Long Legs and Tall Tales: A Showgirl's Wacky, Sexy Journey to the Playboy Mansion and the Radio City Rockettes (65 page)

Surprisingly, being a bear ended up one of my favorite parts of the show due to a special spot we called “The Bear Room.” This was a makeshift fast-change area set up behind the stage for all the performers who had to be bears in
The Nutcracker
. The Bear Room was the place to be for entertainment. It all started when one guy and gal created a little impromptu dance to a portion of the music of the number happening on stage at the time. They showed off their turns, high kicks, hip hop moves, leaps, and fancy lifts. The other bears and our dressers cheered with delight. Not wanting to disappoint their fans, the couple kept coming up with new, amazing routines. The panda bears judged their various dances, going so far as to hold up score cards. The dancing duo expended a lot of extra energy each night to entertain us (and themselves). It turned out to be too much of a cross to bear for the long term; they got burned out and had to take a break. Once in a while, however, they’d surprise us and bring back reruns of our favorite high-scoring routines.

The dance extravaganzas weren’t our only amusement in The Bear Room. Three of our little people played baby bears, and one of those cubs was always playing practical jokes. Once he hid inside a new girl’s big bear costume. The rest of us were in on the secret and made sure to be there to watch her get initiated. When she stuck her feet into her costume, she screamed, because a live creature was inhabiting it! We lived for stuff like that at the theatre. It was highly entertaining, and the high jinks broke up the monotony.

Sometimes we added a dash of spice to our official routine to make it more amusing. In “Candy Canes,” for instance, one night I accidentally caught the glance of one of the male dancers standing offstage in the wings within eyeshot of where I was dancing. I smiled right at him. Afterwards he said, “You saw me looking at you and you smiled back! Wasn’t that great?” Of course, he was standing in the same spot the next night, and I couldn’t
not
flash him a smile and a look. That would be rude. It became our “moment,” and we did it every night without fail. This little connection was important to both of us and made our show special. Once you started something like that, you couldn’t just stop it willy-nilly or it would throw off your show. It became part of our choreography. It also became a superstitious ritual that we knew better than to quit. One time I had the great fortune of being swung out of the show—our swing had family there and wanted to perform, so our stage manager let her take my spot—and I got to watch the show from a seat in the audience. A spectacular swing will even cover the “moments” of the person she is swinging out, so I asked my swing to cover my moment with my guy friend. She did, and he was thrilled! It made the whole experience more fun for all three of us.

Another ritual developed during “Nativity.” I was standing in the wings waiting to go on, and a stage hand held out both fists and asked me to pick one. Inside was a chocolate candy that he gave me. The next night I returned the favor and had him pick a hand. If you did something like that twice, it was bound to turn into a ritual, and it did. Every show, we’d take turns giving each other chocolates at that precise moment. “Nativity” was the only number in the show during which the cast could get away with eating (as long as we kept it on the down low from stage management and our dance captain), and several of us regularly (discretely, of course) munched chocolates and peanut butter cups on our walk to Bethlehem. There was no shortage of chocolate and Christmas candy floating around backstage. Between that and the abundant supplies of coffee, cookies, and doughnuts (which you were required to bring in if you had gotten “lucky” the night before), we’d all be due for a caffeine and sugar detox after the show closed. Treats sweetened up the routine.

*******

Besides spontaneous backstage entertainment, rituals, and superstitions, live theatre always had its share of unpredictable mishaps that kept things interesting. Props and costumes were always helpful in this regard, and the giant candy canes from “Bizzazz” were no exception. When dropped on stage, they would make a thud to wake the dead. Whenever the Rockettes heard that awful sound, we’d quickly eyeball the stage to see where the runaway candy cane had landed in case it was about to trip us. The poor Rockette who dropped it had to scramble to pick it up and catch up to the rest of the girls who, by that time, had probably changed formations. God forbid the cane should go flying more than five feet away. Reminiscent of my childhood baton recital fiasco, it was nearly impossible to make one’s way through all the moving dancers to pick it up again without causing a huge scene. If it seemed too difficult to retrieve, a girl might leave her cane on the floor and pantomime the rest of the number with an invisible cane. (That was embarrassing.) Some dancers gave up altogether, ran off stage, and cowered in the dressing room in shame. Everyone else felt really bad for the poor soul who dropped her prop. After the number, there would be hushed whispers in the dressing room asking, “Who lost her candy cane?” We could tell by tracing where the whimpering and quiet sobbing were coming from. Generally, that would be a new girl. The veteran Rockettes were more likely to shrug it off with a “That’s show biz!” attitude. 

What made dancing with these striped sticks especially treacherous were the slippery, white satin gloves we wore as part of our costume; they made it nearly impossible to hold onto the canes. Wardrobe’s solution was to glue-gun hundreds of tiny, sticky glue dots onto the palms. This approach worked well, but over time the dots wore down. It was imperative that the Rockettes be vigilant about monitoring the level of our glue dots, or we’d be in for a treacherous show. If we told our dresser that our dots needed replacing, and by the next day it wasn’t done, there was trouble (for us and our dresser). Before the number, we’d have to get to the stage early to talk lovingly to our candy canes and say a dozen “Hail Mary Tyler Moores,” or whatever worked, because we knew we needed all the cosmic forces on our side, or that cane was going down. When the prop master repainted the stripes on our canes, which he did periodically, our canes were even more slippery. Minute changes could mean the difference between a dynamite show and disaster. What might seem like a triviality to the layperson could mean serious injury or mortal embarrassment to a performer.

Thankfully, I never flat out flung my cane on the floor. On the contrary, my worst cane experience was when it slipped out of my hands as I was lifting it over my head, and it walloped me in the face. I thought I had broken my nose and was sure it was going to start bleeding right there on stage. It didn’t, but my eyes watered so much for the rest of the number that I could hardly see where I was going. It was like being smashed in the schnoz with a baseball bat. The accident report filled out by the stage manager hardly did justice to the incident: “Performer was hit in the nose with a candy cane,” it read. “Can’t you at least write that it was a
three-foot, ten-pound
, wooden prop?” I retorted. I didn’t think the insurance company would believe my claim, as how badly could one be injured by your average candy cane?

To avoid the aforementioned dangers, the smart girls massaged, smooched, pep-talked, and said silent prayers over their candy canes before each show. It was a superstitious ritual that we never missed for fear of the consequences. Props needed a lot of love and attention.

My most spectacular mishap was so unexpected, unheard of, timely, and far-reaching that it goes down in the record books as my all-time favorite. The set-up is important to get the whole effect, so here goes: Because there wasn’t safe, adequate housing within walking distance of the The Fox, the entire cast had to commute by car. Being winter in Michigan, this often meant driving in snow. One Saturday morning, I awoke to discover that there had been a blizzard all through the night, and the snow was still coming down. Like a school kid hoping for a snow day, I prayed that the show had been cancelled and envisioned myself spending a cozy day in my pajamas sipping hot cocoa in front of the fireplace. A call to my stage manager quickly killed that fantasy. The show was a go. I had a matinee performance and a thirty-mile drive downtown from where I was staying. That dreamy winter wonderland became an instant nightmare, as I realized I’d be lucky to make it to the theatre at all, let alone on time. At show time, the curtain would go up with or without me. I’d better be on stage when it did, or I was apt to be out of a job.

Hence, it was with great concern for my personal safety and career that I embarked on the treacherous trek through the tundra. I left hours early to allow for the perilous, unplowed roads. Gripping the steering wheel so tightly made for a white-knuckle journey, as I drove past car after car after car in the ditch, some slipping, sliding, and spinning out uncontrollably right in front of me. What a relief to finally pull into the theatre parking lot. I hadn’t gotten into a wreck, but I
was
a wreck after that harrowing commute. My muscles were so frozen in fear, I thought they’d never thaw out and relax again.

Adding to the tension, backstage was abuzz with worry over how many of our cast and crew would make it. A good portion of the performers were New Yorkers who rarely drove cars on a normal day let alone in blizzard conditions. I recalled the time I visited a friend in Washington, D.C., when a freak snow storm caused people to abandon their cars on the highway because they didn’t know how to drive in snow.

Our show had a huge cast, and each person had a valuable and unique role to play. No one was easily expendable. Usually, soon after half-hour call, the stage manager looked to see who was missing and assigned swings to go on in their place. In this case, too many people still had not arrived to make a call. We didn’t know if all the swings would make it in or if enough would make it in to cover all the missing people. The stage manager waited anxiously, hoping more performers would show up, as the clock ticked down to show time. This was an especially tense waiting period for those of us present, as we knew that, right before we had to go on, we might be asked to learn new choreography, spacing, and traffic patterns to adjust for gaping holes in the show. It was torture! Fortunately, in the nick of time, enough people rolled in to complete the show without major changes, but everyone was shaken and rattled to say the least.

To make matters worse, most of the audience members had been smart enough to stay safely snuggled up at home; only a few brave, Christmas-loving, diehard fans had ventured out into the storm. Consequently, we were playing to only about one hundred people in a 5,000-seat venue. The house was virtually empty. Performers feed off the energy and enthusiasm of audience members, and this place was dead. Not only were we anxiety-stricken from the dangerous drive and the potential of missing performers, but we had risked our very lives to perform for a mere handful of patrons. We became a group of Ebenezer Scrooges thinking, “Bah, humbug! We don’t want to be here!” But the show must go on, so I gritted my teeth, plastered on a fake smile, and waited for the whole miserable day to be over.

Then it happened—the straw that broke the camel’s back. (Animal lovers, not to worry. This is just a figure of speech. The real camels in our show remained unharmed.) It was during “Christmas in New York”—our massive, magnificent, musical masterpiece that teemed with jolly singers toting colorful, beribboned packages in a festive New York City shopping scene. Real ice skaters skated on an ice rink as fake snow fell from the sky; and, just when the audience thought the number couldn’t possibly get any more exciting, out came the Rockettes, dazzling in our sexy little red velvet costumes with white fur trim.

“Christmas in New York” was a real crowd pleaser, but it was also the Rockettes’ most grueling number in the show. It was a marathon of kicks so strenuous and brutal that my legs and abs got sore just thinking about it. This dance was so taxing that one night, one of our young new Rockettes, thinking she could get by on Coca-Cola and cigarettes alone, passed out in the wings before our encore and the paramedics had to come and revive her. This was no walk in Central Park. The number built up to the Rockettes’ spectacular entrance in which a yellow New York taxi cab drives on stage, the driver opens the door, and out steps a Rockette followed by another and another and another until the entire stage is filled with Rockettes. It was like that circus illusion where a big bunch of clowns somehow spill out of a teeny tiny car. The effect was superb.

We each then pranced our way over to our partner and did a few cutesy moves side by side. Unbeknownst to me, my partner and I had gotten a little too close for comfort and the buckles of our shoes had hooked together. Oblivious, we continued the choreography in which we jumped back to back in preparation for one of those famous Rockette eye-high kicks. The buckles were attached to the shoes by a short elastic band, so as I jumped away from my partner, the elastic band stretched, and stretched and STRETCHED, and when I went to kick my leg.... Remember shooting rubber bands as a kid? You make a gun with your hand, stretch the band around your fingers and let it fly?

When I kicked my leg, my shoe exploded off my foot like a rocket ship blasting into outer space. The Fox has extremely tall ceilings, so it was free to fly high. One hundred audience-member heads and two hundred eyeballs traced the path of the projectile as it made a colossal arch all the way over to the opposite side of the stage and landed with a thud somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

This left me with a problem of cosmic proportions. I’d have to dance the remainder of the number (and remember, we were at the beginning of a very long and difficult number) wearing only one shoe. “What should I do?” The choreography kept moving along fast and furiously, so, even though I was somewhat in shock, I had to make a split-second decision about how I was going to fix this problem. Since I couldn’t see where my wayward shoe landed, retrieving it to place it back on my foot was not going to happen. Even if I quickly found it, it wasn’t a shoe I could easily slip back on, especially with a broken buckle. Running off stage was an alternative, but my exit would have drawn a lot of attention, as I dodged dancers on my way out. And my absence would have left my colleagues one woman short, messing up all the formations and spacing.