Long Legs and Tall Tales: A Showgirl's Wacky, Sexy Journey to the Playboy Mansion and the Radio City Rockettes (48 page)

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Second on the agenda was the “Rag Doll” number, set in Santa’s workshop, in which we played adorable, giant rag dolls come to life. Our whimsical costume consisted of a clownish, baby-doll, polka-dot dress over red and white striped candy cane tights; orange foam hair that stuck straight up and fit our heads like a helmet; thick, nerdy, black horn-rimmed glasses; and black tap shoes that resembled a child’s best Sunday, patent-leather Mary Janes. It was all giggle and no glamour. The quick-paced, remarkably fun choreography alternated between rag doll floppy and sharp and clean. We were even allowed to make funny faces. Freedom!

In order to surprise the audience, we entered from the back of the house (where the audience sits), half the girls from house right and the other half from house left, holding hands and bumbling up the stairs to the stage. After more comedic rag doll choreography in which we kept pretending to wobble and fall over, we ran upstage to retrieve our assigned giant wooden alphabet blocks from two carts. (I had wondered what those blocks were for.) They were about two-and-a-half feet by two-and-a-half-feet square, and, boy, were they heavy. There were hand holes on the sides and a tiny, one-inch arrow on the top, which had to face specific directions during the show in order for certain sides of the block to be showing to the audience.

We dragged our blocks to assigned spots in two horizontal lines on stage. Then sitting on the blocks, we danced, banging our heels on them in time to the music, whirling around on our behinds, and kicking our legs in the air. My stomach muscles were so weak I could hardly keep my legs up the first few rehearsals. I was so embarrassed.

Next, rehearsal gloves were passed out, so we could get used to wearing them like we would in the show. “You’re going to learn how to spin your block. The gloves will keep your palms from bleeding,” said Dennis.
Bleeding? I don’t like the sound of this
. He and Julie showed us how to balance the block on its corner, with the palm of one hand anchoring the top tip in place. “Give it a good spin. Not too hard or it will fall down,” warned Julie, “But you have to spin it hard enough to keep it going for all eight counts. Everybody try.” 

We all gave our blocks a spin. Some girls were too tentative and their blocks stopped dead still halfway through the counts; others spun with too much gusto and their blocks got out of control and fell over with a loud bang. It looked easy, spinning like a toy top, when Julie and Dennis did it. “You have to control your blocks, Ladies.” exclaimed Linda. “Try it again.”

After the traumatizing spin section, we had less than a second to stop the block from spinning, locate the tiny arrow, and turn the block to its new position with the arrow facing upstage. This was a crucial move, for if you got mixed up, or couldn’t find the arrow in time, the blocks wouldn’t reveal the show-stopping surprise at the end of the number. There was no time to dawdle over the problem, because you had only two counts to get the block stopped correctly and then dance away. You couldn’t be there still fiddling with your block when the rest of the Rockettes were doing something else entirely.

Later, we had to climb on top of our blocks to tap dance. Our dresses were so puffy that we couldn’t see our blocks beneath us to know if we were in the center. Dancing a fraction of an inch in any direction could have put me off the edge of my block and tumbling to the floor. I danced with extreme trepidation. 

At the end of the number we did a can-can kickline in which we kicked
heel
-to-eye-high instead of the usual
toe
-to-eye-high. For some reason, as rag dolls we were allowed to kick higher than normal. It felt good to let my legs fly. For “Wreaths” we had already learned how to kick high in perfect synchronization, but because we were holding wreaths while we kicked, it wasn’t until this moment that we learned the proper “hook-up” for the kickline. The hook-up was the manner in which the ladies were connected arm-over-arm in a horizontal line. Julie demonstrated and described the process, “Place your left hand directly behind the small of the back of the lady on your left, then your right hand goes just over and above the small of the back of the lady to your right.” Julie then took me by complete surprise when she announced the single most important bit of Rockette information ever dispersed. “And NO TOUCHING.” “No touching? How can we kick and keep from falling over if we can’t hold on to each other?” I wondered, perplexed. 

Julie reiterated, “Hold your hands a couple inches away from the girls’ backs so it appears that you are linked up, but you really aren’t. You have to hold your own weight and use your abdominal muscles to keep you from wobbling. If you press on the girl next to you, she will fall off balance, and there will be hell to pay.” Julie meant what she said. Back at Radio City, just about the worst mistake a new Rockette could make was to lay a finger on the older Rockette kicking next to her. It was the quickest path to damnation and a sure-fire way to get blackballed.
Gulp. Please, God, don’t let me touch anybody!
This was a new skill that I had better master quickly, or I’d be facing the wrath of bad-tempered, teetering Rockettes. I held my hands as far away from my neighbors’ backsides as possible.

After the kickline, two at a time, we jumped into the air and screamed, throwing our dresses up to reveal our bloomers, can-can style, and ended in a split on the floor. This “jump split” terrified me. The correct method required jumping into the air, legs split apart front to back at a perfect 180 degree angle and then letting yourself drop to the floor in that vulnerable position, landing with an equally terrifying “thwack” sound. I wasn’t any more reassured about the move when I learned the more truthfully descriptive nickname used in the dance world: “cooter splat.” Made my body tingle with fear. I was thirty, just married, with plans to bear children in the near future. My dance career was closer to the end than the beginning. What was the point in risking hurting myself? I wasn’t really good at it anyway. When it came to my turn, I jumped in the air in a mini-split and, instead of splatting, quickly and safely slid down into the split. Linda surely saw that I was cheating, but she let me get away with it, thank goodness.

The rag doll costumes and dance were absolutely adorable—to me, it was by far the best number in the show. To top off what already was a colossal crowd pleaser, we did a mini encore, in which we grabbed our blocks, formed a line across the front of the stage, and one at a time lifted them over our heads. Up until this point, the blocks merely appeared as a random assortment of alphabet letters. At the end, to the audience’s great surprise and delight, they revealed the message, “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” 

We paid the price for such a cute and clever conclusion, because those blocks weighed a ton; after all, they had to be sturdy enough so we could stand and tap on top of them. To lift them we had to first hike them to our chests and then, just like a weight lifter heaving his barbell, use our chests as leverage to muscle them the rest of the way over our heads until our arms were straight. Getting them back down took just as much muscle control and brute strength. Being a new girl, I thought we were being asked to do the impossible, but the others had done it last year. There was no point in arguing. I grunted and shakily lifted my box overhead, my face turning as red as a Christmas bulb. They even made us carry our own blocks off stage when the number was over. I never expected to have to do any heavy lifting. Rockettes were tougher chicks than I thought.

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Next we learned “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers”—the most famous Rockette number, having been a highlight of the
Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular
since 1933. Like the kickline, this number had to be dead-on perfect to live up to audience expectations and its long legacy. Dressed as toy soldiers, the Rockettes walk stiff-legged, as if wooden, for the entire song. The choreography consisted of the soldiers performing a multitude of geometric formation changes and patterns that were a feast for the eyes. The Rockettes made it look easy and invariably earned great applause, but getting it precisely perfect was a painstaking process.

To start, we had to perfect the idiosyncratic soldier walk. To accentuate the rhythm of the marching, the number was done in tap shoes. Julie gave the marching orders: “Your legs stay straight and stiff, absolutely no bending or softening of the knees and no shuffling of feet. Take tiny steps, lifting the feet off the ground just enough to make a slight tapping sound when you walk. Your arms stay straight down to your sides with hands plastered to the sides of your thighs, on the stripes of the costume pants. The fingers remain closed tightly together with no thumbs sneaking out. Keep your hands perfectly flat—no ‘tea cups.’ Take a relaxed position with your upper body, but no slouching. Also, your shoulders need to be perfectly in line with each other, no shifting one shoulder forward. And no craning the neck or tilting the head, or your hat will look out of line. Got it?” I wasn’t even close to getting it. “Everybody practice.”

The new Rockettes milled about the room, stiff as boards, trying to walk with pencil straight legs. “This is not natural,” I thought, the back of my legs aching from the strain. “There’s a reason humans have knees.”

“Kristi, your shoulders are back too much,” Julie told me. I moved them forward a tad, not really knowing what position she was after, and continued my rigid stride. “Kristi, your shoulders are too far back,” Julie repeated. Again, I inched them forward and carried on marching in circles. “Kristi, relax your shoulders.” I was getting extremely frustrated but kept adjusting ever so slightly until she finally stopped complaining. It took me forever to get the feel for keeping my upper body in a relaxed position; it felt like I was dancing with bad posture.

To complicate the process, we started practicing with our soldier hats right away. They were monstrously tall, heavy, shiny black vinyl hats topped with a big, white feather to make us look even taller. The hat was held onto our heads by a chin strap. Seemed simple enough, but there was definitely more to it. Julie explained, “The brim of the hat has to sit very low—right above your eyes. It needs to be low enough that the audience can’t see your eyes, but you can still see where you’re going (barely). And the hat has to stand perfectly straight up—no slant.” We buckled our hats, trying to follow Julie’s directions, and resumed the soldier walk with limited vision. Within seconds hats began sliding down, some completely covering people’s eyes, some tilting backwards threatening to fall off, and still others swallowing half the faces of the smaller-headed girls. What a disaster. It was an exact science to get that hat in the proper position, requiring our hair in a low bun at just the right spot to hold the hat in place and our chin straps buckled at precisely the correct tightness to avoid toppling.

Once we got that awkward soldier walk down and learned how to safely secure our hats in a vertical position, the soldier number was, for the most part, math and memorization. It was basically a matter of remembering how many marches to do before changing formations, the order of the formations, what marks to travel to (number and depth), when to “hesitate” (a little musical punctuation in which we stopped with feet together, went up on our toes, and then lowered our heels back down), and when and in which direction to sharply turn our heads. “Getting the correct direction of the head snap is essential,” Linda warned. “When everyone’s hat with that big, white feather swishes to the right and yours swishes to the left, the mistake is very obvious to the audience.” 

To aid in the teaching, the formations were given code names:
diamonds, seven-upstage, partner revolve, open the gates, salute, close the gates, nose-to-nose, A’s and B’s, about face, squads, partner revolve, feed in, form spokes, iris in and iris out, spokes, the huddle, doll turns, the big wheel,
and t
he fall
. The real difficulty was getting our bodies in the proper alignment with everyone else’s to make the formations look perfect. It was an absolute team effort; whatever one person did wrong affected the rest of the group and had the potential to completely ruin the effect.

In the
opening of the gates
, we started in a horizontal line the length of the stage and split at the center. The end girls stage left and right acted as the pivot points while the rest of the line, linked shoulder to shoulder, marched toward the outsides of the stage to make it look like the two doors of a gate were slowly swinging open. It was hard enough just keeping the line (the gate door) straight the entire time we were marching. The ultimate challenges, however, were 1.) opening the gate at the right pacing so that it was completely open only at the
very end
of the musical phrase and 2.) getting both doors of the gate to open simultaneously—not letting one open ahead of the other. The pivot girls took micro steps underneath themselves while the girls at the opposite end of the gate had to take mega strides in order to reach their respective destinations on time. We had to concentrate carefully to make sure we were moving as a unit and not fighting against each other.

Doll turns
, on the other hand, were less of a team effort and more of an individual endeavor. Spread out in three horizontal lines, we had to bend at the waist, still straight-legged, at a ninety-degree angle and salute. Then we stood up erect and spun on one straight leg, like a pencil turning on its eraser, with no wind up, no plie, no help from anything or anyone. We just had to will it to happen. Those turns were dauntingly difficult and downright scary at first. It took just the right amount of force to successfully complete a turn; too much caused you to topple. We had to stop perfectly, sharply, back in place with feet together. No wobbling. I was happy to be placed in the back line where my mistakes would be more hidden.