When Hell Freezes Over: Should I Bring My Skates?

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Following on his success with Zero Tollerance (1998), the famous skater
now regales us with even more stories of his checkered career. Some of
the earlier exuberance may be missing, or perhaps he just told all the
best stories before, but Cranston still has much to tell us of the
journey of the artist. His self-deprecating humor is still there; he is
generous in discussing performers he admires and ruthless in spearing
those he does not; and he unloads himself of some astonishing
truth-telling where his own actions are concerned.

Most of the book flips around on people and places both past and
present. Cranston talks of famous skaters such as Katarina Witt,
Ekaterina Gordeeva, and Sergei Grinkov, famous others such as Liberace
and Nina Simone, unknowns such as his housekeeper and his friends. He
takes us to Moscow, Berlin, a frozen Ottawa, and of course Mexico, where
he now has a second home. We traipse along with him as he swans around
in wolf furs, continually tackles new projects, and inevitably slides
down the ladder of skating performance while at the same time making his
mark in his second career, which is painting. The photographs scattered
throughout the book are in black and white, while the cover sports two
color photographs of Toller and his collaborator. Given his exhilarating
use of color in his paintings, it would have been a pleasure to have one
reproduced in its full glory.

When he tells us that the icons of figure skating will be remembered on
an emotional level rather than a technical one, we remember the great
contribution Cranston made to the emotional level of the sport. His
skating, as he says, was about “high theatre”; it worked wonderfully
in an arena but did not translate well onto film or television. Hardcore
skating fans will be grateful for the index and will find the author’s
final discussion of the current state of the art trenchant and
thought-provoking. Cranston speaks with a passion; we may not always
agree, but he is always worth hearing.