Long Legs and Tall Tales: A Showgirl's Wacky, Sexy Journey to the Playboy Mansion and the Radio City Rockettes (22 page)

On opening night, during our big dance number, “One Night in Bangkok,” I proved just how inadequate those measly stickers were. The choreography included an exuberant Indian war-dance step where we hopped on one leg and punched one arm in the air. Of course in all the opening night excitement I gave an extra-high-energy punch, which was too much for the slippery floor. The resulting unfortunate occurrence I witnessed in slow motion like a movie special effect: leg sliiiiiiiiiiips out from under meeeeeeee, faaaaaaaaaallll baaaaaackwaaaaaaaards onto elbooooooows, leeeeeeegs appear in front of faaaaaaaace and over heeeeeeaaaaaad, skirt of very short dreeeessss in eyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeees. The spill seemed to last an eternity as each detail was etched into my brain. In reality, it all happened in a fraction of a second. In an instant, I resumed the pow-wow with the rest of the cast. Like a shot, I popped back up and punched and hopped, punched and hopped.

The humiliating experience reminded me of those Olympic ice skaters who, in a failed attempt to do some gravity-defying quadruple-turn jump, instead land smack on their bellies, sprawled all over the ice, legs spread-eagled. A couple seconds later they are back skating with smiles on their faces as if nothing happened. Let me tell you, it’s embarrassing. And, after the initial shock and embarrassment wear off, it hurts, too.

Kristi’s Law: Your biggest mistakes and mishaps will happen when you have the most important people in the audience. Of course, my catastrophic collapse had to happen the night my entire family had flown in to see my performance. “You bounced back very quickly,” Mom said reassuringly. But I was still horrified, and with my (literally) bruised tail between my legs, I finally mustered up enough courage to confront the director before he beat me to the punch. “So, how about my accident in ‘One Night in Bangkok’?” I asked, dreading his response. “What accident? I didn’t see anything,” Mr. Rocco replied casually. Maybe it wasn’t the tragedy I had made it out to be. Sometimes it’s better not to be noticed.

Had I had the proper rubber on my shoes to begin with, the disaster probably would never have happened. It wasn’t until our Equity female lead fell during the show and ended up with a bloody knee that stage management did something to rectify the situation. They mopped the floor in Coca-Cola to make it stickier, and I was given permission to get my shoes properly rubbered by a shoe cobbler under wardrobe’s threat that “nothing had better happen to those shoes.” Thankfully, nothing did happen, and I finished the remaining shows on my feet.

Slippage aside, I enjoyed this “game show,” which was made even more interesting by playing some games of my own. In particular, one of our highly intelligent male dancers and I tried to finish a crossword puzzle by the end of each show. After each of our numbers, we would race downstairs to the dressing rooms as quickly as possible, change into our next costumes, and rush to rendezvous at my dressing table so we could figure out what to write for seventeen down. “Hurry! What’s an eight-letter word meaning “puffed out; full?” “Um, um, um … bouffant?” “Yes! It fits!” “We gotta go; that’s our cue!” Then we’d run up the stairs just in time to make our entrance. Perhaps this wasn’t the best way to stay focused on the show, but it definitely helped the night go by faster.

*******

Game over! With our Chess match complete, we moved right into
Paint Your Wagon
—a show about the California gold rush back in 1853. It opened on Broadway in 1951 and featured the famous ballad “They Call the Wind Mariah.” Clint Eastwood starred in the movie version. Along with this new endeavor came yet another new director and choreographer.

You can’t have a gold rush without prospectors, and since there weren’t enough real men to fill the bill for the opening scene, all the ladies got a lesson in cross-dressing. Our transformation from females to males generated uproarious laughter, as we donned scruffy wigs, beards and mustaches, ratty old clothes, hats, and boots in an attempt to disguise ourselves as male miners. It was the best gender conversion we could muster without a mega-dose of testosterone. There was much guffawing from the guys in the cast. “You look like Michael Landon!” they told me. “Oh, really? Well, he was very handsome, so I’ll take that as a compliment,” I replied remembering that Michael Landon made a pretty sexy “Pa” in the TV show
Little House on the Prairie
.

Every night, we prospectors embarked on what felt like a secret reconnaissance mission. About ten minutes prior to show time, after most of the audience members were seated, the stage manager gave us the “Go!” to head to the hills. In order to avoid being prematurely discovered, we crept and crawled, tip-toed and snuck, stationing ourselves behind bushes, trees, and hills immediately surrounding the theatre. I crouched behind a shrub and tried not to attract attention for so long I felt my brown beard turning gray. When the opening number finally began, we popped out of our hiding spots and journeyed to the stage as if we were really traveling to California. I mustered up my manhood as much as possible, but I could feel the audience eyeballing me and doing a double-take.

The most annoying part about being men was that we couldn’t wear any makeup, except for perhaps a little base, until the opening scene was over. Then we had to hurriedly metamorphose into beautiful women. I yearned for my pre-performance hour of makeup time, as that was when I’d relax and get my mind out of my day and into my role. It was my calming period which gave me the opportunity to switch gears from normal life to entertainment mode.

As surprising as it was to see myself transgendered, the real shocker came at rehearsal when the choreographer announced, “Kristi, you will be doing the dream ballet adage with Fred.” My jaw dropped to the floor. Now you would think that I would have been thoroughly elated to be doing the slow partner dance, especially since 1.) Fred was a strong, tall, handsome, straight, blond guy, and 2.) this was a featured dancer spot!

However, getting selected for the special part was bittersweet, as I worried that other cast members would scrutinize my performance and think they should have been chosen instead of me. I was nervous, as it had been over ten years since I had done any partnering or serious ballet, but I was determined to do my best. Even so, I was a slightly unsettled settler, never feeling completely confident about the adage. Plus I found out that Fred was married. Another one bites the gold dust.

No Wild West is complete without a bevy of raucous dance hall girls in a brothel-esque saloon setting. Naturally, I was one of them. While fun at first, after a while too much Can-Can can do a girl in. It required so many kicks and jump splits that I wondered if I’d permanently stretch my inner thighs to the point where they’d stay in the splits and never go back. I liked kicking well enough and was good at it, but it certainly took its toll on my body.

Our big dance hall dance number was a 911 call waiting to happen. It was organized chaos, with multiple partnering tricks happening simultaneously in close proximity to one another. As I dutifully cartwheeled holding onto my partner’s thighs with my head in his crotch, other duos whizzed and whirled around me, their spinning, kicking bodies too close for comfort. Yikes! “I think my partner and I are too close to the couple next to us. Would you mind moving us?” I pleaded with the choreographer. “You look fine to me. Just stay where you are,” she rebutted. Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one trapped upside down with her face exposed, vulnerable to the flailing feet. Still concerned but too shy to push on, I chose to trust the choreographer and not make a big stink about it.

Sure enough, one night, in the midst of all the hootin’ and hollerin’, I put my head down toward my partner’s privates in preparation to cartwheel, and the guy next to me spun around and kicked me right in the temple with his heavy boot, like a football being punted toward the goal posts. Somehow I finished the number, then ran off stage and burst into tears. I cried all through intermission and then miraculously pulled myself together enough to finish the show, even with what was surely a mild concussion. One of my best friends in the cast was the culprit. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry, Kristi!” he apologized profusely. But really the choreographer should have taken me seriously.

I was too clueless to know about accident reports or to have stage management take me to the hospital. Had I suffered permanent injury from the incident, I would have needed the accident report in order to claim disability or file a lawsuit. I should have insisted that the choreographer move my partner and me to a safer spot. But it’s hard to pull rank when you are a newbie and a peon.

Although
Paint Your Wagon
was my least favorite show to perform, I had the most fun in the dressing room and got a reputation for causing people to laugh soda pop out of their noses. A couple gals made
Paint Your Wagon
-themed backstage activity books (word games, crossword puzzles, hangman) for everyone. It was becoming apparent that backstage is where much of the best entertainment happened.

*******

The summer was winding down and those of us who had done the entire season were both exhausted and sad to see it end. We finished off with
Camelot
—that romantic tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Lancelot, Lady Guinevere, and Merlin the Magician. The Wards were back at the helm for this knightly pursuit. Yes! I was extra excited to get cast in
Camelot
, because it was primarily a singer show. In other words, you could pretty much be a “singer who moves well” (a showbiz classification term) and do all the choreography without a problem. Unfortunately, I had one
grande battement
(a high kick) to do in the show, so I still had to stretch every night. Even more unfortunate was that I pulled my hamstring by overstretching or stretching incorrectly or stretching when my muscles were too cold. Whatever the case, I was in pain and didn’t know enough to rest my muscles and give them time to repair. It was good that this was our last show of the summer, because my legs needed a siesta.

In
Camelot
, I also learned one of the greatest showbiz secrets of all time: “underdressing”—hiding one outfit underneath another. Sometimes, costume changes were so quick, portions of our costume for the next scene had to be worn underneath our costume for the current scene. Of course, it felt bulky and uncomfortable, but it was the only way to make the fast change in time. More importantly, in an effort to get home (or to the bar) in record time, performers also underdressed their “street” clothes. That is, they took off as much of their costume gear (tights, socks, G-strings) as possible and replaced it with as much of the clothing they wanted to wear home as possible. Oddly, while everyone was dying to get cast in the show, once actually in it, after the show ended for the night, they couldn’t seem to get out of that theatre quickly enough. Those ladies really in a rush to leave removed false eyelashes and all their hairpins except for the bare minimum required to maintain the hairdo, and some even scrubbed off some of their makeup. Because the costumes in
Camelot
were floor-length gowns covering our arms, legs, and feet, the women could underdress their T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Fantastic! I’d never seen anything like it. Once the curtain went down, it was a race to the finish, that is, the parking lot. Entertainers turn into Olympic sprinters after a show and can reach their cars faster than most audience members.

Over the course of the summer, I became fast friends with two castmates who did all five shows with me: Ronnie, a manly straight guy with a steady girlfriend, and Matthew, a charming gay guy. Neither of the men were dating prospects, but the three of us bonded beautifully and hung out together. For some reason, Ronnie ended up calling me “poophead.” For the duration of
Camelot
, it was his mission to play poophead jokes on me. I’d find notes in my shoes, on my costumes, and taped to my mirror calling me a poophead. I even found a rubber poop under my wig on my Styrofoam wig head. Before going on stage, I had to search my costumes to make sure they weren’t carrying some sort of fake dung on them. The mischief and camaraderie of our unlikely threesome was a highlight of my time at the Starlight Bowl.

Even more exciting than the doo-doo shenanigans was the baby shower the female ensemble threw for our newly pregnant cast member. We welcomed any excuse for a party. This was no ordinary baby shower, however. It was a high-speed extravaganza held during the show’s twenty-minute intermission in (What better place?) the dressing room shower! (Water off, thank you.) There were gifts and cake and snacks, and then we hurried back to stage to finish the show. Power shower! More and more, the backstage entertainment was rivaling the onstage entertainment.

Summer stock really propelled me into the world of show business, showed me the ropes, and dug me in deep. My New York experiences got my foot in the door, but summer stock left me fully living in the house. I felt connected to, enthralled with, and enchanted by entertainers. I fell in love with the theatres, the dressing rooms with mirrors edged by light bulbs, and the whole process of putting together a show. I thrived on the quick learning curve and getting to do so many different types of musicals in such a short time. I adored the costumes and how they instantly changed me into someone else. I lived for the dressing room camaraderie and conversations and the social events, like opening and closing night parties and all the gatherings for drinks in between. Like King Arthur at the end of the show, lamenting the demise of his beloved Camelot, I mourned the thought of leaving this fairytale existence behind. This was one summer full of shining moments that would not be forgotten.