Long Legs and Tall Tales: A Showgirl's Wacky, Sexy Journey to the Playboy Mansion and the Radio City Rockettes (64 page)

The Super Deluxe Ultra Grande Supreme prize was that Kilpie (real name Karla Kilpatrick) and I were the two Rockettes chosen to dance with Maurice for a special intro to “Luck Be a Lady.” I was shocked, humbled, and honored. As Maurice’s two sidekicks, we had this fantastic, sexy choreography that showed off our long, luscious legs. We’d be wearing a long purple coat with fur trim over our pink and silver costume and then dramatically strip it off before joining the other Rockettes for the rest of the number. Unfortunately, when we finally tried our newly sewn coats for dress rehearsal, they restricted our movements so much that we could only perform a substandard, miniature version of the actual choreography. What a disappointment. As sometimes happens in showbiz, the costume killed the choreography. This is why it’s so important that the choreographer and the costume designer communicate well with each other.

My proudest moment was the night Maurice told me, “Kristi, I love performing with you, because I can really feel your energy on stage!” The heavens opened, the angels sang, and I was silently shouting, “Hallelujah!” Talk about a compliment. I should have typed it up, laminated it, and carried it with me wherever I went. My second proudest Maurice moment was when my son was about five months old. I brought him to the theatre and was pushing him around backstage in his stroller. He often seemed to be pointing his toes. Maurice said, “He’s got great dancer’s feet!” I felt like my son had gotten the stamp of approval from the King of Dance himself. Hallelujah, indeed.

*******

Rehearsals were over, for the time being. Our new, improved show was a winner. Maurice was over the moon with my performance. Nevertheless, even with a heaping dose of Jell-O shots, caffeine, and Krispy Kremes, those positive results weren’t enough to make up for the fact that I was dangerously sleep-deprived and exhausted. Little Baby Kieran and I were on different schedules—mainly he was awake and screaming when I desperately wanted to sleep. My mother had come to the rescue for this rehearsal session, but I couldn’t keep flying her in from Detroit on a moment’s notice. Last-minute rehearsals made it difficult to have a babysitter ready and available. Yes, the show had just gotten a beautiful face lift, but, based on past experience, odds were that it would continue changing and changing and changing. I could bet on more rehearsals somewhere down the line. When? Well, that was a roll of the dice. Even without rehearsals, performing six nights and week while raising a finicky newborn was outrageously difficult. I couldn’t handle both the rigors of the show and the demands of taking care of a baby. It was time to throw in the cards.

After the tour ended, I had just enough time to run to the gift shop to see if they had any new Rockette memorabilia. Did I really need anymore stuff? The memories were worth a lot more. I scoped out the latest Rockette doll thinking that someday my baby girl would enjoy playing with it. “Better yet, I’m going to buy one for her to play with and a second one to keep in the box as a collector’s item,” I told the sales lady. I adored my little rascals and had learned a lot about parenting since my son Kieran was a tiny tot.

I went back up to the green room, changed into my dance attire, and began warming up. As I was stretching, the nice man entered with that morning’s
New York Post
. “Thought you might want to take a look at this,” he said, tossing the paper on the coffee table. The cover read “KICKED OUT: Radio City gives Rockettes the boot.” The Rockettes were front page news! Anxiously I read on: “The Rockettes are getting a kick in the derriere from Radio City Music Hall. Cash-strapped Cablevision, which owns the Rockettes and the fabled music hall, is trying to dissolve the current roster of 41 New York dancers.”

August 10, 2002, the very day of my first Rockette appearance at Radio City Music Hall, the paper claimed I was being kicked out. This official news made the day all the more poignant. How ironic that I had finally hit the big time, and now my time was up. The fat lady was singing. My heart sank to my bunioned and battered feet.

Act 3, Scene 4

Detroit

In addition to the prevailing, mother-of-all-Rockette-shows in New York City at Radio City Music Hall, there were
Christmas Spectacular
franchises running at several locations simultaneously around the country. These were dubbed “Christmas Outside New York” or “CONY” shows. Being a member of the Roster, I could choose where I wanted to perform, including the highly coveted NYC gig. I agonized for some time about whether or not I wanted to dance at Radio City. Finding adequate, affordable, temporary housing and relocating with a baby seemed daunting and difficult. What would Ron do all day in New York City in the winter with Kieran? The
Radio City Christmas Spectacular
happened to have a show in Detroit that year, and the thought of performing in my hometown was especially enticing. We could stay with my parents for free, and they’d help with the baby. Ron might even be able to find temporary work. Yes, Detroit sounded like a much less stressful and financially better option, so baby Kieran and Ron and I packed up our belongings, vacated our apartment, bid a teary goodbye to my dear friends in Vegas, and headed to my parents’ home about thirty miles west of Detroit.

I felt something incredibly special about returning to perform in “The Motor City,” near where I grew up. New York was the Rockettes’ city, but Detroit was
my
city. I rooted for our precious “Motown”—an underdog with latent potential and plenty of soul. Amidst a depressing array of abandoned homes, burned-out buildings, dilapidated structures, graffiti, liquor stores, grungy bars, and pawn shops were shining jewels like the Masonic Temple, where we rehearsed. The magnificent Detroit Masonic Temple was hailed as the largest Masonic Temple in the world. Its fourteen floors contained a whopping 1,037 rooms including three theatres and three ballrooms. Built in the 1920s, its lavish lobby hearkened back to a time of glory and grandeur. Rehearsing in this unique, historical space thrilled me.

On the first day of rehearsals, I was elated to discover that the director of our production was none other than our assistant director from the Branson show, Dennis. He had a cheerful disposition, as did our dance captain, and the rehearsal atmosphere was more relaxed than it had been in Branson. The quality, however, was intended to be just as stellar. All parties seemed to coexist and work together as happily as Santa and his elves.

Aside from Dennis, the only other people I knew in the show were Mac, my fellow ex-Vegas Rockette sister (also a southeast Michigan native) and a male dancer from the Branson show. It was wonderful to see a few friendly faces, and I was particularly thrilled to have Mac in the cast. Mac and I were by far the oldest, most well-seasoned Rockettes of the bunch and the only Roster gals. Being very close in height, in Vegas Mac and I usually danced next to each other in the line-up. This time I was placed alongside a considerably younger-looking lady. One day, I got the nerve up to ask her how old she was. “Eighteen,” she replied. I quickly did the mental math. “I’m old enough to be your mother!” I exclaimed, horrified.

We ate, slept, and breathed the show for the next three weeks. My mind felt like a computer overloaded with too much information for its memory capacity. After a few days, choreography started spilling out my ears. I couldn’t process one more bevel, arm pose, or kick. The moves became a jumble of mishmash, and there came a point at which I couldn’t assimilate any more information. It was like cramming for college final exams, trying to memorize an entire book on art history in one evening. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one on overload. When the dance captain and director noticed that everyone was melting down, they stopped teaching new material for the day.

What made it so difficult was that the choreography for the various dances was too similar. We had to learn so many different bevels, kick combinations, and arm poses, we’d get mixed up from one number to the next. “Was that the left hand on the hip with the thumbs forward or thumbs tucked behind? Does the right arm lift from the wrist to get straight above the head, or did it push through with a bent elbow?” There were hundreds of these poses with minute variations and no rhyme or reason to them. It wasn’t like one number required the thumbs forward every time it was on the hip. With no consistency and no rules to cling to, the choreography was a mind-boggling brain teaser. Like learning for a foreign language which nouns are masculine and which are feminine, we had to flat out memorize it. It seemed a miracle that our muscles and mind would ever work together to retain it all, but eventually, with enough repetition, the entire routine became second nature and stuck in our muscle memory. Much of our choreographic consternation could be attributed to the brilliant artistry of our former Branson show director, Linda, who had created more complex, show-stopping numbers to beef up the CONY shows. I thought the Branson show was arduous and a lot to learn. The Detroit show had all the same Rockette numbers in it plus two new, colossal, Linda masterpieces. The first was “Christmas in New York,” a magnificent, festive, city scene that utilized the entire cast. It served as the grand, climactic finale of the first act and was by far the Rockettes’ most back-breaking, leg-breaking, heart-stopping number in the show. It was a kick fest with a gazillion kicks throughout the number (including a sit-down drill and “circle kicks,” which featured the Rockettes linked arm to arm, facing out, forming a giant circle, and kicking while rotating the circle around), a massive kickline at the end, and an encore kickline afterward.

The second was “Bizzazz,” a snappy number we did with Santa, about Santa having that “extra kind of special something” that let him “sparkle and fizzle-fazz,” and this wonderful stuff was “bizzazz.” The Rockettes called the number “Candy Canes” because we wore sweet and sassy, hot pink costumes trimmed in candy cane stripes (I was so sweet on this Pete Menefee masterpiece of fabric and feathers that I begged him to let me put his sketch of it on the cover of this book) and danced with three-foot, ten-pound, wooden, glow-in-the-dark candy canes. The candy canes were cumbersome, heavy, and hard to maneuver. Holding them in such a way that they looked uniform among us at all times was an excruciating task. Whenever we rested the end of our canes on the ground, for instance, they had to be exactly straight up and down at a ninety-degree angle to the floor with the top arc of the cane facing the exact same direction as everyone else’s. We also tossed and twirled the canes and had to be extremely careful not to toss or twirl too hard, or we’d drop them. This was one of the few numbers in which we sang, this time a duet with Santa from “The Holiday Season.” It took a lot of breath support to belt out the tune, dance full out, and lift our weighty, striped, candy sticks at the same time. This long and taxing number started off the second act right after intermission.

The addition of these two monstrous numbers to our workload meant rehearsals that demanded an even faster and more furious learning curve and a greater ability to perfect our performance quickly. The process was extremely intense, and our thinking caps had to be on at all times. Once real performances started, we’d only have intermission during which to recover from “Christmas in New York” before having to be back on stage to bust out some “Bizzazz.”

For our final week of tech and dress rehearsals, we relocated to our performance venue—the historic Fox Theatre. The Masonic Temple was certainly a gem, but “The Fox” was known as Detroit’s “crown jewel.” Less than a mile from the Masonic, it was located on Woodward Avenue in the Grand Circus Park Historic District, directly across from Comerica Park—home of the Detroit Tigers major league baseball team. Built in the late 1920s as a movie palace, its exceedingly opulent, overly ornate mélange of Burmese, Chinese, Indian, and Persian decor was a spectacular setting in which to house our spectacular show. So excessive and impressive was the ornamentation that it almost competed with our show for the audience’s attention. The ostentatious lobby and the theatre itself were a breathtaking display of lavishness. Of all the theatres in the world, The Fox was my absolute favorite, hands down.

Opening night at The Fox was a grand event. Before the show, the Rockettes, dressed in our white snowball costumes, arrived in vintage automobiles to the delight of the crowd. Colorful streams of confetti streamed down as we lined up for photographs in front of the theatre’s massive marquee. We ceremoniously paraded through the lobby and made our way to our dressing rooms to prepare for the show. Backstage in the hallway, we signed the “Wall of Fame”—the designated place for entertainers to leave their mark. For the Rockettes, there was a painting of a kickline of ladies, and we each autographed our respective line-up spot.

After not performing for such a long time, it took a few shows to get used to dancing in front of an audience again. Ten thousand eyes on a person can really get the adrenaline going. I had so much nervous energy, I felt uncomfortable with stage fright. A brilliant idea came to me, “Why don’t you
pretend
you’ve already been in the show for weeks, Kristi, and breathe as if it’s old hat?” My entire nervous system settled down, and I felt fantastic.

*******

After the big opening night hoopla was over, we settled into more or less of a daily routine for the remainder of our approximately seventy-show run. While some aspects of the job were repetitive, my typical day (and night) at the office nearly always included something new and exciting happening.

For instance, we did tons of publicity: radio shows, newspaper interviews, television segments, photo shoots, appearances, and charity events. Some of us even went to a Detroit Red Wings hockey game in costume and schmoozed people. A handful of Rockettes were Detroit-area natives, and publicity played heavily on the use of local ladies. Another Rockette, two young girls who played Clara in our “Teddy Bear Nutcracker,” and I all hailed from my same childhood dance school, so a newspaper article covered that angle. Being the only mom in the bunch and a local gal to boot, I got loads of attention and was personally featured in newspaper articles, radio shows, and even on television. One television station featured me on their “Working Women” segment. They came to my parents’ home and took footage of me playing Mommy to Kieran and then filmed me at the theatre being a Rockette. It was terribly exciting. In addition, I participated in some charitable community outreach events, including an in-between-shows appearance at a home for battered teen girls in Detroit (we hung out, autographed stuff, and handed out Rockette dolls) and visits, in costume, to cheer up patients at a local hospital. Our biggest publicity event was probably performing the “Rag Doll” number for the televised Detroit Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Sometime we had local celebrities (like famous newscasters, radio personalities, or athletes) read “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” to the audience before the show started. Select Rockettes had the honor of escorting these special guests onto the stage. I had the good fortune of being chosen to host two handsome Detroit Red Wings hockey players. Score!

Other thrills included finding presents from Radio City at our dressing spots. Over the years, I was gifted an assortment of Rockette paraphernalia including snow globes, ornaments, an umbrella, a gift basket of lotions (from Vaseline, our sponsor at one time—official lotion of the long-legged ladies), a plush burgundy robe embroidered with a Rockette kickline and personalized with my name on it, an embroidered black leather jacket for the Rockettes’ 75th anniversary, a Rockette windbreaker, a Rockette dance bag, a Rockette warm-up suit, Rockette dance clothes, a Rockette over-the-shoulder bag, an engraved silver compact, Rockette lapel pins, a Rockette-embroidered denim shirt and denim jacket, a Rockette instant camera, and Rockette figurines. The company even sent gifts to my home during times I wasn’t working. How’s that for a great job? 

The best gift, however, and a big bonus of being back near my hometown, was that my typical day often included the delight of having old friends and family in the audience. Tons of people from my past and present attended the show—parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, old school teachers, dance teachers, childhood friends, high school acquaintances, sorority sisters, and college pals. It was a fantastic homecoming and always thrilling to be surprised by a blast from my past. Many wanted to visit with me after the show, so I was constantly spending extra time greeting people. For really special folks, I’d ask permission to give a backstage tour or take them outside to the animal tent behind the theatre to pet the camels, sheep, and donkeys. I loved being able to give them the VIP treatment.

*******

In addition to the excitement of seeing expected and unexpected guests after the show, plenty also happened
during
the show to stir things up. For instance, I ran out of luck and got stuck being one of three oversized panda bears in the “Teddy Bear Nutcracker,” so I had to wear a giant panda bear suit and a huge fiberglass bear head. Those particularly dangerous costumes were a recipe for disaster and/or comic relief. The body suit was so heavy I could hardly lift my arms. The head offered such limited visibility that a dresser had to hold my hand like a two-year-old and lead me to my stage entrance, because I could barely see where I was going. When left to my own devices, I bumped into set pieces, knocked over crew, and tripped over cables. I could do little else but grin and bear it. Dancing in those costumes took a leap of faith; each show I prayed I could find my marks and see well enough to discern my exit path when my dance bit was done. I had nightmares about being stuck on stage, blindly wandering in circles trying to find my way off.

Just like in the real
Nutcracker
ballet, our production also included Russian dancers who did athletic jumps and leaps and turns and kicks. In our case, however, the three men were disguised as bears and had their faces covered by those dastardly heads. It was a feat for me to just walk in my cumbersome costume without killing myself or someone else, so I marveled at their ability to perform such outrageously difficult maneuvers under the circumstances. They weren’t always successful. One particularly exuberant yet visually impaired Russian bear leapt his way right off the edge of the stage and onto the lap of a surprised audience member seated in the front row. That was not your typical lap dance. Luckily, no one was seriously injured.