Why I Don't Like Ice Shows

A little humor before Monday's catastrophe

“Disney On Ice” is in Newark, with dozens of tractor trailers filling up the parking lot at the Prudential Center with their supplies, skaters, and costumes. My office is taking phone calls from residents and municipal workers eagerly seeking the discounted tickets we offer to this show.

Which is why I’m writing about it today…with all the horrible stuff going on (except peace in Gaza), we need a break from catastrophe.

I don’t like ice shows. It has nothing to do with the trope of red-blooded heterosexual Anglo-American (or other American, or Canadian) men and ice events.

We all know the joke, and has its moments: What are the five things an ice event needs for men to attend it?

1. A score

2. A fight

3. A puck

4. An organ

5. A Zamboni

“Ice Capades,” “Holiday On Ice,” and “Disney On Ice” only offer the fifth item: the Zamboni.

Actually, my reason for disliking ice shows is different.

My grandmother loved them. Fluid grace. Artistry. Women in fancy costumes twirling on the rink to great music.

Every summer, as a young teenager, I was required to visit her in her retirement community in West Palm Beach, Florida. Not Mar-A-Lago. Century Village. The place was full of widows whose husbands died right after they moved in, having completed their life’s mission to ensure that their wives would enjoy the comfortable retirement that the community offered. A month after they moved in, husband often died in his sleep.

There was warm weather, palm trees, bingo at the community center, bus trips for shopping and entertainment, fellow residents from New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Toronto to reminisce with, and grackles on the lawns.

Grandma’s fellow apartment owners included her three sisters, and all four would regularly convene to grill me on that important issue: was I getting married soon and was the girl Jewish?

Now, I was about 14 years old, and marriage was far from my primary interest in life…I had not even gone out with a girl on a date yet.

My Asperger’s prevented me from lying or giving socially acceptable answers. My brother, who has more insight than I do and no Asperger’s, simply looked them in the eye, and said, “Yes, and we are planning to get married.”

The four sisters then smiled, sighed contentedly, and looked at each other. I took my brother aside, and said, “You are lying like George Steinbrenner on his managers. You’re not getting married at age 12!”

He shrugged and said, “What are they going to do, check on me? They just want to feel good and have their values reinforced.” Sure enough, they never checked on him.

Anyway, Grandma always booked two tickets to “Holiday On Ice” while I was there, and we went to see it every time.

The first time I went, I actually enjoyed it. Good music, interesting ice maneuvers, and a monkey that played hockey with its trainer and scored a goal.

The following year, the star attraction was a young blonde woman named Jill Shipstad. The program for the show described Ms. Shipstad as “Spice on ice is mighty nice and we’ve got it in Jill Shipstad!” She was a California blonde whose father had co-founded “Shipstad and Johnson’s Ice Follies,” and she skated for 20 years for her dad and “Holiday on Ice,” before becoming a coach and choreographer. I looked her up in preparing this essay, and found that she died in 2013, at the age of 69. Too early.

Another attraction at that show was a pair of bears that skated on the ice with their trainers. That was fairly astonishing.

Therefore, “Holiday On Ice” was almost worth the muggy heat, Grandma’s lousy cooking, annoying whining, irritating sisters, and the stupefying boredom of a West Palm Beach retirement community.

The third year was the disaster.

That year, “Holiday On Ice” had a theme: “Sesame Street On Ice.” It wasn’t the worst theme in the world, as I loved the show’s Muppets then and now.

What made it a total nightmare was the audience.

Every six-year-old and below – of all ages – made up the midday audience, as their mothers were desperate to get them something to do besides watch TV. They did. Find something to do, that is. They did not watch TV. Nor did they watch the ice show. Here’s what they did.

They gobbled up tons of sugar-bomb food and soda. They made their parents buy heaps of toys that either made noise or lit up the auditorium. The sugar made them run around, brandishing their light wands and toys, screaming.

The show team brought out sleds, loaded the tykes into them, and Muppets towed them around the ice. The kids ran up and down aisles, jumped into the sleds, and screamed some more. They leaped up in front of Grandma and me.

Grandma was a stickler for the “ACT YOUR AGE!” theory of parenthood, which meant, “Act how I think kids acted when I was your age.” In reality, those kids WERE acting their age. She yelled at them.

I just took cover. With good reason.

The kids hurled soda and popcorn in all directions, including at me. I avoided most of the bombardment, but I wished I had brought my English relatives’ World War II “battle bowlers” to protect me. I felt like yelling, “On Tin Hats!”

With all the screaming, yelling, and hurling of food, I found myself scared and disgusted at the same time.

The climax of this ordeal came when the kid behind me whined, “Mommy, I gotta throw upppppp…” and I leaped out of my chair just in time to avoid the stream of vomit.

Mommy apologized profusely as she tried to clean up the mess. Grandma called for an usher, and he moved us to better seats.

We sat stonily through the rest of the performance, applauded politely, and drove home.

As Grandma tooled along, we sat in silence. Finally, I said, “Grandma, I don’t want to go to any more ice shows.”

She just nodded.

However, decades later, my daughter arrived, grew up, and she and her best friend, our next-door neighbor’s son, wanted to see “Disney On Ice” at the Meadowlands. Both were in the third grade, and the theme was “Monsters, Inc.” I love that movie – brilliant use of Pixar animation, great voices with Billy Crystal, John Goodman, and James Coburn, hilarious plot. I was willing to go.

The show proved an entertaining translation of the movie to an ice rink, Mickey Mouse made a token obligatory appearance – I still like Bugs Bunny better – and the only problem we had came with the two “spinney” things that the kids bought. My daughter’s friend got his “spinney” thing in his mother’s hair, which caused some amusement and consternation.

After that, I was done with ice shows.

However, there are still three ice show subjects that fascinated me. All involved famous Olympic champions.

I’m not a big fan of Olympic figure skating – it seems to be an event that shows of glamor more than talent, but it has generated immense buzz for a century, ever since Sonja Henie showed up.

I’m old enough to remember when Dorothy Hamill, then a sassy teenager (for the “Short and Sassy Look” in her later endorsements) won the 1976 Olympic Figure Skating gold. Two days later, every middle-class white girl in my junior high school arrived in class with Dorothy’s haircut, lugging a pair of ice skates. The haircuts remained. The skates soon vanished.

Five decades later, now aged 68, married and divorced twice, Dorothy has written an autobiography about suffering depression, endorses arthritis remedies, and suffers breast cancer. That makes me feel old.

The first ice skater that holds my attention is Katarina Witt, the East German star, who has won enough Gold Medals – two at the Olympics – to fill a closet. To prevent this smokin’ hottie from defecting to “Holiday on Ice,” the East German government gave her everything that incompetent state could provide: cars that worked, opposed to the Trabant; fancy homes; permitted travel. The East German Secret Police, the omnipotent Stasi, also ensured that she was not using her fame, wealth, and fan club to say or do anything that was opposed to Marxism, by wiretapping everything in her houses. They started that at age seven.

Every room in her homes was bugged and jammed with cameras, and the Stasi file on Katarina added up to more than 3,500 pages. She didn’t know they had been doing that until East Germany collapsed in 1991, and she was given the 27 boxes the following year.

”I would go through all the different emotions where you’re just absolutely upset and you’re furious … at times I was laughing … I was just completely in shock. How far they even would go,” Katarina told an ABC interviewer.

The most bizarre aspect of this endless surveillance was that the Stasi agents timed her sexual encounters. Apparently she had plenty, but she declined comment on who with and how many. What did come out was that they averaged nine minutes.

Nine minutes?

What did that mean?

I asked a good friend of mine who writes erotic fiction by day and edits the Society for American Baseball Research’s publications by night about this time span.

“What determines,” I asked, “When a sexual encounter starts and when it ends?”

She looked at me funny. It might seem obvious – when the guy “shoots his wad,” withdraws, mutters, “I hope it was good for you, too, babe,” rolls over, and starts snoring. However, I pointed out that there were other potential endings…our hero might, after finishing, remember the supreme importance of making sure “it was good for you too, babe,” by bringing her to another climax or two or three.

She agreed. She also noted that a sexual encounter could start at any one of a number of points. When they start kissing with tongues probing? When they start undressing themselves? Each other? Fall into bed? Our lady bares her breasts? Our man drops his pants? What defines it?

Only the Stasi knew for sure, and they weren’t telling me.

Anyway, Katarina herself posed nude for Playboy magazine in 1998, claiming she wanted to end her “ice princess” image. Like many such women who bare it all in those pictorials, she did so while soaking wet. She jumped into a brook and a pond in an anonymous forest. The magazine puts their women in such wet places – steam rooms, beaches, rivers, bathtubs, showers – for that noble purpose of making the ladies’ nipples harder.

Both Katarina and Playboy achieved their goal. As she said, she “changed people’s perceptions” about her and the magazine had its second-ever sellout issue. For those wondering, the first was Marilyn Monroe, the inaugural edition.

The second is Debi Thomas. I was single when I saw her on the cover of Time magazine’s 1988 Winter Olympics preview issue, and, being single and desperate, fell in love with her taut figure, long legs, and perfect smile.

Reading the article, I learned that she had earned a Gold, Silver, and Bronze in three straight World Championships, and had been skating competitively since age nine. Something about that bothered me – I thought about child stars whose careers collapse after they hit adulthood.

Anyway, her Olympic performance did not match up to the Luce empire’s hype. She made mistakes in her jumps in the free-skating program, gave up (by her own admission), and finished third. Katarina Witt took the gold back to East Berlin. Canada’s Elizabeth Manley nailed the silver. Debi was still the first black athlete to win any medal at the Winter Olympics. Oddly, both Debi and Katarina used Bizet’s “Carmen” as their music.

After that, Debi retired from competition and headed back to medical school, which was what she really wanted to do, doing so at Stanford University, becoming an orthopedic surgeon, specializing in hip and knee replacement.

She was a fine surgeon. However, she did not get along with her colleagues. She suffered from bipolar disorder, and went from clinic to clinic to clinic.

Just to make her life worse, she went through two disastrous marriages, lost custody of her son, suffered financial trouble, and became addicted to painkillers. She got into an argument with her boyfriend in 2012, got hold of a gun, and fired it into the ground. She then surrendered herself and the gun to the police, saying she had bipolar disorder. That ended her medical career – she couldn’t afford the mandated distressed-physician program.

Now she hit bottom…she let her medical license expire, had to sell her Olympic medal to pay bills, and wound up living in the boyfriend’s trailer. He suffered with anger and alcohol issues. Debi was diagnosed as being bipolar. That explained a few things to me. I had a bipolar boss. One minute, she was the exemplar of sweetness, caring, and charm – the next she was hurling a telephone across the room in hysterical fury.

I got the sense that Debi was more interested in becoming a surgeon than a top-ranked ice skater, and her quick departure from the world stage after her defeat proved it. She came over to me like Trilby, with her coaches as Svengali. She would have probably been happier skating for fun than in the Olympics, and needed real love more than skilled coaching.

Debi lives in Florida now, and did make a comeback in 2023, skating to a Silver in something called the “World Figure & Fancy Skating Championships” that year. She said returning to the ice was “like riding a bike.” Good for her.

The third was a better-known ice skater, who has become both a comic meme and an icon of both disaster and idiocy: Tonya Harding.

The facts don’t need much rehearsal…the line in the movie by Martin Maddox says it all: “I mean we had no idea that something like this (hitting Nancy Kerrigan) could be done by two of the biggest boobs, in a story filled with boobs.”

Allison Janney earned her Best Supporting Actress in “I, Tonya,” but Julianne Nicholson, Sebastian Stan, Paul Walter Hauser, and Margot Robbie were no slouches, either. If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to invent them, because of the chaos they caused. If the story had been fiction, an acquisitions editor would have tossed it in the circular file and sent some of the worst sentences to “National Lampoon” for their annual “From the Transom” section of really appalling literary submissions.

One of the more bizarre moments that did NOT make the movie was Jeff Gillooly (now Stone) videotaping his wedding night with Tonya Harding – and selling it. Why people videotape their own wedding nights and such encounters baffles me. Anyway, the video of Tonya and Jeff prancing around their bedroom (don’t ask me where), removing her bridal gown, and getting it on, became its own Internet meme.

However, there was – and the movie notes this – a sense of tragedy in Tonya’s story. She was a very working-class girl, whose only talent in the world was a brilliant ice-skating ability. The environment of competitive figure skating seems to demand that its competitors all be some kind of upper-crust princesses with supermodel figures, bonded teeth, blinding smiles, opera music sound tracks, and anodyne quotes about God, country, and apple pie.

Tonya was none of those, and she suffered heavily for it. As she lacked any other job skills, she became a female boxer, a pitchwoman for auto insurance, an “expert” on “World’s Dumbest Criminals,” a painter, welder, and deck builder. Gradually, as a person, she has vanished into working-class America, but remains forever a punchline.

A few years ago, I was chatting with my same pal, who writes erotic fiction, and Tonya Harding’s name came up. We were discussing sports stars who went nuts. She mentioned that she knew Tonya’s family.

I had to ask: “How accurate was that movie? Were they really like that?”

She shook her head. “They were worse,” was her simple answer.

Oh.

The last ice show I attended was at the Prudential Center, two blocks from my office. It had the five things a red-blooded heterosexual Anglo-American man (or any other man) needs to be entertained: a fight, a puck, a score, an organ, and a Zamboni.

The New Jersey Devils defeated the New York Rangers, 3-1.