Sugar Coat It
A male FIGURE SKATING COACH, mid ‘40s, talks to his new student, a girl of 10.
COACH
You do not want to be a figure skater. You may think you want to be a figure skater but you don’t. You think you’ll be glittery and pretty and shiny like a rhinestoned flag celebrating all things spectacular but you won’t. Let me spell this out for you: if you commit to the lessons you are starting here today, you won’t have a life outside of this building. You hear that? That is the mechanical hum of compressors creating ice where it shouldn’t be, potentially deadly freon pumping through polyethylene pipes to take the only plain, ordinary water left in the state of Nevada and turn it into a sheet of ice. The slightly higher frequency, slightly more grating noise you hear is those lights up there — don’t look up, they’ll blind you! — those lights up there produce this fabulous jaundiced-color light. This
garish glow will bathe you morning ’til night while you fall on your ass, which will, incidentally, always look bigger in spandex than you or I want it to.
And these kids out there, these will — save one real one — not be your friends. They will be your rivals. You may go to the mall on your limited time off, or have dance parties in the locker room when one of you sneaks a beer in, but they will always be looking over their shoulders at you when they land, hoping you saw their clean double lutzes, hoping your camel flew too far, hoping you jumped right out of the rink like Midori Ito at the 1991 World championships. You look blank. You don’t even know who Midori Ito is because you’re ten years old. She was the first woman to land a triple axel. If you want to be a skater, you should have a poster of her on your I’m-assuming-it’s-Pepto-colored bedroom wall. You don’t know what Pepto is — well, stick with skating honey, and you will. If you’re lucky you will find one real friend, and good for you, you might get to keep yours. I lost my true love Rob, a wonderful high-cheekboned, gentle soul who made love to the ice with every stroke of his blade — and lost many of my less-than-true friends, too, to a then new, unfathomable disease that ravaged our tiny world. AIDS, child, AIDS. Skating can teach you a lot more than edges.
You won’t have time for real friends or boyfriends or girlfriends, anyways. You’ll train on ice, you’ll train off ice, you may or may not go to school depending on how fast you get good. You’ll spend all of your time focused on getting good enough to compete for 2 to 4 minutes a few times a year. And unless you medal and medal a lot — and probably even if you do — you’ll ultimately be training your childhood away to have my job. My job was lovely for exactly one year. When I first turned pro, I skated a show with Kristi Yamaguchi. I trained daily with Brian Boitano and it was right when the South Park movie came out, and all the kids warmed up to that song every day. They stroked around singing, “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” and it was truly
hilarious because there he was doing what he always does: THIS. First stroking, then edges, then small jumps, then big jumps, then some spins. Even the great Brian Boitano has spent most of his life surrounded by floor mats onto which hockey players have spit and sweat buckets of eeew. In fact, Hopeful Next-Miss-Thing, even if you win the damned OLYMPICS, so named for games originally played by men with sculpted flanks in the shadows of a mountain on which the
Gods of yore sat, you’ll still need moppet-headed comedy writers from Colorado to immortalize you. Only if you are eventually rendered in two-dimensional construction paper and beamed into the living rooms of every family in this land of liberty will your legacy outlast your biggest fall. And you will fall — all leapers do. So, the question is: will you leap?
Figures.
COACH
You do not want to be a figure skater. You may think you want to be a figure skater but you don’t. You think you’ll be glittery and pretty and shiny like a rhinestoned flag celebrating all things spectacular but you won’t. Let me spell this out for you: if you commit to the lessons you are starting here today, you won’t have a life outside of this building. You hear that? That is the mechanical hum of compressors creating ice where it shouldn’t be, potentially deadly freon pumping through polyethylene pipes to take the only plain, ordinary water left in the state of Nevada and turn it into a sheet of ice. The slightly higher frequency, slightly more grating noise you hear is those lights up there — don’t look up, they’ll blind you! — those lights up there produce this fabulous jaundiced-color light. This
garish glow will bathe you morning ’til night while you fall on your ass, which will, incidentally, always look bigger in spandex than you or I want it to.
And these kids out there, these will — save one real one — not be your friends. They will be your rivals. You may go to the mall on your limited time off, or have dance parties in the locker room when one of you sneaks a beer in, but they will always be looking over their shoulders at you when they land, hoping you saw their clean double lutzes, hoping your camel flew too far, hoping you jumped right out of the rink like Midori Ito at the 1991 World championships. You look blank. You don’t even know who Midori Ito is because you’re ten years old. She was the first woman to land a triple axel. If you want to be a skater, you should have a poster of her on your I’m-assuming-it’s-Pepto-colored bedroom wall. You don’t know what Pepto is — well, stick with skating honey, and you will. If you’re lucky you will find one real friend, and good for you, you might get to keep yours. I lost my true love Rob, a wonderful high-cheekboned, gentle soul who made love to the ice with every stroke of his blade — and lost many of my less-than-true friends, too, to a then new, unfathomable disease that ravaged our tiny world. AIDS, child, AIDS. Skating can teach you a lot more than edges.
You won’t have time for real friends or boyfriends or girlfriends, anyways. You’ll train on ice, you’ll train off ice, you may or may not go to school depending on how fast you get good. You’ll spend all of your time focused on getting good enough to compete for 2 to 4 minutes a few times a year. And unless you medal and medal a lot — and probably even if you do — you’ll ultimately be training your childhood away to have my job. My job was lovely for exactly one year. When I first turned pro, I skated a show with Kristi Yamaguchi. I trained daily with Brian Boitano and it was right when the South Park movie came out, and all the kids warmed up to that song every day. They stroked around singing, “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” and it was truly
hilarious because there he was doing what he always does: THIS. First stroking, then edges, then small jumps, then big jumps, then some spins. Even the great Brian Boitano has spent most of his life surrounded by floor mats onto which hockey players have spit and sweat buckets of eeew. In fact, Hopeful Next-Miss-Thing, even if you win the damned OLYMPICS, so named for games originally played by men with sculpted flanks in the shadows of a mountain on which the
Gods of yore sat, you’ll still need moppet-headed comedy writers from Colorado to immortalize you. Only if you are eventually rendered in two-dimensional construction paper and beamed into the living rooms of every family in this land of liberty will your legacy outlast your biggest fall. And you will fall — all leapers do. So, the question is: will you leap?
Figures.