Naturally, my father, a deeply private yet even-natured man, never discusses Guido’s sad fate. On the surface at least, he is repressed and not in the least bit comfortable with emotions, and will never delve into them—his own, or anyone else’s. However, as time goes by, he will relax more, and much to my surprise we will become good friends.
For as far back as I can remember, my father’s greatest passion has been wine making. In this, he is following in the footsteps of his own father, who used to grow grapes and make wine in Pennsylvania. He spends much of his free time making wine in the basement. As a result, the house always smells of wine and of vinegar. My father is proud of his wine. Years after I become an adult and leave home, I come back for a family gathering and crack an awful joke, comparing the taste of his latest vintage to salad dressing. He says nothing, but his hurt is palpable, and I feel dreadful and realize how dear his wine making is to him.
Every few weeks, our father tells us to go down to the laundry room in the basement, where he cuts our hair with barber’s clippers, which I hate because all my brothers and I have the identical haircut.
On one memorable occasion, he sits me down and says, “Christopher, you need to learn about sex, about relationships between men and women.”
I flush scarlet, sink into my chair, and say, “Dad, please, let’s cut my hair so I can get out of here. I know how babies are made.”
Although my own sexual nature is still a mystery to me, Madonna’s precocious sense of her sexuality, as well as her star quality, came to the fore during her first talent show. Her biographers all claim that the talent show took place when she was at St. Andrew’s, but I remember it as being at West Junior High School.
I am twelve, and Madonna is fourteen. The whole family goes along to see her perform in the nondescript school auditorium. None of us have any idea what Madonna’s act is going to be, but we are excited and want to support her.
We sit in the second row fidgeting as we watch all the other kids’ usual run-of-the-mill talent-show turns—one tap dances, another plays the harmonica, another recites a poem—and wait for Madonna to come on.
Then, in a scene straight out of the movie Little Miss Sunshine, Madonna suddenly twirls onstage, covered from head to foot in green and fluorescent pink paint, which creates the illusion that she is stark naked. She’s wearing shorts and a top that are also covered in paint, but as far as my father is concerned, she might as well be naked. According to his strict moral code, her appearance is utterly X-rated, and he puts down his camera in horror.
Madonna starts dancing—or perhaps writhing is a better word. Although Carol Belanger, my sister’s school friend, is also onstage dressed exactly the same way, and writhing about just as much, next to Madonna, she fades into the scenery. None can take their eyes off Madonna. Moreover, her performance is the most scandalous one that anyone has ever seen in that conservative community.
Madonna and Carol’s act takes about three minutes. When the lights go up, there is little applause. Everyone in the audience is dumbstruck. People exit with a great deal of barely suppressed muttering.
Afterward in the car going home, none of us say a word, and my father keeps his eyes resolutely on the road. We all know that Madonna is in deep trouble. When we arrive home, he calls her into “the Formal” and shuts the door behind them. When she finally emerges, her face is tearstained. Her performance is never again mentioned.
For the next month, her teenage talent-show performance becomes the talk of Rochester. At school, kids sidle up to me and whisper, “Your sister Madonna is a slut.” I have already been bullied and called a fag—a word I don’t understand—that my sister’s being called a slut doesn’t bother me at all. But I can imagine that my father is utterly mortified in front of his friends and at work. Little does he know that this is only the beginning…
As for me, the night of the talent show marks the birth of my fascination with my sister Madonna. For on that night, I understand she isn’t like everyone else; she is profoundly different. It isn’t until later that I discover so am I.
TWO
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
W. B. Yeats
IN JUNIOR HIGH school, I am as much of a loner as I am at home, and the fag-calling gets worse when, at thirteen, I take up the violin. Luckily for me, after one of the bigger guys at school, Jay Hill—for reasons I never quite manage to fathom—comes to my rescue, the other kids stop bullying me.
Into high school, I decide that my best bet is to ignore the bullies and let them fear me instead. So I grow my hair long, buy a dark green army coat that goes down to my knees, grow a mustache, and lurk around the school silent, brooding, and impassive. After a while, even my teachers grow afraid of me, primarily because in class, my violin case always in hand, I wordlessly stare at them. I have no real friends, but plenty of curious onlookers.
Away from school, I discover science fiction, and in particular Frank Herbert’s Dune, which evokes the possibility of worlds other than the one in which I live, makes a great impression on me, and becomes my only escape from everyday reality.
Practically daily, I stand on the sidewalk outside my parents’ house, smoking a cigarette and watching a plane high above me, and think, I wish I were on that plane. I’ve got to get out of here. Trouble is, I haven’t the remotest idea when or how.
During my sophomore year of high school, Madonna starts going out every Thursday night and coming home looking tired but happy. We aren’t close enough for me to ask why, but I know something has changed for her. Soon after, she gives up cheerleading, loses weight, and starts wearing black sweats instead of her usual brown-and-gold-plaid skirts and sweaters. I observe the change in her, intrigued.
One rare evening when Madonna and I are at home alone, she finds me reading in my bedroom and tells me that every Thursday night she has been attending Christopher Flynn’s Christopher’s Ballet School in Rochester. I am taking art classes and violin lessons, so the idea of ballet classes doesn’t seem so foreign to me. Consequently, when Madonna asks if I’d like to come and watch one of her ballet classes, I jump at the opportunity. I suppose I am flattered. My big sister has noticed me at last. And I am curious if not a little wary, because I instinctively know that my father won’t like my becoming involved in such a female pursuit. But Madonna wants me to come with her, and that is enough for me.
ON A COOL Thursday evening in the fall, Madonna and I stealthily slip out of the house together. I am wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt, Madonna is in pink-and-black sweats, and she drives us into downtown Rochester.
In the car, I clam up because I am so apprehensive. Madonna doesn’t talk either. I feel as if we are embarking on a great but dangerous adventure together. Then we arrive at a stone building on the corner of East Fourth and Main, just across from Mitzelfield’s department store, where Joan would sometimes buy us clothes, if we were lucky and she didn’t feel like making them.
Before we walk into the building, Madonna says, “Christopher Flynn is a great guy,” so before I meet him, I already know he must be.
We go upstairs to the second-floor studio, and she introduces me to Christopher. I’ve never met anyone like him in my life. He is around five foot eight, a lean man with dark brown hair, and dressed in gray jazz pants and a tight leotard with a shirt over it. His voice is high and haughty, and I think he sounds like a girl.
I follow him and Madonna into the dance studio and find a group of fifteen girls, ages twelve and up, all in pink tutus and tights, but no guys. I stick out like a sore thumb, but I’m used to that, so when Christopher tells me to sit on the floor and watch, I do.
I can’t believe that Madonna is so meekly taking her place among fifteen other girls, all standing at the barre, and—like them—obeying Christopher’s every order without question. When he pokes her with a stick because her plié isn’t low enough or her turnout isn’t correct, she unflinchingly complies. She has never shown ou
r father so much obedience. I develop instant respect for Christopher.
Moreover, the music is beautiful and the dancers are graceful. I think to myself that ballet is pretty cool, but wonder how I fit in.
Class finishes, and everyone leaves but Madonna, Christopher, and me. He asks me if I want to take a class with him. Before I can answer, Madonna chips in, “I think you should, Chris, I think you’d like it.”
I don’t know whether I can dance, nor do they. I tell them that I don’t think my father will appreciate my taking ballet classes. “I don’t think he’d be happy at all,” I say, looking at Madonna for affirmation.
“Just don’t tell him,” she says. “We can figure it out.”
We. Suddenly, my sister and I are we. A novel experience. And I like it. I also like the idea of studying ballet with her, of having something in common with her other than just our crazy family.
But I still have one reservation: “It’s all girls.”
“So?” says Madonna, bridling.
Christopher diverts me from any potential conflict with my sister by chatting to me about ballet, what it represents to him, how he’d danced with the Joffrey Ballet in New York.
I am intrigued and think, Maybe I really can do this.
In the end, Christopher talks me into joining the class, primarily by challenging me.
“It isn’t going to be easy,” he says, “I’m not going to babysit you.”
A challenge. A new world. Maybe even a way out of Michigan.
I say I’ll think about it, and Madonna and I leave.
The moment we get into the car, she immediately says, “So what do you think? How do you feel? Are you going to do it?”
I tell her I’m afraid of our father’s reaction.
She says, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
My sister is going to take care of something for me. The emotional impact on me is incalculable. The following Thursday, I attend my first ballet lesson with Christopher Flynn.
UNTIL I JOIN Christopher’s Ballet, Madonna and I haven’t been friends and haven’t socialized together. Now, though, every Thursday, we go to Christopher’s together. And no one in our family knows. Not even Paula, to whom Madonna is, at this point, really close. Sometimes I wonder why Madonna invited me, not Paula, to come to class with her, but I was playing the violin, and folk dancing, while Paula wasn’t into any of that.
So I go to Christopher’s, and my life changes. Not dramatically, but subtly. I discover that Christopher is my sister’s mentor, that they are close, and that she is even a little in love with him.
As my self-appointed Pygmalion, Madonna often comes to watch me, although she is in a different class, and is complimentary about my progress. Once, the two of us see a TV program about Fonteyn and Nureyev. I fantasize that maybe one day that could be Madonna and me, dancing together, just like Nureyev and Fonteyn. But that’s a long way away and I know it. We aren’t even buddies yet—more Pied Piper and follower—but I feel that my sister is starting to care about me, and I like the feeling.
Meeting Christopher Flynn and discovering ballet has introduced Madonna to a new world and opened up a possible escape route from Michigan. I think she looked back at the home and family she was so anxious to leave, sensed that I might be like-minded, recognized something within me, and decided to nurture it.
In retrospect, if my sister hadn’t reached back and brought me into her world, I might never have escaped Michigan, and my life would have been different. Taking me with her to Christopher’s Ballet School was the greatest gift Madonna has ever given me. A once-in-a-lifetime gift.
But…
As I grow older and wiser, I learn that Madonna always has her eye on the main chance. No matter how potent the spell she casts over me, no matter how generous the gifts—there is always a sting in the tail, always a but…
In the midst of her almost maternal altruism toward me, she has her own agenda for prompting me to join her at Christopher Flynn’s; he doesn’t have any male dancers in his class, and he needs one. The romantic in me would like to have it otherwise, but the truth is that Madonna’s motives, as always, for whisking me out of Oklahoma Avenue and into her brave and wondrous new world are not unmixed. She adores and venerates Christopher, considers him her father, her mentor, her lover. He needs a male dancer for his class, so Madonna produces me. Yet no matter what her motives, and the bitterness that will one day arise between us, I will always be in her debt.
Madonna leaves home in the fall of 1977 and goes to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to study modern dance. Now that she is out of the house, Paula gets a room by herself at last. But although I am wrapped up in high school, I still miss going to class with Madonna and feel a little lost without her.
I’m a senior in high school, but at least I’ve got my own car at last, a used green Dodge Dart. I haven’t seen much of my sister since she left home, but I’ve thought of her often. She’s the first of us Ciccone kids to go to college, which I think is really cool. I am curious about her life there and eager to find out all about it and am delighted when she invites me and my parents to see her perform in her first ballet at the University of Michigan.
So here I am. Seventeen years old. Long seventies hair styled into an Afro. Fu Manchu mustache. Black Sears pants, brown polyester Sears shirt with big sleeves and a three-button cuff—a present from Joan—and brown Sears platform shoes with a blue-and-red stripe on the toe. Driving myself from Rochester to Ann Arbor, I have no intimation that, thanks to Madonna, over the next six hours my destiny—both sexual and professional—will become set in stone.
AT THE CAMPUS theater, the Power Center for the Performing Arts, I meet up as arranged with my father and Joan. During the show—“Hat Rack,” an experimental ballet—I sit with them. They look utterly bemused by what they see onstage; Madonna is wearing a black bra and shorts, and two male dancers are wearing black shorts. Together, they all roll around the stage. Odd angular movements, not at all the ballet I had studied with Christopher Flynn.
I also find the dancing a trifle bizarre, but I still can’t take my eyes off the stage, off Madonna. I can’t stop thinking that this is the kind of dance I’d like to do. I’ve never seen movements like this: leaps, turns, bare skin, dancing in bare feet. I am overcome with the feeling that I could do this, I could be a modern dancer. I decide right then to follow in Madonna’s footsteps, give up ballet, and study modern dance at college instead. Of course, I don’t say a word to Joan and my father about my new resolution. I’m still in a trance, high on my brilliant prospective career.
We all go backstage to congratulate Madonna. She is all flushed and happy, giddy, excited, and glad that her first college show has gone so well. Joan and my father tell her she was great. Joan asks the questions I secretly wanted to ask: What did the ballet really mean? What was the plot? What was your character?
For once, Madonna is polite to Joan and makes a valiant stab at answering.
Then she asks me what I think.
“Interesting, strange,” I say thoughtfully.
She asks me if I want to hang out with her later.
Thrilled, not just because she is my sister, but because she is a dancer, living an enviable lifestyle, I say yes, yes, I do.
She changes into leggings, boots, a coat and hat. I tell my parents I’ll drive myself home later.
We eat a quick dinner at a restaurant on the corner of Huron and South First Street, the Oyster Bar and Spaghetti Machine.
During dinner, I ask her questions about “Hat Rack.” She tries her best to help me make some sense of it.
Then she asks me if I want to go to the club downstairs with her. I’m a seventeen-year-old high school kid from a hick Michigan town. I’ve never been to a club before. Entranced, I say that I do. And then I follow my sister into yet another new world.
A door stands with a sign saying THE RUBAIYAT in Arabic cursive. Standing in front of it, a sumo-sized man grunts, “Three dollar.
No holler.”
Madonna pays for both of us.
Inside it’s dark, but I can make out an exposed cable-covered brick wall and red banquettes arranged along the walls. In the middle is a wooden dance floor, lit by strobes and Christmas lights. An arched wooden latticework and a large silver disco ball hang from the ceiling. Years later, Madonna will make her entrance from a similar silver disco ball in her Confessions Tour. Even at this early stage in her life, no experience, no visual image, is wasted on her.
“Stayin’ Alive” pounds through the club.
And then it hits me. The whole place is filled with guys. Guys dancing close, guys dancing apart, guys dancing together.
I nearly freak out.
I turn to Madonna and, honest to God, ask, “But why aren’t there any girls here?”
Madonna looks at me, incredulous. “Well, Christopher,” she says in an unusually patient voice, “this is a gay bar. You know, for men.”
All of a sudden, a wave of relief sweeps over me. I don’t know what, I don’t understand why. I just know that everything is as it should be.
The DJ spins “Boogie Nights.” Madonna grabs my hand and pulls me onto the dance floor. But I am far too busy avoiding the eyes of the men around me to really enjoy dancing with Madonna. I just look down and struggle not to examine either the men or my emotions.
I realize that this isn’t Madonna’s first time at the club. Later, she tells me that Christopher Flynn first took her there and that they go often.
I don’t want the night to end, but when the club closes, I offer to drive her to her dorm.
Once in the car, Madonna asks, “So, Christopher, what did you think?”
I gaze out the car window and hum a few bars of “Stayin’ Alive.”
Life with My Sister Madonna Page 5