By Beverley Smith
Jan. 4, 2000
The Globe and Mail
“Okay,” said the skater, adorned in green garbage bags, felt cap, and red Naugahyde boot covers scrounged from a storage bin. “Let’s do the schlameezle schmozzle.”
With this suggestion, the secret practice began for Ice Nightmare, a team of grinning male figure skaters who are always on the prowl for new innovative moves that meet one requirement: Make audiences double over in laughter.
The schlameezle schmozzle is “their little way of getting started,” said head coach P.J. Kwong, who cooked up the concept of a comic male precision skating team almost four years ago to add spice to a Toronto fundraising dinner for skaters.
Now the side-splitting team is in such high demand that they get booked to perform a year in advance. They skate at club shows, winter carnivals and arena openings. They’ve performed three times at the Toronto Festival of Lights. They share the job of opening the new Hershey Centre (now the Paramount Fine Foods Centre) in Mississauga, Ont., with such skating luminaries as Brian Orser, Elizabeth Manley, Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler and Josee Chouinard. The Ice Nightmare has hit the big time, almost in spite of themselves.
“They’re absolutely wonderful,” says Barbara Ann Scott, the queen of Canadian figure skating who won a gold medal at the 1948 Olympics.
“Skating needs more of this,” says Kurt Browning, a four-time world champion.
“I never laughed so hard,” says Debbi Wilkes, a CTV commentator who sometimes doubles as an “apprentice coach” for the team.
Ms. Wilkes, an Olympic silver medalist in pairs, sometimes comes to practices. It’s always worth a laugh. She’s helped create some moves, too, like the Sandhu, named after Canada’s mens’ silver medalist. “It’s kind of balletic,” Ms. Kwong explained.
Ms. Wilkes will go down in history as the creator of the Tinkerbelle, a move in which Ice Nightmare skaters get up on their toe picks and turn around in circles.
Ice Nightmare is a lively spoof of a fast-growing segment of figure skating, called precision skating, or most recently synchronized skating. This year, synchronized skaters will compete at their first world championship in Minneapolis. They display wondrous choreography, as teams of 20 to 24 weave fascinating formations, show off exquisite costumes and boast cold, bold team names such as Black Ice, Ice Image, Ice Infinity, Les Pirouettes, Ice Crystals and Ice Expression.
These synchronized skating teams are made up mostly of female skaters, although some European teams have the odd male on the team. Ice Nightmare just has odd men. They claim they are undefeated, but they don’t compete. Still, in the past couple of years, they’ve become perhaps more popular than the real thing.
It’s because Ice Nightmare has fun and that is what is truly unusual about this motely crew. “These guys keep coming back because they love the comraderie,” said practice spectator Grace Elliott, who has judged skating at the national level. “How many times do you see skaters getting together for the sole purpose of having fun? It restores my faith in the sport.”
One of the originals, Greg Augi, said he really wasn’t sure what to think when Ms. Kwong first posed the idea of a male precision team. “But it works,” he said. “Everybody seems to love it.”
Even the tony Toronto Cricket, Skating and Curling Club has adopted the team, giving them ice at times when nobody else would dream of practicing. Try 10 p.m. to midnight on a Saturday night, once a month. Into the Cricket Club they pour, all of them jamming boisterously into a small dressing room as they hunt for garbage bags.
“It’s kind of like dressing a bag of snakes,” Ms. Kwong sighed.
As many as 20 skaters drive in for the practices, some coming from as far away as Kitchener, Ont., braving blizzards. Some of them set up car pools. One team member, C.J. Pugh, Canada’s reigning (and now retired) junior pair champion, is attending university in London, Ont. He doesn’t have as much time as he used to for such things, but he’s happy to have his skates on again for the second time in about six months.
Skating parents have become so attached to the concept that one single mother has been known to drive her son from Sarnia to a Toronto practice, then drive him back home again when it is over. Ms. Kwong says she has seen shy young men come out of their shells and blossom through the experience of being a part of Ice Nightmare.
Together, they go to Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and boo figure-skating jokes. They warm up for their practices by playing broomball. And there is a lone woman, Kate Morgan, daughter of team manager Trish Morgan, who stands in at practices when some of the Ice Nightmare can’t make it. “They treat her like one of their own,” Ms. Kwong says. Ms. Morgan, the team’s first alternate, has actually skated in two shows.
“After we did it the first time, the boys really wanted to do it again,” Ms. Kwong said. She hadn’t really intended to continue the experience, but she began to look into the possibilities. But almost everyone she knew advised her not to repeat it. Ice Nightmare couldn’t possibly be funny a second time, they said.
Ms. Kwong was aware of some resistance in the beginning from bona fide synchronized skaters, worried that Ice Nightmare was making fun of their new sport. But Ms. Kwong said the concept of Ice Nightmare is not malicious. “It’s not bad skating in drag,” she said, speaking of team members who are almost all current or former national-level competitors.
None of the skaters is a slouch. If you get past the laughter, you may see that their footwork sequences are quite difficult. And you’d better skate very fast if you want to keep up with an Ice Nightmare.
“They are very good skaters who are just missing the mark [intentionally] with some of their skating elements,” Ms. Kwong said.
The true worth of Ice Nightmare has gone beyond being a little fun. Ms. Kwong decided that it was important that Ice Nightmare continue. She said that team togetherness has taught them some important life lessons: giving something back to society. Ice Nightmare does that by performing at small-town club carnivals. And they donate all of their fees to breast-cancer research, in honour of one of their former coaches Joan McPhail, a breast-cancer survivor.
Altogether they’ve raised about $5,000 for research and treatment at the Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga, Ont.
Over the years, Ice Nightmare has built up a bountiful repertoire of silly routines. The original was Robin Hood. Ms. Kwong wanted to portray proud but rather stupid men. “They take themselves seriously, but totally miss the mark,” she says.
It’s hard to forget about their first performance. They had no more than four practices before they hit the spotlights. Actually, it didn’t seem to matter. Part of their routine involved a handful of klutzes falling down and spinning out on the ice. One skater wears a football helmet, supposedly for safety.
A unique routine is their Cuban Pete number. The Ice Nightmare trademark is to skate in garbage bags. (The crisper the bag, the more they rustle in the wind.) In Cuban Pete, they wear orange ones, and their attitude is modelled after cartoon character Pepe Le Pew, “a real chick repellent,” Ms. Kwong says.
They also do a Batman routine, using black swim caps that they bartered for a publicity shot for Speedo. (“You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find black bathing caps,” Ms. Kwong said.) They dressed up their caps with Batman stickers from a Zellers’ store.
Olympic champion swimmer Mark Tewksbury showed up at one of their early performances and astonished them at how quickly he could don one of the tight-fitting caps. They had no trouble talking him into proudly posing for a photograph with them.
Their next effort is a country-and-western theme set to Shania Twain’s “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” Ms. Kwong, with the help of other choreographers Susan McGrigor and Aimee McKenzie, is still working on it.
Sometimes, the Ice Nightmares’ moves are not exactly choreographed. Ms. Kwong calls them “death-defying moves.” An original Nightmare, Lawrence Gryniewski, once a senior national-level competitor in ice dancing, slipped, hit the boards at high speed and almost wiped out a line of spectators. In his other life, Gryniewski, a retired skater, is an engineer who builds police robots for bomb disposal. Fortunately for him, there is another team member, Fred Schaefer, who is a trauma nurse and paramedic.
Another time, the entire line decided to spray Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion with ice chips by stopping suddenly in front of her rink-side seat. Mrs. McCallion, however, had escaped earlier and wasn’t sitting there. “They kill themselves laughing when they do stuff like that,” Ms. Kwong said.
Danny Moir, Canada’s reigning novice dance champion (and older brother to future two-time Olympic gold dance medalist Scott Moir), found himself the object of hijinks when he skated with Ice Nightmare at his home club in Ilderton, Ont. Of course, it was his birthday. Just as the team was to exit from the ice, they all jumped on him and pulled off his skates, making him run across the ice in his bare feet. (Mr. Moir doesn’t wear socks when he skates.)
During their first road trip to the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, Ice Nightmare was at it again. Just before they were to perform, they fastened Mr. Augi to a chair with duct tape, then tipped it over in an empty field behind the Scarborough Ice Galaxy Arena.
“Help! Help!” came the cries from the field.
“They let him go barely in time for him to get his Bat cape on,” Ms. Kwong said.
Still, Ms. Kwong said she’s been pleasantly surprised at how well behaved the team of young males has been on road trips. (Their ages range anywhere from 15 to dead, according to a mock press release.) Ms. Kwong admits she was a little worried at first that she would have to patrol the halls of hotels. She never has.
“Some days, they try my patience,” Ms. Kwong said. “They drive us mental with their silliness. Some days, they don’t pay any attention to me.
“But it’s really been a treat for me. It’s been a totally unexpected blessing. I’ve never missed a practice. I’m the only Ice Nightmare who has never missed a practice. And there’s never been one that I’ve regretted going to.”
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