Long Legs and Tall Tales: A Showgirl's Wacky, Sexy Journey to the Playboy Mansion and the Radio City Rockettes (58 page)

As the new girl, I did not have a say in where I wanted to sit and was assigned by Raoul to the last seat of Kiddie Corner, where I butted up against the partition wall. Luckily, Ginny, my dear friend from Branson, sat in the Hot Tamale Row spot closest to Kiddie Corner, so if we leaned back in our seats we could see each other and talk. Kiddie Corner housed an interesting potpourri of people, starting with Dorrie who sat on my right. Dorrie was one of the older girls in the group, a contemporary of Mac and Jado and a New York Rockette and tour survivor. Thankfully, she loved to chat and, having paid her dues, had earned her right to an opinion on anything Rockette-related. Because she had seniority over me, I was relieved she wasn’t one of those terrifying New York Rockettes about whom I’d heard rumors. While she certainly could have pulled rank, she never did, and we got along fine and even became good friends.

Occupying the first spot next to the dressing room door was Joann, who had joined the touring Rockettes and settled in Vegas when the tour ended there. A fashionista, music buff, and shopper extraordinaire, she was also mothering and responsible. Next to her sat Missy, the totally buffed and beautiful Australian I had danced with in Branson. She was the only person in my section who I already knew. Missy and Joann, best friends and both nearing thirty (my age at the time), lent an air of maturity and “been there, done that” to Kiddie Corner, but it was the one and only Bobbi Sue with her childish antics who infused the section with personality befitting its name. Bobbi Sue was sandwiched dead in the middle of us all, and it was probably for the best that she had a safety buffer on both sides.

Dorrie was the eldest member of Kiddie Corner, but Joann was the matriarch, especially to Bobbi Sue, whom she best-friended in a big-sisterly, even motherly way. Joann would cook lasagna or pot roast and bring the leftovers in a Tupperware for Bobbi Sue to make sure she was eating well. Bobbi Sue was one of the few Rockettes who was considered underweight, a condition that earned her the nickname “Skinny Chick.”

Skinny Chick was a twenty-two-year-old, 5’10”, paper-thin, drop-dead gorgeous, firecracker, southern gal with silky, light-brown, waist-long hair. If she liked you, she was as loyal a friend as they come. If she disliked you and had the urge, she could punch your lights out in a second. Her unbridled passion for dance absolutely poured out of her every pore. She didn’t touch booze or drugs, and God knows there wasn’t a drug out there that could match her energy anyway. Bobbi Sue turned heads. Always sporting some sexy dress that started four feet up her gams, she caused traffic jams on the Vegas Strip. She made it known that she wasn’t big on anything educational, including reading, but who needs smarts when you’ve got a bod like that?

Every night at precisely half-hour call, Bobbi Sue would come bounding in, boisterous and full of spit and vinegar. Then she’d spend the next twenty-five minutes laughing and parading about, eating her take-out food or modeling her latest shopping purchases. While I needed a leisurely hour or more to prepare myself for the show, Bobbi Sue could sit down at her dressing table at five-minute call without a stitch of makeup on and be ready on time, which she did regularly. When she was in a real hurry, she’d smear on lipstick and lashes and finish her make-up
after
the opening number.

Bobbi Sue’s one self-proclaimed flaw was that her breasts were too small. As such, she joined the “Itty Bitty Titty Committee”—a backstage club that was formed by women first on the alphabetical bra scale (size As). I thought she looked stunning as is. But some women are naturally like computers: As soon as they see another female, their brains scan her body, process the information thoroughly, and assess how they compare. The Rockettes were familiar with each others’ parts down to the last detail. We all knew perfectly well who had the tightest abs, most toned legs, best buffed arms, and most beautiful breasts. We were always begging the girls with the sexiest stomachs to spill their secrets to getting that perfect six-pack. (Wouldn’t ya know it? Sit ups.)

I saw perhaps half a dozen breast augmentations (some exquisite and some gone terribly awry) on Rockettes over the years. Some members of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee pondered openly about enhancing their bra sizes, and many of us would try to talk them out of it. After carefully surveying all the naked gals in the room, Skinny Chick announced, “Kristi, if I ever get a boob job, I want them to be just like yours. My boyfriend should come and check yours out.” I was floored! Boy oh boy, was I honored to have the winning mammaries, because we had some doozies in the cast, both faux and natural. I soon became known as “Kristi B-Cups,” because it was determined in the dressing room that I had the ideal size B-Cup breasts. That nickname morphed into “Krystal B-Cups,” and from that moment on, the girls almost always called me that or just “Krystal” or just “B-Cups.” When I was a modern dancer in New York, I thought my breasts were too big. When I was in the Playboy’s Girls of Rock & Roll, I felt my breasts were too small. Now, as a Rockette, my breasts were just right! Go figure, Goldilocks. I should have just accepted my body from the very beginning.

Skinny Chick and I were polar opposites in several ways. I would sit quietly at my perfectly organized, tastefully decorated spot reading a book or quietly working on some craft project or another while she bounced off the walls, taped junk to her mirror, or searched through her pile of dance shoes and dirty clothes under the dressing table. Her spot was so messy it’s a wonder she could find her make-up. She could barely view her face in her mirror, because it was covered with magazine cutouts, photos, lipstick graffiti, and other types of trash. Being the consummate professional, I routinely did a fifteen-minute ballet warm-up using my chair as the barre every night before the first show. I never
ever
witnessed Bobbi Sue warming up. It would have been a redundant gesture, as she ran around so much her muscles were constantly on fire anyway.

It didn’t take long for Bobbi Sue to discern and become annoyed by our opposing idiosyncrasies. After I’d been in the show for several months, Miss Skinny Chick went so far as to issue me an eviction notice:

Why Kristi Should Not Be in Kiddie Corner!

• Too neat

• She does ballet warm ups

• Boobs!!!

• Reads (not just looking at pictures)

• Too crafty

She also complained that I was too smart and used big words. Then to really stir things up, one night I came off stage from dancing in “Big Band” to discover her sitting demurely at her perfectly clean and neat dressing table pretending to write a letter, while my spot had been ransacked, garbage thrown everywhere and all my stuff strewn about. She was a wild card. I don’t know how any of us would have gotten through the shows without her.

Kiddie Corner was full of surprises, but when a Hot Tamale gave her notice, I jumped at the chance to move closer to my Branson buddies—Gyne, Safford, and Squally—where I could cross-ball-stitch without guilt, where “read” wasn’t a four-letter word, and where I was not only allowed but encouraged to do crafts. Several of us openly worshipped Martha Stewart, and Squally could make a masterful butternut squash risotto and work a glue gun like nobody’s business. Eventually, even Fathead gave into peer pressure and cross-stitched Christmas gifts for her entire family. My people! While I still dearly loved my Kiddie Corner compatriots, I found my happy place in Hot Tamales and stayed the remainder of the run.

Later, I had the tremendous honor of being secretly asked to move to Bellevue when one of their residents was leaving the show. But after careful consideration, I decided to remain in the Big, wild, Dressing Room. After all, it did house the bathroom and shower room—a huge plus. More importantly, I didn’t want to miss out on any of the hilarious, backstage entertainment. Bobbi Sue was reason enough for me to stay put. I could have just popped a bag of popcorn and watched her all night.

*******

By the time you perform a show about thirty times, you are generally comfy with the choreography, you have calmed your nerves, and you have adjusted to the pace (you no longer hyperventilate after every number). The choreography has gone out of your brain and into muscle memory so you don’t have to think about it anymore. At this time, your eyes and brain become free to focus on other activities, like scoping the audience for, say, cute guys. I couldn’t believe how much we could see from stage, especially after the show became routine, and the cast loved to spread the word. “Did you see the lady breastfeeding her baby in the front row?” “There was a couple making out stage left, five rows back around #8!” “That dude center stage, third row hasn’t clapped the entire night!” Let that be a lesson to you, audience members. If you don’t want to be seen, don’t do it. These were welcome diversions, however, as they kept the gig interesting for us.

Additionally, most of your costume kinks have been ironed out. You’ve gotten extremely efficient with your costume changes and have memorized your entrance music including exactly the number of counts needed to get you from the dressing room to your place on stage. When I first started, I had to listen carefully for all of my cues; I couldn’t even make small talk for fear of being distracted. But after a while, I barely needed to pay attention to the music on the monitors. My body automatically got up at the appropriate time in the music, started putting on my hat, and headed downstage, like Pavlov’s dog salivating to the ring of the bell. Sometimes my internal alarm clock failed, and I found myself spewing profanities while dashing down to make my entrance, but for the most part, I was running on automatic pilot.

By this point, your show has become so streamlined that you have freed up precious seconds, even minutes, of time in which to do something other than focus on the show. Even during the most hectic periods of the night, we’d find micro-snippets of time to fix lipstick, flirt with a stagehand, read a note on the call board, or grab a chocolate. I was living life on high speed, and every moment counted. Maximizing time was a game we played to the fullest.

Lots of performers, myself included, cross-stitched, knitted, or crocheted because we could always sneak in a few stitches if we had a couple extra seconds. Plus we could gossip while doing it, a pursuit that proved most difficult when trying to read a book. Reading wasn’t the best way to pass the time during the show, as you could become so engrossed in the story that you’d nearly miss your cue to go on stage. And you most certainly had no business concentrating on your history exam in the dressing room, as that would prevent you from being available for questions, bantering, and complaining. Our favorite way to fill time and our natural default activity was loads and loads of chewing the fat, tittle-tattling, and dishing the dirt. Nothing wasted time as well as some serious scuttlebutt.

During this particular show, we were lucky enough to have a few long breaks of seven minutes or so while the specialty acts performed. Seven minutes is an absolute eternity in backstage time; you wouldn’t believe what an actor can accomplish in those few instants if prepared. I’d bet my tap shoes that if God had been an entertainer, she/he could have created the world in seven minutes. Much like the “New York minute,” only considerably faster, is the “Entertainer’s minute.” What entertainers can accomplish in three seconds, one minute, or a whopping seven whole minutes would astound you. It did me.

It’s no wonder we became masters of the clock. Our entire job revolved around tick-tock: We had to be at the theatre at precisely half-hour call, start the show at exactly the same time every night, be on stage at the start of each number, change costumes in record time, perform choreography perfectly to the beat and timing of the music. Time waited for no one in the theatre. The show would go on with or without you. It was a regimented lifestyle; to be successful, you had to keep good time.

In addition, the show was completely scripted and choreographed. Can you imagine having a job in which every day, at the same time, your every motion and utterance are done in the same way and in the same order with the same people while wearing the same clothes and saying the same words verbatim? And doing a good job meant repeating this exact same protocol every single day without the slightest deviation? It was robotic and unnatural. After repeating our performance time and time again for days, weeks, months, and years on end, we became so intimately familiar with the show that we were desperate for variety and something refreshing to mix up the daily routine. We loved to find ways to break up the repetitiveness and inject a touch of the unexpected.

Consequently, out of sheer necessity, the combination of tedium and seven glorious minutes of free time catalyzed the creation of some fantastic backstage entertainment. If preplanned, we could squeeze in the world’s fastest “Talent Show” or “Showing.” One Rockette would announce, “Everyone meet in the Big Dressing Room after ‘Big Band’ for a Showing!” That meant that someone had put together entertainment for us. Yippee! As soon as our number was over, we’d sprint off stage, unzipping each other’s dresses and eschewing costume pieces along the way. We’d quickly put on the costume for our next number and gather for the special event.

A showing could be any silly spectacle presented by one, two, or several people. Bobbi Sue, the Queen of Backstage Entertainment, periodically dressed up like the female lead dancer in
Riverdance
—the “Irish Dancing Phenomenon”—wearing a leotard and wee little skirt, her hair down in long, wavy, flowing locks, a wreath of sparkly ribbons around her head. She would mock Irish dance and parody the show to much laughter, cheering, and applause.