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Overview
In her hilarious and heartfelt memoir, Kathryn Bertine tells the strange-but-true story of what life is really like behind the glitz and glamour of professional figure skating. Bertine's childhood dream came true when she earned a place in a touring ice show. But as she traveled through the back roads of Chile and Argentina in a rickety bus with the international cast of Hollywood on Ice, she wondered if this was exactly the dream she had in mind. Gone were the days of athleticism and artistry. Hollywood on Ice was half Disney, half Playboy. The skaters apply false eyelashes the size of caterpillars and wriggle into progressively more revealing costumes. Some performers dress up as animals; some real animals actually skate. The undeniable showstopper was the Michael Jackson number, starring a middle-aged blonde with a beer belly that is barely contained by his flashy spandex costume. Bertine was no quitter, and she stuck it out-with laugh-out-loud humor and unfailing grace. But as she came to fully understand the differences between showbiz and sports, Bertine had to make the hardest choice of her life. Anyone who has known-or dreamed of becoming-a skater, dancer, or professional athlete will find here a poignant, funny, and utterly winning story of a young woman's courage, resolve, and grace under pressure.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781735901435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Shelf Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2021 |
| Pages: | 350 |
| Sales rank: | 819,430 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d) |
About the Author
Kathryn Bertine, an elite triathlete and former professional figure skater, is the author of All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater's Journey. She graduated from Colgate University in 1997, and holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, including ESPN The Magazine, US Weekly, Her Sports+Fitness, and Inside Triathlon. She currently lives and trains in Boulder, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona.
Read an Excerpt
All the Sundays Yet to Come
By Kathryn Bertine
Little, Brown
Copyright © 2003 Kathryn BertineAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-09901-5
Chapter One
The skaters called the dressing room "the trailer." That is basically what it was-a long skinny passageway, forty feet in length and only five feet across, something like the dimensions of a supermarket aisle. The trailer was a beast of mobile metal that rolled all around South America with the rest of Hollywood on Ice but always ended up in the same place, stage left of an ice rink's backstage. About as homey as a turn-of-the-century tenement, the trailer was an ill-lit, dingy tunnel that reeked with the unique stench of professional figure skating: a bouquet of overflowery antiperspirant, industrial-strength eco-terrorism hairspray, and the pungent aroma of showgirls who forgot their deodorant.
The Russians in the cast seemed to prefer antiperspirant to deodorant, or at least were unaware that the two could and should be used in combination. Most of the male skaters just didn't care. Some women cared but refused to admit that any tangy redolence came from their bodies. Blame fell on the wardrobe. With cheap containers of body perfume purchased from the local farmacia, the Russians sprayed not themselves but their show costumes with malodorous scents that could cripple an innocent bystander. By the grace of God, there was one odor we had become immune to: the undocumented birthplace of penicillin, the moldy innards of a well-worn figure skate. There was no smoking in the trailer, but the smell of cigarettes followed their addicts into the dressing room and wafted through the dead-end hallway, lingering for what seemed like forever.
Along the left side of the trailer ran a pipelike bar that was used to hang up the costumes. Everyone had his or her own personal section of the bar, on which we would hook our outfits chronologically according to how they'd be used in the show. The opening costume was first in line: a pink, purple, white, and gold ensemble that attached itself to a sheer, nude bodysuit that covered our womanhood with patches of diamondy sequins. They itched, but on the ice we smiled. In the trailer, we scratched. There was a feather headdress and a long violet sparkling skirt that was shed backstage in a "quick change" as we exited left of the curtain and ran behind the scenes to enter from the right for our next round of prancing. We tossed our sequin skirts to the dressing ladies, who quickly attached an even more revealing "curtain" of feather boas that dangled from a hook in our leotards right above our tailbones. As we swished and swayed with every step, the feathers tickled our thighs and our partially revealed buttocks through the holes of our fishnet stockings. The opening number had mediocre choreography and second-rate skating, but the costumes consumed the audience, and the whistles and catcalls seemed to satisfy management that all was well. Management never came back to the trailer.
The other garb on the rack was just as fantastic. Some costumes were typical skating dresses, all spandex and rhinestones, with little skirts that spun and leapt as our bodies did. The majority of outfits, however, made Hollywood on Ice seem more like Halloween on Ice. Each person in the twenty-two-member cast skated between six and seven numbers per show, and all the wiggling in and out of costumes every few minutes created a constant, schizophrenic pandemonium. With half-naked and half-costumed bodies strutting about at any given time, the trailer looked like the result of a merger between Disney and Penthouse.
Sandwiched between the opening costume and the finale bikini, there were a leather outfit for the Flashdance routine, a sequined half-tuxedo, half-hotpants getup for the Michael Jackson number, a cavegirl ensemble for the Flintstones section, a dark cloak and a glittery sea-horse costume for the Little Mermaid scene, and a brilliantly colored rag doll outfit for the Barbie skit. Foreign countries are oddly infatuated with both Michael Jackson and Barbie. Our Michael Jackson was a white, middle-aged blond Canadian named Lenny who sported feathered hair, a goatee, and a lower abdominal beer belly that even the loosest spandex could not forgive. The audience didn't seem to mind, and when the techno version of "Bad" came over the loudspeakers, the crowd cried, "¡Baila, Miguel!"
Beneath a long wig of white-blond hair, our lead Barbie was a short brunette Russian named Olga. For this number, the rest of the cast was divided into rag dolls and Barbie dolls. The rag dolls were supposedly sad because they were ugly. Wanting to be like the pretty and popular Barbie skaters, the frumpy dollies made a wish to the all-powerful fairy godmother rag doll and-voila!-instantly transformed into beautiful Barbies thanks to the magic of Velcro. The skit sent a debatable message of self-esteem to the young girls in the audience: if you pray hard enough and pull your clothes off at the right time, you too can have anything you desire.
I was one of the aesthetically challenged rag dolls, complete with wayward neon-green hair. When my yarn wig was not in use, it perched on top of the costume bar on a Styrofoam head so it would keep its glamorous pouf. The Styrofoam heads were perhaps the most interesting part of the trailer, at least in the beginning. The decorpitated Styrofoam silently stared down at us with a variety of inventive expressions. Bored skaters passed the time between shows by drawing on the heads. Some had wicked eyes, crossed eyes, eyebrows raised in shock or slanted in deceit, penciled-on jewelry or Magic Markered boogers. The showgirls drew lips that were full and colorful. Some puckered, some smiled, most frowned. The heads in the men's trailer sported wide, open, circular mouths and satisfied expressions. My hat perch was named Rick; it said so on the base of his neck, where he had been tattooed with a wide-tip black Sharpie. Rick had stunning eyelashes and seemed friendly enough but mostly kept to himself. A few people had turned the soft, vulnerable Styro-skulls into voodoo dolls, with straight pins and stitching needles impaling numerous orifices and perhaps the name of a former lover written in jagged lettering on the smooth expanse of white forehead or the crumbly stump of the neck. Estrella and Pegi, the women who worked at the seamstress table, would come in the trailer from time to time and ease the torment of the pin-poked heads, collecting the voodoo devices when sewing supplies were low.
Beneath the costumes ran a bench that housed individual drawers. These were for our skates and other personal items. Things left outside the drawers were either stolen or confiscated, and a fine was assessed to the skaters at fault for not picking up after themselves. Fines began at twenty-five dollars for a first offense, and the threat of them lurked everywhere. The most popular crimes a skater was convicted of were visible tan lines, sloppy makeup technique, leaving our trailer drawers open and trip-overable, and of course weight gain, whereby the fines increased if we did. The drawer at the far end of the trailer contained la balanza, which was pulled out every week for us to stand on and for management to assess who needed a "heavy" fine.
My drawer was filled with the usual clutter: extra skate laces, hair products, contact lens solution, a few old magazines in foreign languages, a Spanish dictionary, Walkman, books, gum, laxatives. I kept stationery, too, and wrote letters home, enclosing South American postcards and photos. Russians borrowed envelopes from me but not writing paper. They addressed the front with the foreign characters of the Russian alphabet, wrote no return address, slipped in one hundred pesos, and sealed the envelope, pressing the adhesive edges until their fingers whitened.
The little children whose parents worked for the show would sometimes sneak into the trailer and stand on the row of drawers, hide behind our costumes, and jump out at us. Some of the skaters would get angry, but most pretended to be frightened, though we could see little knees poking through our feather boas and could hear giggles before we even entered the trailer. "¡Ay, Dios mío! ¡Tengo miedo!" we would cry, crossing our hands over our hearts, fainting with false fear into our rickety seats. Little Cathi would shriek with laughter, and her six-year-old cousin Stefanie would check my pulse, and proudly declare, "Muerte. Muerte."
There was a lot of nakedness in the trailer. Quick changes from costume to costume required hurried fingers to snap this and buckle that, while breasts and buttocks flew like wild animals released from confinement, bouncing around in bewilderment before they were caught and shoved back into sequined captivity. Boobs, butt cheeks, and bareness were the norm. No one cared, no one looked. Well, most people didn't. Modesty was abandoned at the flimsy brown curtain door where the stagehands dawdled to catch glimpses of the female silhouettes inside. I grew used to this fast, though in my tomboy youth it had been an insufferable ordeal if the subtle outline of my training bra announced its subterranean presence, giving gender to my otherwise unisex T-shirts. In Hollywood on Ice, half of the outfits were training bras.
We had even become accustomed to Pedro, the one male skater assigned to our dressing room. He sat at the end of the trailer and respectfully turned his back during our quick changes. Usually. He was not gay, as the majority of male show skaters are, and perhaps the reason he had no interest in the nakedness of our trailer was that he had slept with more than half the women in the cast. He had seen their tits and asses enough times that it was hardly a thrill in the dressing room. Neither Pedro nor I fit each other's criteria for sexual attraction. I was not often magnetized to men below my height, five-nine, and Pedro had a thing for petite Russian ladies, so that was that and fine by both of us. Yet it seemed odd to think of him as an object of desire for the fair-skinned, bottle-blond, cosmetically obsessed Russian skaters. He was a dark-skinned Chilean, about five-five, with teeth that mamboed around his mouth in various directions, a thick mound of black hair that looked wet but wasn't, and one crossed eye that appeared to want nothing more passionately than to be in the other socket.
We spent the majority of our time in the trailer on the nights that we had a performance, and we performed every night. Most nights we had two shows, and on the weekends we had three. The first curtain went up at seven-thirty and the ten o'clock show immediately followed. Having spent most of my life as an "early bird," it took my body quite some time to adapt to the night-owl culture of South America. Ten o'clock is when most Argentines eat dinner and begin their evening. To earn every penny of our $300 weekly salary, we had to be present for all sixteen shows. Arriving at the trailer at 6:30 P.M. and finally departing for the hotel at 1:30 in the morning, this worked out to about fifty-two hours of trailer time each week. When we actually had a moment to ourselves, there was always something going on in one of the two dressing rooms. The show itself was conducted and rehearsed in Spanish, and despite the language barriers, we came to understand one another's personalities quite easily through the cramped lifestyle of the tour and the endless hours. Rumors about who was sleeping with whom circulated in multilingual whispers, usually Spanish or Russian, and all one had to do was listen for the names. Blahblahblah Pedro Blahblahblah Bella ... y Olga tambin! Nyet?! ¡Sí! I learned three Russian words on tour: nyet, dosvidanya, and hooliganka. Oddly enough, no, hello, and you hooligan seemed to suffice in answering just about anything the Russians asked me during my entire time with Hollywood on Ice.
Some skaters played cards or wrote letters home between shows. Others did sit-ups. Most smoked. I read-perhaps more than I had in college (where English had been my major). Hunting down bookstores in cities such as Mar del Plata or Santiago was simple, the classics racks were full of English translations. Nabokov, Lawrence, Stoker, Wells, Dickens, classic poetry, modern fiction, and the most indispensable reference, my Spanish verb dictionary, composed my traveling library. Felicia, my British roommate, brought a camera to the trailer and snuck a photo one night as I sat cross-legged on the folding chair, reading Wuthering Heights. I look studious. Serious, yet relaxed. There is a scholarly element about my posture. There is also a spiky-haired wig on my head. On my body, a skimpy, leather, punk rock outfit complete with metal studs and choker necklace. Suggestive fishnet stockings confine my neatly crossed legs and black thigh-high spandex boot covers. My face is painted to match my hoodlum demeanor; a rebellious eighties party girl in the Flashdance skating scene. My facial expression, however, is one you would observe on a graduate student immersed in her research. Around me the photograph reveals numerous half-naked women caught mid-quick change, as I sit and wait patiently for the musical cue that begins my upcoming number.
Most of the skaters were friendly with one another, which was a good thing because of the cramped quarters of the dressing room. No one was extremely fond of Pam, or more accurately, her role as the line captain. Pam was responsible for assessing fines and scheduling long, tedious rehearsals. In a variation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, our trailer was a happy home to Ice Bitch and the Eleven Waifs. From the first little chair to the last, there was Pedro (Dopey), Jody (Happy), Felicia (Friendly), me (Sneezy, for I sat next to a Russian with a hairspray fetish), Bella (Aqua-Nety), Olga #4 (Chain-Smokey), Yulia (Purgey), Olga #1 (Just Plain Snotty), Ice Bitch, Krystal (Bipolary), Donna (Prim and Properly), and Sunny (Adultery). The trailer was also a classroom of sorts. We learned valuable lessons on the principles of ignoring and the art of nonconfrontation: Yield to the one with skates on. Emotions ran high, but I preferred that to the days when there were no emotions running at all, and everyone in the trailer silently wondered what the hell we were doing there in the first place.
Along the right side of the dressing room sat twelve flimsy folding chairs that faced the wall, where twelve cheap squares of mirrored glass were bolted beneath a row of finicky lightbulbs. Someone was always complaining because one or more of her flickering orbs was stolen while she was out on the ice performing a number.
Continues...
Excerpted from All the Sundays Yet to Come by Kathryn Bertine Copyright ©2003 by Kathryn Bertine. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| Preface | xi | |
| 1. | The Trailer | 3 |
| 2. | Life Within the Electric Pet Fence | 13 |
| 3. | Murray's | 28 |
| 4. | Holiday on Ice--Entrance to the Raisin Stage | 46 |
| 5. | What Might Have Once Been Dino | 83 |
| 6. | The Museum | 90 |
| 7. | Pandora's G-String | 97 |
| 8. | The Birth of Captain Graceful | 116 |
| 9. | The Challenge of an Altered Dream | 134 |
| 10. | Sundays Past, Sundays Present | 140 |
| 11. | The Love of Something | 158 |
| 12. | A World of Ice and Water | 166 |
| 13. | Dream Deferred | 194 |
| 14. | In Search of Greatness | 203 |
| 15. | Walking with the Plankton | 215 |
| 16. | Dinosaurs and Aneurysms on the Drive to Nigeria | 224 |
| 17. | Finishing the Moment | 243 |
| 18. | Operation Sunday | 257 |
| 19. | Stunning Revelations | 267 |
| 20. | Rowing with the Predator | 272 |
| 21. | Detonation | 281 |
| 22. | Reconstruction | 288 |
| Epilogue | 301 | |
| Acknowledgments | 303 |