Page 83 - MN

83
experience. Willie and Cathy did a move where he'd hold her by one ankle and spin her around with her head very close to the ice. It was impressive. But one night her skate was wet and his grip slipped. Cathy flew out of his grasp and slid across the ice into the orchestra pit. The musicians caught her, but she was pretty scraped up. She got back on the ice and finished the act with blood running down a scrape on her leg. The next night she was back, with heavy makeup on the wound, doing the same move with Willie. Tough, these skaters.
Later on we had Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner do the pairs routine. They came out of two upright tubes that would fill with smoke and then they would appear. One night something went wrong with the smoke machine and Tai got burned by hot oil, but the next night they were back out there, doing the show. As I say, tough.
A smart person would've bought a pair of skates and learned from the experts. For some reason that never occurred to me. Instead, I bought a sewing machine. I have no idea why, but the days were long and we were products of the Sixties and loved to experiment with clothes. It was still the era of tie-dyes and bell bottoms and flowers in the hair. So I made shirts that I thought were pretty impressive but when I think of them now I get embarrassed. Maybe that's what put off the girl skaters.
Ah! Another memory. The show carried four musicians--a piano player/conductor, bass, drums and guitar. When we got to a city, they'd fill out the band with local concert musicians and one of them had to be a french horn player because there was a specific part for him in Song Sung Blue. Apparently it was a difficult part because every night we'd stand off stage and wait to see if the french horn would hit the high note. I think we wagered on it and it was a 50-50 bet. The solo would climb and climb to that high note and.....
Besides doing my comedy I'd do a number with one of the skaters where I'd sing "Mister Bojangles" and he would skate to it. Actually, I would kind of talk and sing, like a story. It was a nice number, but one night Dick the director thought he could do the skating part better. He'd been a dancer and I'm sure he had chops, but when he did it the audience thought it was a comedy number and it didn't go well. I felt sorry for him.
Ice skating comics:
In those four years we had two skating comedy acts. Both were old-time professionals with about ten minutes of killer material that they lived on for years. The first was Eric Waite, and there'd be a big production number with a prince and princess surrounded by girl skaters in tutus carrying u-shaped flowered hoops. One of those girl skaters would be Eric, and he would lose control of one end of the hoop and start chasing it around. From there it would go into classic slapstick and the audiences loved it.