LIFESTYLE Not quite as in your dreams
THERE AREN’T ANY, LIKE, GIGOLOS FOR HIRE AT THE SODA STAND Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our own
It’s never like in dreams. I don’t make an entrance on one white-booted leg, the other extended, executing a cute loop. I seldom get to a rink and so first skate round the lumpy outer edge a few times, where I can grab the railing when needs be.
At the Northgate ice rink going around the edge doesn’t mean there’ll be an available handrail because bands of tweens and teens are hauling themselves along, hand over hand, by the rail. Many are screaming above the music-announcements din.
I have to skate around them and that’s good. I’m sort of limp-skating anyway. The right boot is hard on my littler toes. The boots are merrily Mickey Mouse blue with a domed, rigidly round front. They don’t lace up. They just clamp on, toes or not.
When Heather and I arrived, two things assailed us: the welcome coolness and a wall of sound.
What I like are the endearing skating penguins for hire from the cream soda stand, which kids hold by the ears and follow around. I wish they had polar bears for grown-ups.
On an outdoor rink in Toronto there were only a few slippery poles to hold onto, so I was forced to get skating legs faster. Someone found me faltering out on the ice and swept me along in a dance, our arms crossed, like in the movies, with a bit of backwards skating too.
I was so excited and rushed over to my waiting friends afterwards, only to find they’d been facing the other way, taking photos of each other.
Perhaps, instead of a polar bear from the cream soda stand, I could get a gigolo.
Limp-skating more proficiently, I avoid the centre because some teens are playing lie-down-andcause-an-accident, to the shock of skaters who find they suddenly have to leap over prone bodies, to the adoring mirth of girlfriends.
Suddenly everyone exits the rink because the ice smoothing machine is about to be brought in. I’m happy to see it shaves off the outer lumps.
Then it careens around balletically to music. As the driver swoops past, he leans out and finger-flicks fans beyond the rails. He cuts a cool figure of eight and flashes heroically down the centre.
I’m desperate to release my right toes and scrabble at the clamps. A guy with a breaking voice advises: “You have to, like, push them, like, in.”
Northgate Ice Rink, Entrance 6, Northumberland Avenue, North Riding.