Datebook: Monday, August 12th ~ 2007

Typically when I return from the Lake Placid Ice Dance competition I need a week to recover. This is hard because non-skating people think I have been on vacation all week. I can’t complain about being tired or stressed-out because they quite frankly wouldn’t understand and might think I was a tad spoiled.

I improvise in the seven days after the event by quietly going for a pedicure and sitting in one of those massage chairs while the technician beats on my legs with the flat of her hand—if I close my eyes I imagine for a brief time that I am at a spa—and by eating and having a specialty drink at Don Pablo’s where for an hour or two I can pretend I am sitting in a cantina in Cabo with the warm ocean breeze rippling my hair.

This year, however, I have “Lake Placid hangover”. I am not recovering all that quickly and the mood of the event keeps hanging over me days after the last zamboni run.

This was a roller coaster event for us. We (please, I feel I was out on the ice too, even if my memory of the event resembles footage seemingly shot by a head cam) skated great, but had some glitches and falls which of course translates to the scores not agreeing that we had a great skate. By Saturday, I wanted to call the medical supply house in Saranac Lake and ask for a portable oxygen tank to be delivered to the rink because there was no way I could continue breathing on my own. And even though we left with two medals, I feel a bit like the members of the debate panel from the classic Adam Sandler movie “Billy Madison” in that I feel “stupider” for having lived it.

For example: I still don’t know what the Original Dance is supposed to be like.

I do know that the costume is seemingly the most important component—although I cannot find too much for it on the scoring sheet-- and nothing—nothing--can be over the top. Most of the teams, if not all, were told to go back and add more to the costume. I wish now we had selected a Carmen Miranda number so my daughter could have worn a four-foot high hat made of fresh fruit and during the footwork sequence they could have juggled bananas and mangos back and forth, finishing with a inside back edge that successfully sliced a ripe melon in half, but I think it is too late to make that change now so we are left to send out for more beading, fire batons, and xylophones.

Some of the message boards have comments that things seemed “off” this year.

And they were.

There were many big changes and omissions.

“Goldberries” restaurant has been replaced by “Charlie’s”, and although a fabulous new establishment it served as a haunting reminder that our top skaters were not there. The real “Charlie” that we associate with Lake Placid and his gorgeous, porcelain-complexioned partner Meryl were not in town. The ever musical and vivacious Kim and her handsome leading man Brent, did not don skates although they teased us all a bit by sitting and watching some of the events. Emily and Evan and Maddie and Keiffer also did not take to the ice which means for many of us we must wait until January to see the mastery of their programs.

For me, without them, it was a bit like when Michelle Kwan didn’t skate in the Olympics or when Wendy’s stopped using the cartoon image of the little red-haired girl. You keep expecting to see them any minute even though you know it isn’t going to happen—no matter how many Frosty’s you buy, the cups are never going to have the little girl in red pig-tails again.

And so, it is just not the same.

We try to improvise and move on, surely like Fisher Price did when they replaced all their Farm and House people with the fatter Weeble-type creatures they now foist off on pre-schoolers.

We want to tell them, as they clutch these new fist sized toy people, “Oh, if only you could seen how they used to be.”

And I guess that must be the remedy for my hangover from Lake Placid.

I have to remember how it used to be.

Mombo