Were someone to open my closet circa 1994, they would have found it brimming with fabric circa 1984. Yards of slick Lycra weighed heavily on wire hangers while mounds of ruffled polyester sat in curly bunches on the floor. Neon orange stretch pants were stacked next to puffy tops that had been permanently bloused at the waist with stylish elastic hems. Along the back wall was a row of hooks that had been decorated with sequined bow ties and shimmery cummerbunds. If either Liberace or Blanche Devereaux were passing through town, I could have outfitted them both and still had enough ruffles left over for the Barnum and Bailey Circus.
I was once a figure skater. My first pair of skates were hockey skates and I hated them. When I discovered there were such a thing as blades that had picks on them, I had an epiphany. "I want to jam picks into the ice and twirl in the air," I said to myself. And that was that. Soon after, my mom bought me a pair of figure skates of my very own. I was in heaven. They were girl skates, however, and I was not in love with the fact that they were white. We tried to cover them up with stretchy brown covers, but I did not want brown skates. I wanted black ones like Kurt Browning. Although his last name had the word brown in it, his skates were black and he won Olympic medals with them. My second pair of skates were black. I was on my way.
Early one winter morning, I was thrilled when my brother-in-law invited me to go skating with him at the rink. He was the only person in our family who even remotely enjoyed sports, as evidenced by the well-worn cushions on every recliner in the living room. We were far from a lazy bunch, but the idea of throwing balls, let alone catching them, was a mystery to us all. While I tended to share the opinion of my lineage, it was exciting to be invited somewhere that did not involve picking weeds or picking rocks or picking anything else that needed picking. My brother-in-law also introduced me to golf, which I still love playing and watching to this day. Far more than I ever loved skating, as it turns out, but I am getting ahead of myself.
"You should get a pair of boys' skates," he said to me as we laced up our boots. He didn't mean any harm by it, I know, but the words stuck in my head. Was there something wrong with my skates? Was there something wrong with me? These thoughts weighed on my mind as I watched him slide a puck around the ice with a stick. I refrained from any twirls that day and stayed as close to the boards as possible, lest I embarrass either one of us. When we got back home, I mentioned our conversation to my sister.
"They are boys' skates," she said, swatting her husband with a tea towel. "As a matter of fact, they're mens' skates." And, thus, my short lived identity crisis was resolved. I slung my skates over my shoulder and at least one thing became clear that day - it is better to have a sister than to not. My mind once again returned to twirls and I became determined to stand atop the podium at the Olympic games in a pair of black mens' figure skates.
My love affair with skating began, as love affairs tend to do, with great anticipation. I was enrolled in lessons and could barely wait to get on the ice every time I set foot in the rink. It didn't matter to me that I was the only boy there. To be honest, the thought never crossed my mind. All I cared about was how to spin 360 degrees over and over and not get dizzy. And I did learn. In a very short amount of time, I also learned how to jump in the air going forward and land on one foot going backward. This is called a waltz jump and I took to it like nobody's business. Soon I put these jumps and spins together and suddenly found myself with a routine that was choreographed to the Batman theme song. "Look out, Kurt," I thought to myself. "Here I come."
My very first ice show remains stamped in my brain as the first event in my life that I could call "an event." The rink was decorated with streamers and balloons. The concession stand was fully stocked with salt and vinegar chips. The bleachers were filled to capacity with moms and dads alike. However, they were all moms and dads of little girls. It wasn't long before the ice show that I overheard my dad grumbling something about it being weird that I was skating with these girls and that he might not show up. I was unfazed by this and didn't think of it again until the day of the ice show. As I suited up into my Batman costume, his words came back to me. I was not hurt by them, but rather I couldn't understand how he could possibly want to be anywhere else. I mean, this was undoubtedly the biggest thing that had ever happened in Oxbow since Main Street had been paved. I looked at the program and realized I was next to go on. Just before my music started, I spotted him. He was not on the bleachers with the rest of the parents, but he was there, standing all by himself at the far end of the rink. I was no longer Bruce Wayne. I was Batman.
This is when things got serious. The days of cutesy routines were over and it was time to compete. A coach was enlisted and her name was Lenna. She sometimes scared the skates right off me, but that is what coaches are supposed to do and she was a great coach. I grew more fond of her with each passing practice session until I couldn't imagine how I ever learned to skate without her. "This is what the big time feels like," I thought. My jumps and spins got progressively more difficult and my repertoire of routines became far more sophisticated. Long before computers made editing music a snap, Lenna cut a couple of songs together with a cassette deck and created what became my favorite routine of them all. Instead of Batman, I was now skating to the theme song from Dallas that had been crudely sliced together with the theme song from Terms of Endearment. There was a slight click on the recording every time the tape switched between songs, but surely I would be able to disguise this glitch with my artistry. Like I said, this was the big time. I channeled my inner Larry Hagman and Shirley Maclaine for the next two years.
I started taking this new routine to figure skating competitions all over the place. By this time, I had become very close to one of the girls who skated with me. Erin was a dynamite skater and, despite the fact that she was so tiny that you could fit her in your back pocket, she had a huge presence on the ice. She became my best friend during this period of my life and for a while it felt like I had another sister. She and her mom, Connie, would ride along with me, mom and Lenna to every one of these competitions.
I should stop for a moment and provide an extra detail that might give you a better mental image of the five of us. We all had perms. This was well into the 90's, but fashion trends tend to trickle slowly into Oxbow, so we were all still riding the wave of popularity for curly tresses. As far back as I can remember, my mom had a permanent wave in her hair. During my skating days, her hair sat on top of her head in the shape of Epcot Center. It was less styled than it was shaped. Think Bob Ross from The Joy of Painting on PBS. Connie's perm had a wet look to it, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Lenna's perm was a little hipper than both of theirs and she bared a striking resemblance Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. Erin's was the cutest of the bunch and would have made Fred Savage from The Wonder Years very jealous. My perm was the most unfortunate of all, although it did coincide with Linda Gray's do in Dallas, which gave my routine the continuity it had been lacking previous to the Ogilve treatment.
Back to competition. The competition I looked forward to most each year was the one in Minot, North Dakota. The five of us would pile in mom's van, our poofy heads peeking over the seat backs, and our little reenactment of The Golden Girls would cross the border onto American soil. I can only imagine what the border guards were thinking. We would arrive in Minot and immediately check into the hotel. It was usually the Holiday Inn on the north side of town, which had a big pool, a mini-golf course and pop machines stocked with Crystal Pepsi. I should have clued in then that figure skating was not my calling when I was more enthralled with these amenities than I was the competition, but again, this realization came later. More on that shortly.
Despite the fact Erin was a much better skater than I ever was, I always returned home from Minot with more medals than she did. However, it only stands to reason I would because there were far more girls competing than there were boys. Often times there were fewer boys than there were places on the podium, while she would be up against dozens of skaters. As my collection of medals grew and grew, I started to believe I had more talent than I actually did. This false sense of achievement quickly made any medal that was not gold completely unacceptable to me. It was also at this time that I was becoming less enthused by the skating itself than I was by the thought of how I might hang the medals in my bedroom.
There were many other competitions throughout each season and we seemed to hit them all. Even in the middle of a blizzard, mom would get us to each and every one of them without incident. I remember her casually plowing through snow drifts, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on a sandwich. And such great memories I have of each one. At one competition, my sister came down with an illness so bad that its symptoms rivaled those of cholera and she was unable to leave the hotel. Whenever I think of the many ways I would prefer not to die, I picture her hunkered down in that hotel room next to a humidifier and jars of Vicks Vaporub, and think I would rather get caught in the gears of a Tilt-A-Whirl then come down with whatever it was she had. There were a few competitions that mom could not make it to for one reason or another. On one of these occasions, Erin's dad drove us and it was then that I learned "if it's yellow, let it mellow" also applies to hotel toilets, apparently.
It was at this point in time that someone had the brilliant idea that Erin and I should team up and compete as a pair. I can barely pick up a glass without dropping it, but never mind. Skating directly beside her is when it became abundantly clear, at least to me, that I was not cut out for the sport. Suddenly I could see that she had what it took and I did not. That's when my interest in skating really began to wane and I considered giving it up. But first I had to figure out why.
What you don't see when you watch Kurt Browning on the ice is that skating is hard. He makes it look easy, but trust me, it's not. The morning practices before school in subzero temperatures became less and less bearable. Bless her heart, mom would pull a pair of pants on over her pajamas and drive me into town at the ungodly hour of 5:30am. Occasionally she would forget to put in her bottom set of dentures, but nobody seemed to notice because we were all so tired and all so cold. We practiced to the same cassette tape of 60's rock and roll so many times that I still shiver to this day whenever I hear "Runaround Sue." After a couple hours of this torture, mom's voice would come over the loud speaker.
"Time for sssshcool," she would say. Then I would take off my skates as quickly as possible, wishing nothing more than to crawl back into bed.
As I had suspected years earlier, but didn't want to admit to myself, sports were not my thing. My grade in gym class was the only one under 90 percent. Way under. God, I hated gym class. I hated it with a passion. If there was a way to get out of gym class, I knew about it. I always laid the blame for my poor marks on the teacher, Mr. Rosenthal, but that excuse flew out the window when he came to the rink on one of these chilly mornings and watched me skate. While I couldn't spike a volleyball or dunk a basketball, he did see that I was capable of something athletic, and this revelation was reflected on my next report card. I still think of this as one of the nicest things a teacher ever did for me. When my grade jumped from 60 percent to 80, I knew then and there that I had gotten all I was ever going to get out of figure skating.
As it turns out, it was performing I liked. I liked wearing sequined vests. I liked making people smile. I liked taking a bow. My eureka moment came when I discovered the drama club. I had a small part in a play and that's when it hit me that I could make an ass of myself without freezing it. After having spent so much time and money on skates and costumes and competitions, I was scared to tell mom that I had experienced a change of heart. I worried she would say something motherly like "but you're so good at it" or "quitters never win" or "always finish what you start." But I couldn't go on with the charade anymore. It was not long after that first play performance that I finally summoned the courage to tell her.
"I want to quit skating and join drama," I declared nervously.
"Okay," she said.
And that was that. No speech. No lecture. Just "okay." It was as if she already knew I had a new dream. And she is not the sort of person who gets in the way of dreams; if anything, she paves the way for them. With that, I hung up my skates for good, along with any dreams of an Olympic medal.
I still get a tingle up my spine whenever I see Kurt Browning on TV. I know he lives somewhere in my neighborhood and I always have my eyes peeled for him when I'm walking around. I have no idea what I'd say if I ever actually bumped into him. "Thank you for Erin and Connie and Lenna," perhaps. "Thank you for home perms. Thank you for Minot. Thank you for dad at the back of the rink. Thank you for mom at the front of it. Thank you for proving figure skates are mens' skates if a man is wearing them. And most of all," I might say. "Thank you for the colorful costumes in my closet. They saved me from ever having to live in one."
I was once a figure skater. My first pair of skates were hockey skates and I hated them. When I discovered there were such a thing as blades that had picks on them, I had an epiphany. "I want to jam picks into the ice and twirl in the air," I said to myself. And that was that. Soon after, my mom bought me a pair of figure skates of my very own. I was in heaven. They were girl skates, however, and I was not in love with the fact that they were white. We tried to cover them up with stretchy brown covers, but I did not want brown skates. I wanted black ones like Kurt Browning. Although his last name had the word brown in it, his skates were black and he won Olympic medals with them. My second pair of skates were black. I was on my way.
Early one winter morning, I was thrilled when my brother-in-law invited me to go skating with him at the rink. He was the only person in our family who even remotely enjoyed sports, as evidenced by the well-worn cushions on every recliner in the living room. We were far from a lazy bunch, but the idea of throwing balls, let alone catching them, was a mystery to us all. While I tended to share the opinion of my lineage, it was exciting to be invited somewhere that did not involve picking weeds or picking rocks or picking anything else that needed picking. My brother-in-law also introduced me to golf, which I still love playing and watching to this day. Far more than I ever loved skating, as it turns out, but I am getting ahead of myself.
"You should get a pair of boys' skates," he said to me as we laced up our boots. He didn't mean any harm by it, I know, but the words stuck in my head. Was there something wrong with my skates? Was there something wrong with me? These thoughts weighed on my mind as I watched him slide a puck around the ice with a stick. I refrained from any twirls that day and stayed as close to the boards as possible, lest I embarrass either one of us. When we got back home, I mentioned our conversation to my sister.
"They are boys' skates," she said, swatting her husband with a tea towel. "As a matter of fact, they're mens' skates." And, thus, my short lived identity crisis was resolved. I slung my skates over my shoulder and at least one thing became clear that day - it is better to have a sister than to not. My mind once again returned to twirls and I became determined to stand atop the podium at the Olympic games in a pair of black mens' figure skates.
My love affair with skating began, as love affairs tend to do, with great anticipation. I was enrolled in lessons and could barely wait to get on the ice every time I set foot in the rink. It didn't matter to me that I was the only boy there. To be honest, the thought never crossed my mind. All I cared about was how to spin 360 degrees over and over and not get dizzy. And I did learn. In a very short amount of time, I also learned how to jump in the air going forward and land on one foot going backward. This is called a waltz jump and I took to it like nobody's business. Soon I put these jumps and spins together and suddenly found myself with a routine that was choreographed to the Batman theme song. "Look out, Kurt," I thought to myself. "Here I come."
My very first ice show remains stamped in my brain as the first event in my life that I could call "an event." The rink was decorated with streamers and balloons. The concession stand was fully stocked with salt and vinegar chips. The bleachers were filled to capacity with moms and dads alike. However, they were all moms and dads of little girls. It wasn't long before the ice show that I overheard my dad grumbling something about it being weird that I was skating with these girls and that he might not show up. I was unfazed by this and didn't think of it again until the day of the ice show. As I suited up into my Batman costume, his words came back to me. I was not hurt by them, but rather I couldn't understand how he could possibly want to be anywhere else. I mean, this was undoubtedly the biggest thing that had ever happened in Oxbow since Main Street had been paved. I looked at the program and realized I was next to go on. Just before my music started, I spotted him. He was not on the bleachers with the rest of the parents, but he was there, standing all by himself at the far end of the rink. I was no longer Bruce Wayne. I was Batman.
This is when things got serious. The days of cutesy routines were over and it was time to compete. A coach was enlisted and her name was Lenna. She sometimes scared the skates right off me, but that is what coaches are supposed to do and she was a great coach. I grew more fond of her with each passing practice session until I couldn't imagine how I ever learned to skate without her. "This is what the big time feels like," I thought. My jumps and spins got progressively more difficult and my repertoire of routines became far more sophisticated. Long before computers made editing music a snap, Lenna cut a couple of songs together with a cassette deck and created what became my favorite routine of them all. Instead of Batman, I was now skating to the theme song from Dallas that had been crudely sliced together with the theme song from Terms of Endearment. There was a slight click on the recording every time the tape switched between songs, but surely I would be able to disguise this glitch with my artistry. Like I said, this was the big time. I channeled my inner Larry Hagman and Shirley Maclaine for the next two years.
I started taking this new routine to figure skating competitions all over the place. By this time, I had become very close to one of the girls who skated with me. Erin was a dynamite skater and, despite the fact that she was so tiny that you could fit her in your back pocket, she had a huge presence on the ice. She became my best friend during this period of my life and for a while it felt like I had another sister. She and her mom, Connie, would ride along with me, mom and Lenna to every one of these competitions.
I should stop for a moment and provide an extra detail that might give you a better mental image of the five of us. We all had perms. This was well into the 90's, but fashion trends tend to trickle slowly into Oxbow, so we were all still riding the wave of popularity for curly tresses. As far back as I can remember, my mom had a permanent wave in her hair. During my skating days, her hair sat on top of her head in the shape of Epcot Center. It was less styled than it was shaped. Think Bob Ross from The Joy of Painting on PBS. Connie's perm had a wet look to it, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Lenna's perm was a little hipper than both of theirs and she bared a striking resemblance Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing. Erin's was the cutest of the bunch and would have made Fred Savage from The Wonder Years very jealous. My perm was the most unfortunate of all, although it did coincide with Linda Gray's do in Dallas, which gave my routine the continuity it had been lacking previous to the Ogilve treatment.
Back to competition. The competition I looked forward to most each year was the one in Minot, North Dakota. The five of us would pile in mom's van, our poofy heads peeking over the seat backs, and our little reenactment of The Golden Girls would cross the border onto American soil. I can only imagine what the border guards were thinking. We would arrive in Minot and immediately check into the hotel. It was usually the Holiday Inn on the north side of town, which had a big pool, a mini-golf course and pop machines stocked with Crystal Pepsi. I should have clued in then that figure skating was not my calling when I was more enthralled with these amenities than I was the competition, but again, this realization came later. More on that shortly.
Despite the fact Erin was a much better skater than I ever was, I always returned home from Minot with more medals than she did. However, it only stands to reason I would because there were far more girls competing than there were boys. Often times there were fewer boys than there were places on the podium, while she would be up against dozens of skaters. As my collection of medals grew and grew, I started to believe I had more talent than I actually did. This false sense of achievement quickly made any medal that was not gold completely unacceptable to me. It was also at this time that I was becoming less enthused by the skating itself than I was by the thought of how I might hang the medals in my bedroom.
There were many other competitions throughout each season and we seemed to hit them all. Even in the middle of a blizzard, mom would get us to each and every one of them without incident. I remember her casually plowing through snow drifts, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on a sandwich. And such great memories I have of each one. At one competition, my sister came down with an illness so bad that its symptoms rivaled those of cholera and she was unable to leave the hotel. Whenever I think of the many ways I would prefer not to die, I picture her hunkered down in that hotel room next to a humidifier and jars of Vicks Vaporub, and think I would rather get caught in the gears of a Tilt-A-Whirl then come down with whatever it was she had. There were a few competitions that mom could not make it to for one reason or another. On one of these occasions, Erin's dad drove us and it was then that I learned "if it's yellow, let it mellow" also applies to hotel toilets, apparently.
It was at this point in time that someone had the brilliant idea that Erin and I should team up and compete as a pair. I can barely pick up a glass without dropping it, but never mind. Skating directly beside her is when it became abundantly clear, at least to me, that I was not cut out for the sport. Suddenly I could see that she had what it took and I did not. That's when my interest in skating really began to wane and I considered giving it up. But first I had to figure out why.
What you don't see when you watch Kurt Browning on the ice is that skating is hard. He makes it look easy, but trust me, it's not. The morning practices before school in subzero temperatures became less and less bearable. Bless her heart, mom would pull a pair of pants on over her pajamas and drive me into town at the ungodly hour of 5:30am. Occasionally she would forget to put in her bottom set of dentures, but nobody seemed to notice because we were all so tired and all so cold. We practiced to the same cassette tape of 60's rock and roll so many times that I still shiver to this day whenever I hear "Runaround Sue." After a couple hours of this torture, mom's voice would come over the loud speaker.
"Time for sssshcool," she would say. Then I would take off my skates as quickly as possible, wishing nothing more than to crawl back into bed.
As I had suspected years earlier, but didn't want to admit to myself, sports were not my thing. My grade in gym class was the only one under 90 percent. Way under. God, I hated gym class. I hated it with a passion. If there was a way to get out of gym class, I knew about it. I always laid the blame for my poor marks on the teacher, Mr. Rosenthal, but that excuse flew out the window when he came to the rink on one of these chilly mornings and watched me skate. While I couldn't spike a volleyball or dunk a basketball, he did see that I was capable of something athletic, and this revelation was reflected on my next report card. I still think of this as one of the nicest things a teacher ever did for me. When my grade jumped from 60 percent to 80, I knew then and there that I had gotten all I was ever going to get out of figure skating.
As it turns out, it was performing I liked. I liked wearing sequined vests. I liked making people smile. I liked taking a bow. My eureka moment came when I discovered the drama club. I had a small part in a play and that's when it hit me that I could make an ass of myself without freezing it. After having spent so much time and money on skates and costumes and competitions, I was scared to tell mom that I had experienced a change of heart. I worried she would say something motherly like "but you're so good at it" or "quitters never win" or "always finish what you start." But I couldn't go on with the charade anymore. It was not long after that first play performance that I finally summoned the courage to tell her.
"I want to quit skating and join drama," I declared nervously.
"Okay," she said.
And that was that. No speech. No lecture. Just "okay." It was as if she already knew I had a new dream. And she is not the sort of person who gets in the way of dreams; if anything, she paves the way for them. With that, I hung up my skates for good, along with any dreams of an Olympic medal.
I still get a tingle up my spine whenever I see Kurt Browning on TV. I know he lives somewhere in my neighborhood and I always have my eyes peeled for him when I'm walking around. I have no idea what I'd say if I ever actually bumped into him. "Thank you for Erin and Connie and Lenna," perhaps. "Thank you for home perms. Thank you for Minot. Thank you for dad at the back of the rink. Thank you for mom at the front of it. Thank you for proving figure skates are mens' skates if a man is wearing them. And most of all," I might say. "Thank you for the colorful costumes in my closet. They saved me from ever having to live in one."
