felt normal, it felt natural. But at the same time, I was stepping back in my head and going, “wow, I’m actually doing this, aren’t I?” There was no nervousness, but a zen-like feeling of anticipation and reigned-in excitement as I waited for the curtain to pull back during opening number. Even after I got used to the show, there were remnants of that anticipatory excitement at the beginning of every show. No matter what bullshit went on backstage, or how sick I felt, or how unhappy I may have been, when the show started, I left it behind for the uber-alternate reality of the performance. I must say, I prefer the zen of shooting, with it’s control, precision and uber awareness, and the calm it imparts. But being on stage and going through the motions, the same old motions, after 5, 10, 15 shows, was an interesting feeling with it’s own weird soothing qualities. It was almost mechanical. I had clocked so much time on the ice that skating was as natural as walking. I found that part of me could retreat and relax while my body took over.
Reflecting back on my induction to the tour, I realized that the show was like a isolated little bubble, a fragile kind of biosphere. As a new girls, it’s like we represented elements of the outside world that had to be quarantined for a given period of time, until we assimilated and abandoned enough of the influences of the outside world to be deemed unthreatening to the delicate, strange world of the ice show. Showgirls seldom mingled in the outside world without putting up a protective haze of booze and drugs.
I never fully adjusted to life on tour. My skin never hardened completely to the lifestyle of a showgirl, but I began to grow used to it and to the other rhythms of the tour. The show has a weird way of getting into you, like it or not. Assimilation by immersion. By the time we left Mobile, I was referring to the hotel as “home.” The first time I heard myself say it, it shocked me. It was completely unintentional. The words just slipped out like any other words. Like it was completely normal. Are you staying to skate after rehearsal? No, I’m gonna go home.
Did I really just say that? Holy sh**, I really just said that- I can’t believe I just said that. I was thinking “hotel” and I said “home”. F***! Whoa. Wow……well, ok…..here we go.
After the crackheads in the apartment adjacent to mine began punching holes in the walls at 4 a.m., causing pictures to fall off the walls and shelves in my apartment and me to wake up in the middle of the night and reach for my gun because the walls were shaking from loud banging noises, I decided that moving out of my apartment complex a month early would be worth paying double rent. Since boyfriend will be moving here at the end of the summer with his weimaraner, I found us a nice duplex with a huge yard and went ahead and landed it. The landlord is the owner, which is a major bonus – no more shady corporate leasing company. After meeting with him to discuss the application process, I realized that his manner of communication is far from succinct and to the point. He really likes to explain himself at least three times (poor guy has clearly been screwed over by tenants in the past). So when we met the following day to sign the lease, I expected it would take a loooong tim. I did not, however, expect him to show up with a completely blank lease template. I mean, it was totally blank standardized template from the Texas Realtors Assoc., or something. I was used to the terms being set in stone by the apartment complex management. You know: the standard operating procedure: no wiggle room, but you pretty much know you’re getting a fair shake like every other renter. I’d never seen a totally blank template before.
Negotiating a contract is not difficult, if you’ve never done it before, all you need to know is that it’s a negotiation: you can take a black pen and cross things out, write things in, and it’s legally binding provided that all parties initial next to each ammendment. This was not my first rodeo; I have prior experience negotiating a contract from my days as a showgirl….
Chapter 1: D-20
I ran away with the circus after highschool and had a brief, 1 1/2 year career as a showgirl. I’m not lying…not exactly. My paychecks were from Ringling Bro’s Barnum and Baily. Somewhere in my parent’s basement, in an accordian file folder, I have the paystubs to prove it. Ringling Bro’s is the parent company of Feld Entertainment, the company which operates Disney On Ice. The show I joined was D20, Disney On Ice’s 20th production, “100 year’s of Disney Magic” was it’s commercial name. I performed with the company during the US tour in 2000 and the Japan tour in 2001.
Whenever I refer to my days on tour as “back when I was a showgirl,” the typical reaction is a surprised cockeyed look, followed by a confused glance down at my obviousely less-than-voluptuous bust. I wasn’t that kind of showgirl. But we were showgirls. Oh, yes, we were showgirls….I’m talking fake eyelashes and fishnets, big gaudy glittering costumes and head-dresses. And we flexed.
Flexed?
Picture Vanna White standing in her Vanna-White-Pose in front of the Wheel-Of-Fortune gameboard. Her pose is called “flexing” and it was the first thing I learned on the show.
I had just spent the summer in Florida training with my coaches. I moved down there by myself, immediately after graduation. Like, immediately, as in, I spent the day after graduation packing, and the next day I was out. I was 18, and I lived in Kissimmee for 3 months by myself, housesitting for a family I’d met a month earlier. It was a self-affirming experience for an 18 year old girl: living by yourself at the other end of the seaboard from your friends and family. I didn’t do much except skate, eat, and sleep. I didn’t have friends in Kissimmee, apart from my training mates, but we all lived over an hour’s drive apart. I was never a huge social butterfly, but it was lonely. I cried a lot after I settled in. Then I got over it and spent some quality time by myself. The experience certainly made me more comfortable in my own skin, so of course, I was a cocky little shit by the end of the summer, thinking I knew something about life at the ripe age of 18.
Nothing prepared me for life on tour. I don’t know why I thought I’d get on just fine with a bunch of skaters. I didn’t like to hang out with large groups of people, and if I couldn’t get away for some me-time every once in a while, I get cranky and petulant. I didn’t even like hanging around with other skaters in general. But it seemed like the logical next step. I mean, at that point, I was a good skater and I didn’t want to go to college.
Off I went to meet up with the tour which was rehearsing in Mobile, Alabama. I was sent my flight info, along with a few brief instructions: bring two large suitcases and put your skates in your carry-on. When you get to Mobile, take a cab to the hotel, and keep the receipt. That was it. I still remember the details of that day. I wore my bright orange parachute pants that I bought at marine specialties in P-town, and a tight light-blue calvin klein camisole which was see-through in the back. I loved that shirt, my parents hated it. My short brown hair was pulled up into two spikey pig-tails. I thought I was such a little deviant. I thought I was rock solid. And I was excited about my new adventure.
Those feelings quickly dissipated when rehearsals began.
Next Chapter: The “New Girls”
secretlivesofscientists AT gmail DOT com
A strange duck : a philipino - norwegian - hungarian - russian, publically - educated, whiskey - drinkin' jewish pro fessional figure skater - turned - PhD student who conducts green-energy research and supports gun rights and gay marriage.
