Ice Capades

By now, we've done a lot of shows. We're talking 200 shows plus. You would think that by now, nerves would be playing a minor to nonexistent roll, right? That's certainly what I though. But this was a special night. It was the premiere in Zurich. And the premiere in Zurich is no joke.

The workers had been busting their butts for three days to get everything ready. There was an extra tent, complete with beautiful chandeliers, that would serve as a restaurant. Then there was the VIP tent. Red carpets were laid out, extra lights were hung up. And don't even get me started on some of the more ridiculous tasks, like blackening the tires of the sanitary wagon...

Needless to say, we were nervous.

So imagine my joy when I discovered they had repainted the stage for the occasion. The last time they painted the floor, it was a matte paint that did not slide, even if you wanted it to. In the most epic over-correction of all time, they appeared to have painted the floor with lubricant based paint.

Now PM had been told the floor was being painted and had been tasked with spreading the word.

She didn't.

As such, I only found out they had painted the floor a couple of hours before the show was set to start. That left pretty much zero time to properly adapt to the floor. And boy would I have to adapt. I have never in all my life been on such a slippery surface. It was near impossible to execute my spirals. Normally, one spiral will see you face a third of the ring. So if you start facing the center, after three spirals you should be able to come up toward the middle. The floor was so slippery that the wheel would slide out just a little every rotation so that I would stay exactly in place. That should not happen.

If I tried to change the angle of the spiral to control where I was going, especially if I needed a lower angle, the wheel would just slide out from under me. At one point I didn't even manage to finish one spiral before the wheel slid out from under me. To make matter worse, normally the wheel will slide when your weight is in front (and your hands are toward the ground) but form some strange reason it kept sliding out by my feet so I would end up going backwards!

I was terrified to even do freehand spirals. Having the wheel slide out when you're only attached by the feet was not an attractive prospect.

This being the premiere, with a packed house, loads of newspapers and television present, not to mention Swiss quasi-celebrities like the past two Miss Switzerlands, the current Miss Switzerland, and a former Mr Switzerland*, the stakes were pretty high.

I was in tears. I was on the floor, my wheel and I defeated, with a vision of utter humiliation on the horizon.

At dinner, some of my non-artist friends on the tour as well as my boyfriend took up the battle as their own. They came to the tent with me and tried to find a solution. We tried scouring one of the floor panels of the extension to see if it would make the surface rougher. A good idea in theory, but the space was so small there was no way to see if it would work.

Then, A said that a friend of his who does cyr wheel puts rosin on his wheel when the stage is slippery and that it tends to help. I was pretty skeptical. Rosin gets sticky with heat. How was it supposed to make my cold metal wheel sticky?

But we covered the wheel in rosin anyway and to my great surprise (and relief) it worked like a charm. I could scarcely believe it and wasn't sure if the rosin would last from preset to the actual appearance on stage, especially since my wheel is covered by a cloth beforehand. But it was the only solution I had.

The premiere went brilliantly and my wheel, with the help of the rosin, triumphed over that floor. Admittedly, doing wheel when the wheel and your hands are covered in rosin really isn't very enjoyable. It is, however, a million times more enjoyable than continually falling on your face.

Thank goodness for A. I never in a million years would have thought to use rosin. He totally saved the day.

 Only 58 to go!


* Am I the only one who finds the number of Miss/Mr Switzerlands present really, really funny?