A Boy Can be Anything He Wants! -- Even a Rockette?!?
My son, Mateo, wants to be a Rockette.
He saw them twice last year on television, first performing at the Thanksgiving Day Parade and then in a one-hour special during their annual Christmas Spectacular.
From the minute that line of thirty-six tap-dancing showgirls shuffled onto the TV screen wearing furry red Santa skirts and dazzling smiles, Mateo was transfixed. My normally rambunctious three-year-old boy sat staring at the images as though he’d been hit with a stun-gun.
“Look, there are the girls on a double-decker bus! Sneaking around in Santa’s workshop! And now getting shot by a cannon and falling backward—stiff, like this!—in outfits like wooden soldiers!”
Of course, Mateo is growing up in a household where the word “Rockette” is bandied about regularly in casual conversation. My eighty-year-old mother, Mateo’s grandmother, was a Rockette. (Or I should say is a Rockette, because as anyone with a Rockette in his or her family knows, one never stops being a Rockette, in the same way one never stops being a movie star.)
During mealtime, Mateo gazes at a photo on our kitchen wall of his Grandma Gerry at eighteen, hands on hips as she poses in a sequined leotard on the roof of Thirty Rockefeller Center, home to Radio City Music Hall and the “World’s Greatest Stage.” Not to mention Mateo’s familiarity with the scale model of the Music Hall at my parents’ home in San Diego, the shrine to my mother’s career of framed newspaper clippings, the closets full of top hats and canes. These objects are among Mateo’s cherished playthings.
“Can boys even be Rockettes?” I ask my husband, Tim. I secretly hoped it would be our six-year-old daughter, Olivia, who followed in my mother’s footsteps—that is, I hastily assure Tim, in between Olivia’s training for the Olympics and getting short-listed for the Nobel Prize.
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