Stuff You Should Know - Rockettes: Still Kicking After All These Years

Episode Date: January 2, 2019

Tune in today to learn all about the legendary NYC Rockettes, who actually got their start in Missouri.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. Happy New Year. You are too tall to be a rockette, aren't you? Just barely. Jerry and I can be rockettes. That's pretty good.

And you can't. No, it's true. Which is a shame because you have the gams. I do, actually. I've got pretty decent legs. You know? At least my calves are all right. What, no thighs?

They're a little tree-trunky for my tastes. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I've got a bit of like a fertility idol thing going on, like up toward the hips and all of that. Yeah. Well, it's because of all those squats. I was not expecting to talk about this.

About your gams? Yeah. Well, I'll talk about my legs all day long. Well, let's hear it. They're shapely. Okay. They're not... I gain all my weight between my waist and my chin.

Uh-huh. I got... I don't... If you looked at my legs and my arms, you'd be like, that guy weighs 160 pounds. That's a layer. And then the rest of me comes along to bust that myth. Step aside. Still have a nice little fanny?

Sure. Yeah. Everybody knows that. Sorry. Listeners in the UK? Oh, yeah. That means something different over there, doesn't it? It does.

It's just so dainty and nice that little five-year-old kids can say fanny in the United States. That's right. It's just the Brits who are sickos. But this isn't about our gams. This is about a dance troupe, a legendary dance troupe. Yeah. About as legendary as a dance troupe can possibly be are the Rockettes. I think so.

I just said that sentence like Yoda. Can you do the voice? No. No? No. Not even going to try. But this totally surprised me digging into the research on this to learn that the legendary Rockettes of New York City and Radio City Musical are not from New York City.

No, they're not. Where are they from, Chuck? Did you know this? I had no idea, no. Yeah. So, shout out to St. Louis. Yeah. They were founded in the 1920s, 1925 to be exact, in St. Louis, Missouri as the Rockettes,

the St. Louis Rockettes, which I think they were trying to be a basketball team, maybe. St. Louis Rockettes? Sure. Yeah. There was a choreographer named Russell Markert, which is, I kept wanting to say market, but that is an R. Yeah. And he founded them, like you said, in 1925, and he was inspired by a British dance troupe

named the Tiller Girls, which was founded in the 1894 by John Tiller. And it was kind of a similar idea. He saw these Tiller Girls, and he was like, I want a high-kicking, glamorous, theatrical dance troupe of my own. Yeah. So, I'm going to rip it off. He did, actually. But John Tiller is widely acknowledged as the creator of what's called Precision Dance,

which is where you have a bunch of dancers who are really highly trained, really athletic, and really precise in their movements that can move in such unison that you take a number of different dancers, and they basically become one thing that can do things that an individual dancer can't do, and that's precision dance technique. And John Tiller literally invented it with, I think, four 10-year-old girls in the 1890s, and he came up with some further refinements to it, like when you put your hand around the waist of the people on either side of you, it kind of lends to the unity of the whole thing, and Russell Markert saw this and was like, this is amazing.

If I can get some American girls with longer legs to kick higher, it'll knock everybody's socks off. That's a quote, by the way. Yeah. And there's something, too, that synchronicity of, for me, for movement and sound that just knocks me out every time. When I go and see a choir, what's like a hundred people singing together. And high kicking.

Or a symphony, just not only the sound, but the movement, when you watch a symphony, that's a big part of it for me. Forget a choral symphony, like I'm on the floor weeping if you take me to a choral symphony. But there's something about that precision of all these people together that's just really, like, I don't know what it is about it. I mean, it's a collective voice or collective movement, but it's that precision that really just gets me every time. For sure.

Well, that's what the Rockettes are known for. Their trade is precision dance. They're as good as it gets with it, although the Taylor Girls are definitely still around. They still have Christmas specials themselves, and they're doing their thing for sure. So it's not just an offhand thing to say the Rockettes are as good as they come in precision dance, because the Taylor Girls would probably say, I would dispute that statement. But they would say it with a British accent. Right.

I dispute that statement. So they were not as tall back then. The original height requirements were between five, two, and five, six and a half. And now they went, we'll take your tallest dancer and make them our shortest dancer, because I guess it's just, I don't know, I'm not sure why they did that. But now it's between five, six and five, 10 and a half, and it is not because they want to exclude people or discriminate against people who are too tall or they feel too short. But it's so they can just all look, it's an optical illusion, so they can all look the

same height, because they take that five foot, 10 and a half inch dancer, although they don't have to be that tall, but they take whoever their tallest dancer is, put her right in the middle and then just stagger it out from there. And in the end, everyone looks, it's weird, everyone looks to be the same height, even though they're not. I don't understand how this works. It's just, I saw it so many different places that I'm convinced that it does work. I just don't get the illusion of it, how it works.

Well, I think over four inches and 36 women, it's just so minute of differences as you scale down that it would take, I guess, an extraordinary human to be like, that woman is an inch and a half taller than the one five people away from her. Right. You know? I got you. Yeah, I guess that's true. So you're just a normal person is what I'm saying.

You should feel good about that. I fall for that optical illusion every time. Yeah, everybody should. So they started with the Missouri Rockets with just 16 women. And like I said, now they have 36 and they debuted in St. Louis, but then went to New York to perform Rain or Shine on Broadway. And that is where a man named S.L. Roxy, that was his nickname, Rothafell, which is an interesting name.

That's where he saw them and said, Hey, I got to get in on this. This is amazing. Yeah. So Russell Make Marker took the idea from John Tiller and Roxy Rothafell said, Hey, I want in on this jam. So I'm going to grab a few of these dancers from St. Louis and bring them over to New York City. And we're going to have them start dancing there.

Okay. And I know just the place for them. There's this new venue that's opening up in 1932 and they're going to call it the Radio City Music Hall and I'm going to make sure that these dancers are able to perform and we're going to call them the Roxyettes. How about that? Huh? Because of his nickname.

Right. And Marker said, That's fine. Just make sure you pay me some money for it. Sure. And he, he did get paid and got paid until 1971. He that's, it's hard to believe, but he worked for the Rockets or with the Rockets from 1932 to, or I guess even previous in St. Louis in 1925, all the way until 1971. Yep.

Really amazing. Yeah. It is pretty amazing. That's a pretty long career. So they, they opened Radio City Music Hall. I think they were part of a 17 group act and that was like such a hot ticket, something like a hundred thousand people wanted in, but it's a 6,200 seat theater, which I think it still remains the nation's largest indoor venue, which is really saying something because

I guess it'd just be like a theatrical venue because obviously The largest indoor venue. Sports venues have it beat by quite a bit, but Oh, theatrical. Okay. I got you. It has to, yeah, it's either movie or theatrical or something, but it's the largest venue of its kind in the United States from what I see.

Yeah. And for many years, they, they, I mean, they had specials every now and then, but it was sort of just a movie theater. Yeah. And here's the thing. You could go see the movies. I think especially it started to take off in the 50s, like before they would have premieres for movies and the Rockettes would like perform at the premiere. And then at some point, I don't know if it was Russell Marker or Roxy Rothfell or somebody

said, well, why, why just do this once? How about every time somebody comes to see a movie at the Radio City Music Hall, we'll have the Rockettes perform before the movie. Can you imagine that? How cool that would be? It would be pretty cool. I mean, like imagine seeing that and then being like, okay, now for the movie. That's just be, it'd be a different experience for sure.

Yeah. But it was rough on the Rockettes because not all the movies were successes. So they would change the Rockettes show for each movie. So if a movie came along and it was just a terrible flop, this whole choreographed routine that they'd learned would be out the door in two days. And now all of a sudden they had to learn a new one quick because there was a new movie coming in to replace that one. Oh, so they did a different routine for each film?

Yes. Interesting. Yeah. And sometimes they would have to learn it in a matter of hours, like around midnight before the next day's performances. I wonder if it was tied to the film? Sometimes I think, but not all the time. I think it was, I think it was in some cases, but I think more than anything, they would

change the routine just because the people coming to see a different film would want to see a different routine. Okay. I got you. That makes sense. Yeah. So in the 1940s, they were one of the first groups to sign up for the United Service Organization and go and perform for the troops.

And in the 1950s is when things really started to kind of take their toll. Like they were performing sometimes up to five times a day. And so they said they built a dormitory there, which, you know, they could live in. I don't think they were required to. But it really was to accommodate the fact that they were working almost around the clock rather because learning these new routines, like you said, and then performing up to five times a day, really grueling stuff. It was basically the prototype for Google, just making it so your employees didn't have

to leave. Oh, interesting. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Just go sleep in your pod. So the Rockets, their fame started to grow pretty quickly. And they made like a few steps, if you'll forgive the pun, along the way that kind of cemented them as much a piece of America as Apple Pie or baseball or moms or what have

you. So the 50s were also big for the Rockets too because they joined the Macy's Thanksgiving they prayed in 1957, I think. Yeah. That was the big, the big move. Yeah. Because they went from just a group that you either had to go to New York or go off to war to sea to, wow, they're in my living room now.

These girls are high kicking on my television and I'm just loving life. All right. So let's take a break. It's a 1950s, good times are ahead and then dark times come in the 70s because it's New York City in the 70s and everything was kind of awful then. So we'll be back right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you

get your podcasts. Okay, hey, before we get started, Chuck, I want to say we put on a pretty good stage show ourselves. We've been known to. And we've got some coming up, you know, plug, plug. Yeah, there's no high kicking involved. There could be if people demanded it, I would be willing to do a little high kicking. Are we talking about some shows?

Yeah, let's do that real quick. All right, so we're going out west for our annual Sojourn in January where we go to Seattle and we go to Portland and then we end up at SF Sketch Fest like we always do in mid-January. Yeah, and I've got a end of the world live show on Friday at Sketch Fest and you have a movie crush on Saturday at Sketch Fest, right? Yeah, I'm doing a matinee show at one o'clock on Saturday, January 19th with Busy Phillips as my guest.

Nice. And my show is Friday the 18th at Cafe du Nord and I am my own guest. Fine solo. And then I have another one in Brooklyn on the 24th at the Bell House too. Oh, I thought you already did that one. No, it got postponed to January 24th. Oh, great. Yes.

So you haven't missed it. There's still time for you to come. Fantastic. So that is our little plug. How about that? Yeah. And of course, our big stuff you should know show is at the Castro on, what is that, Thursday night?

That is Thursday the 17th. Yeah. So come see us at the More in Seattle, Revolution Hall in Portland, at the Castro in San Francisco. We've got our individual little shows, our cute little individual shows. And there's plenty of information on sysklive.com. That's right. So, now it's the 70s, New York is suffering, which is crazy. When you look at pictures of New York City in the 70s and early 80s even, just hard to

believe how bad things were there. Yeah, it was pretty rough. And actually, it's funny, you can thank Rudolph Giuliani for, I guess, cleaning up the town if you want to call it that. Okay. Have you ever heard that? What do you think, Rudolph Giuliani for cleaning up the town? Uh-huh.

Sure. Okay. Good for him. So... I saw him in the park one day. You did? What was he doing? Talking to a duck?

No, he was doing like a photo op, but I had friends in from another country even, I think. And I said, hey guys, that's the mayor of New York over there, and they were like, oh, that's nice. And I went, it's kind of a big deal to just walk around and see the mayor of New York. Did they say, whatever Chuck? I think they're Australian actually. Yeah. Oh, that was my Australian impression.

Oh, that was good then. Yeah. Thank you. That's pretty good. That's a great story, Chuck. Yeah, it's fine. But for them, they didn't understand fully that the mayor of New York City is, it's quite a big deal to see him just out and about in the city.

I have a similar story. I was watching one of the first few seasons of Law and Order on my television one day, and there was the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani. Interesting. But I knew it was a big deal. I got another story. Did you know in the Michael Bay film, Pearl Harbor, that they comped in Bruce Willis' John McClain character from Die Hard in one hospital scene?

How? Just digitally. That's an anachronism. I know. That doesn't make any sense. Do they really do that? Yeah. You can look it up, Pearl Harbor, John McClain, and there's screenshots of John McClain and

his white tank top just briefly for a blip in the background of one of the hospital scenes in Pearl Harbor. It's so weird. So, you know, there's a nude woman in the window of one of the buildings that the rescuers fly by? Oh, really? The Disney movie from the 60s? Yeah.

All these weird movie Easter eggs, just bored editors, I guess. That's exactly what it is, bored juvenile editors. All right. So, it's the 1970s. In New York. None of this has happened yet that we're talking about. The rescuers did. The rescuers did, but there was no Die Hard.

There was no Pearl Harbor movie. Right. Except for Tora Tora Tora, but no bad Pearl Harbor movie. Okay. No Rudy Giuliani. He was alive. Sure. But he was not the mayor of New York City in the 1970s.

Not as far as we know. Who was that? That was Ed Koch. He was the 80s, I think. Oh, was he? Maybe late 70s. All right. We'll get that straightened out.

Okay. But New York City is going down the toilet, including, believe it or not, the great Radio City musical, much like our own legendary Fox Theater in Atlanta, was facing shutdown and demolition, potentially. Yeah. There was a rough transition from some of those old movie palaces after people stopped, well, going to movie palaces and moved out to the suburbs. A lot of those beautiful places were left out in the cold.

And some of them didn't, well, a lot of them didn't make it, but some of them almost didn't make it. There was a lot of people going to the Fox and Radio City, and apparently it was going to be turned into a parking lot. And Belushi himself got onto the news desk at Siren Eye Live and was railing against the demise of Radio City Music Hall. And the Rockettes too had said, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is our home. This is an iconic place.

Let us help go raise awareness and funds to save this place. And they did. They were successful. They won the National Register of Historic Places, and it has a landmark designation, not just the building. There's 1,200 buildings in New York with the landmark designation, but only 110 interiors have the landmark designation, and Radio City Music Hall is one of them, which means that its interior is so amazingly beautiful that it is a protected landmark in the United States.

Yeah. I've never been in there. I haven't either. I've never been to Carnegie Hall, but never Radio City, it's on the list for sure. But it's interesting because they tried to, their whole deal was, is they wanted exclusive movie bookings. Like they were to be the only theater in town that would be showing a particular movie. So that limits their pool immediately, and then they really preferred G-rated movies.

They had really strict screening criteria. So that just, it narrowed down their movie pool so small that they would go weeks and weeks at a time where nothing happened there. Yeah. So they would just shut down. Because again, remember, like the Rockettes are a dance troupe that you would see before you saw a movie. So if they're not showing movies, they're not showing the Rockettes.

And at this time in the 70s, the Rockettes said, okay, we're, our talent is being wasted here. At least let us go take the show on the road while you guys are sitting around waiting for another movie to come along. And they actually, they gained that right because they're union dancers, we should say, we'll get into that a little more later. But they managed to get the right to take the show on the road. And they really started to make a name for themselves in the 70s in places like Tahoe

and Vegas. Sure. Apparently made a huge fan out of Sammy Davis, Jr. who would come see the same show like night after night when they, when they play in Vegas or Tahoe or whatever. He was just fascinated by the Rockettes. Love that. For sure. Sammy.

What a great guy. We should do a show on him. Apparently he also, oh yeah, I'm down with that. He also surprised them on stage once by joining them on stage for a dance number, which apparently he knew because he'd seen the show so many times. Wow. Which that's a pretty Sammy thing to do in Las Vegas. Hi, Kicken.

Well, his, his kicks weren't so high. Run out on stage, unbidden, uninvited. He's a little guy. He was. He was the littlest Rockette I imagine. Wow, but he was too. So they're doing their show on the road here and there. They're making ends meet.

Radio City is struggling, even though it was designated as a landmark, the 80s were not super kind to Radio City either. They very famously appeared at the halftime show of the Super Bowl in 88. They're trying to change with the times. They're dancing it in the 90s at different places and they're always doing their Christmas deal throughout all this after, you know, they started doing that, and what was that, 57? 32. Oh, they did the Macy's Parade in 32?

Oh, no, I'm sorry. I thought you meant the Christmas Spectacular. Yeah, the Macy's Parade was, the Thanksgiving Parade was 57. Yeah. So they've got their holiday stuff, their Easter specials, their Christmas specials. They're dancing it inaugurations for George W. Bush. In fact, they came under, under fire for dancing at Trump's inauguration. Well, the dance troupe almost was split asunder over whether they wanted to do that or not.

Yeah, it was a big deal. It was a huge deal, actually, and they had revived the Easter extravaganza. They renamed it the New York Spring Spectacular the year before, and they said they took a year off and I don't think they ever went back to it because of all the controversy over 2016 and the inauguration. It was just such an unusual experience for the Rockettes. They're just like America personified and for there to be a huge national conversation about them performing at an inauguration.

It was a big deal for the organization for sure, especially for the dancers who are career Rockettes. Yeah, exactly. Should we talk a little bit about just being a Rockette? I think we should, man, because we've done it. We have. There was a brief time, although we've basically entered Dinah Lohan territory now. Who's that?

Lindsay Lohan's mom. She very famously lied about being a Rockette. Oh, really? Yeah, she said that she has a background in show business. She was a Rockette for a while and some journalists went and dug around and they found out that she was definitely, they had no record whatsoever of her under any name, maiden or married, ever being a Rockette. It's always amazing to me when very provable or disprovable public lies are told by people

like that or politicians who say that they fought in a war when they didn't, like that's happened. Yeah. It's just, I don't know why people say things like that. It's like, no, we can go check that really easily. Yeah, but even without the checkability of it to just lie in an interview or to puff yourself up, I guess, it's just like, I don't understand the psychology of it. Is it just because you don't feel like you're given the interviewer enough of what they

need or did they lay some sort of trick that led you into it or I don't understand it either. Yeah, I wonder if people start to believe these lies. Like if you make up a story about yourself and you just stick with it for so long, it's weird psychology. Yes, human psychology is indeed quite weird. Didn't you have a web show called psychology is weird? Nuts. Psychology is nuts.

Right. A little short live video thing. Yeah, go check that out everyone. We'll take a break. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb and if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I am. We're back. Yes.

So we were going to tell everyone about our experiences as Rockettes, because we're Dinah Lohan. So here's the thing. If you're a Rockette and you've been doing this for 10 years, you're a pretty long-lived Rockette, although I think I saw one woman who is a Rockette and if I'm talking weird all of a sudden, it's because I am stalling everybody, looking for her name and I'm not finding it. But I think it's Lindsay Howe.

I'm almost positive her name's Lindsay Howe. I believe she has been a Rockette for 14 years. That's a long time. That's a very long time to be a Rockette because as you will soon learn, being a Rockette is extremely difficult and very demanding and inside of show business and out, they're widely seen as probably some of the best professional dancers in the business and certainly some of the most disciplined professional dancers in the business as well. But it's really hard to do for a really long time and one of the main reasons why is because

their work schedule is extremely grueling. But with Lindsay Howe, she would make the same amount of money that a first-year Rockette would make. Because they're all paid the same, they work the same hours, they do the same work. Some of them are kind of promoted as like the faces of the Rockettes, the company, I think Madison Square Garden Company that owns Radio City Music Hall and the Rockettes are really protective of their image and they aren't free to just kind of talk to the media or whatever.

There's some that are kind of like, you and you and you, you're the Rockettes, you're the face of the Rockettes. But other than that, everyone does the same amount of work, same amount of hours, same amount of pay. And one of the reasons they do that is because the point of the Rockettes is not to have standouts. There's no other dance troops or other Broadway troops or anything like that. There's not meant to be stars.

The Rockettes are the star and they're meant to be one single unit that moves and works and lives together. Yeah, and they're unionized. So they make most of their money over the holiday season. So they walk out after a couple of months with about 40 grand in their pocket, which isn't bad for a couple of months' work. But it is, like you said, super grueling. If you want to become a Rockette, you're not required to, but there is something called

the Rockettes Summer Intensive Dance Program where you can go, you can enroll, you can spend six hours a day learning everything over the course of about a week. All the choreography, how to get in that shape, stay in that shape, how to prevent injuries and sort of the business of it all. And like I said, you don't have to do that, but they do place a lot of Rockettes if you attend that intensive dance program. Well, some, I saw out of a thousand that have taken it, 60 have gone on to actually become Rockettes.

Yeah. Because it's very tough to become a Rockette too. Yeah. I mean, I get the feeling that has less to do with the program than just how hard it is to make that cut. Right. Right, exactly. So, not only do you have to be fit enough to kick those famous kicks up to 1200 times

a day through all these shows, but there's one, there's one clothing change. You got to do all these costume changes, but there's one in particular in between the parade of the wooden soldiers in New York at Christmas that you have to be completely changed out in 78 seconds. And these costumes are not like super easy to take off. The wooden soldier ones in particular are pretty complex. So, 78 seconds probably goes by extremely fast. Yeah.

And there's 36 Rockettes total performing on stage, but there are 80 certified Rockettes total overall. You have a morning cast and afternoon cast, and then you have, for each of those shows, you have four swings or extras per. So like if someone's like, I just twisted my ankle, I can't do this. They have four women waiting in the wings for each of those morning and afternoon shows. Yeah. So, the thing is though, is they're working six days a week, or the Rockettes are performing

six days a week. If you have two casts, rather than work both casts six days a week, they'll alternate to give one another a day off. And they'll do that on days sometimes where there's four performances in a day, which means that if you are a Rockette, there are days, and I've seen also sometimes they're back-to-back days, where you're doing four performances in a single day, four 90-minute performances. And that's when those 1,200 kicks that you mentioned comes in, because some of those shows have 300 high kicks, and we're talking eye-level kicks.

And if you do four of them in a day, you've just kicked eye-level 1,200 times in a day. And from some of the articles I've read, that is about as much as your body can possibly take. Yeah. I mean, they all, in the interviews I saw, there was that Great New York Times article where they really sort of dive into a day in the life of a Rockette during the holiday season. And they all kind of are like, there's no way to prepare your body for this.

Like we are in the best shape that a dancer can be in, and it just destroys us to the point where one of them said that just taking their stockings off at the end of the night is laborious. And with their commute, depending on where they come from, some of them are awake and either commuting or rehearsing or performing 20 hours in a day, just grueling, grueling stuff. Across the board, they also all say that it's the only job that they want. It is a great sorority and sisterhood and an honor to be one of these over the years

3,000 women who have made that cut. Right. You know, never were like, well, it's really not worth it in the end. Yeah. No, the, I mean, at least the ones who are allowed to speak to the media certainly have a lot of positive things to say about being a Rockette and like how familial it is and how you're just hanging out with your best friends. And it is a great gig for a dancer, especially as one of these articles pointed out, if you're

a dancer who doesn't sing. Yeah. That's a rare thing to get that kind of a gig. I think it's one of the few for jazz and tap dancers where singing's not involved. But also not just like a good gig, a good paying gig too, like 40 grand for a couple of months of performances. A lot of the Rockettes, they don't live in New York. They'll come live in New York during the season when they need to rehearse and then do the

Christmas spectacular and then they go home. So they might live in New York from September to the end of December and then they go back home and wherever home is, 40 grand probably goes a lot further than it does in New York unless they live in San Francisco, in which case it's probably, it goes even faster. But it's a really good paying gig. They also have benefits because their union and their contract workers, they have year round benefits and 40 grand. So they can go work as Pilates instructors, as nutritionists, as all the other stuff that

they do during the year normally, and then they come back and they're a Rockette. But something I thought was pretty cool was even if you're, say, a 10th year Rockette, you get invited back, like once you're a Rockette, you're in as a Rockette, but you still have to audition in April, like everybody else. So you audition in April and if you make the cut, you start to go get in shape and then rehearsals I think start in September and rehearsals are six hours, six days a week for basically the six weeks leading up to the performances, which run from mid-November till, I saw December 31st, I also saw tickets available for a January 1st show, so I don't know if they extended

it or not. Yeah, and it's funny, like 40 grand sounds like a lot of money over a couple of months and it is, but when you break it down per show, it breaks down to about 135 bucks a show, which all of a sudden it doesn't seem like great money. No, but that's what you make as a standard cast member for a Broadway union dancer or actor or variety performer, I think is the, they're part of. So no, it doesn't seem like much, but that's another reason why the Rockette gig is so good. You get overtime on those days when you do a third and a fourth show, you're getting

overtime pay and there's multiple shows in on multiple days. So you can, I mean, another actor at a different gig working the same days over the same period would not make that amount of money, that 40 grand because they wouldn't have any overtime, they wouldn't have that many shows. Yeah. And I don't think anyone like dreams of going to Broadway to become rich and wealthy, like part of the allure Broadway is you're with the best of the best and you can say, I danced or I sang or I acted on Broadway.

With Brian Cranston. I saw him on Broadway. Yeah. I saw Michael McKeehan on Broadway. Oh yeah? In accomplice. The audience was the accomplice. That was the big twist.

Oh, well, you just ruined that one. Was it good? It was great. It was one of the greatest stage performances I've ever seen. I saw Lenny live on stage. Derek St. Hubbins. Yeah. This is before I knew him as anything but Lenny.

I was like eight. Oh, so this was a while ago. Cranston is in something new on Broadway now, I think too. It's a network. Right. Oh man, I want to see that. Sure. I bet that's good.

I saw that it was described as, get this Chuck, get ready for this. Oh boy. Electrifying. Really? A Broadway show described as electrifying? His performance was electrifying. I don't think I've ever heard that word used for the theater. So another thing though about the Rockettes, even though they do make most of their money

over those couple of months and then they have the rest of the year too, and in a lot of cases be like a dance instructor or something like that or a fitness instructor, they increasingly are working more and more months out of the year, whether it's as ambassadors for the Rockettes or doing like video things for YouTube, they are increasingly called on to do other things. So what is the woman who came along as the lead choreographer and director and really kind of punched it up even further? Her name is Linda Haberman and she took over, I think in like the mid-2000s, maybe 2008,

and she kind of brought like this whole new, not new, it's not a whole new thing. She made it a little more pro-feminist, a little more like you go girl kind of vibe to the Rockettes than they had before. They were seeing, you know, rehearsing in the rehearsal gear rather than like full costume. And it was just kind of like the intent I get was to make them more. People? Yes, yes, because one of the great criticisms of the Rockettes is that there are nothing but like teeth and legs, just a bunch of women out there kicking, like forming one large

Uber woman who can kick her legs amazingly high and has like the widest gleaming-est teeth ever you've ever seen. And that it was really kind of just objectification of women, like by definition. And Linda Haberman like really kind of took that and tried to unravel it quite a bit. And she also took the show, so we should talk a little bit about the show, it's a, depending on who you are, it's either like just beloved traditional Americana, kitschy, offensively sexist, who knows. But I think the first two are kind of the predominant views of it.

It's kitschy and sweet, or it's, you know, endearing Americana. And Linda Haberman kind of took that and tried to punch it up into the 21st century a little more. And there's like way more visual effects than there were before. It's like a 3D component, I think, to this year's show or recent year's shows. Like the whole theme is like a girl wants a video game and her mom is kind of showing her, you know, why that's not so great, because it's a violent video game. There's a lot of kind of updating that's, that the rockets have undergone in the last

few years. And that was largely from what I understand Linda Haberman's doing. I think she was the one that digitally inserted John McLean from Die Hard. She was. He swoops in in the New York Follies section. No, I'm glad they updated things, because this was a prime case of like a beloved American tradition that could use some refreshing. And you can't highlight them as humans and individuals and still, you can have both,

you know, and you can still have that desired effect of uniformity and precision that they're known for, you know. Right, exactly. But they don't have to be just like faceless and nameless, you know. And I read a few like feminist critiques of the rockets and they seem to have been kind of outdated. Like I really feel like Linda Haberman did a good job at like, yeah, she kind of took those critiques and changed them in a lot of ways.

That's great. One of the other criticisms is that it wasn't until 1985 that the rockets had their first woman of color as a member of their cast or their troop. Oh yeah. And the first woman of color was a Japanese woman named Setsuko Marahashi. And in 1985, she joined. In 1988, the first African-American woman joined. Her name was Jennifer Jones.

And the reasoning, apparently it was Mark, Markert, who was like, no, from all I saw it had nothing to do with racism. It was the idea that it was going to disrupt the visual unity of the dance line. If there were, you know, differing skin colors in the dance line. And apparently he was so not so about it. Like you would get in trouble if you had a suntan. Like that's how he wanted everything to be homogenous and unison. Well, regardless in the 21st century, in the late 20th century, that sentiment didn't

hold up. And I guess shortly after he died is when they started adding women of color more to the rockets troop. Yeah. They were all people of color in that same dance line. And they went, oh, it's still awesome and synchronized and looks great. Right. Exactly.

And from his grave, he went, no. He started rolling around in it. Oh, goodness. So you haven't seen a rocket's Christmas spectacular, huh? You mean live in person? Yeah. I have not. I have not either.

Are we going to go now? I think we should. I want to know if any rockets listen to this show. Yeah. That would make me super, super happy. It would for me as well. And the only other small tidbit I have is they have microphones in their heels of their shoes.

I saw that too. They used to play recordings of their tapping, right? Oh, I don't know. That does not surprise me. Yeah. And then they figured out how to do the actual, like broadcast the actual tapping. So we're going to go one day, Chuck, we're going to go see the Christmas spectacular. We're going to go see the live nativity with the real camel and donkeys and the wooden

toy soldier march where they fall down like a domino in slow motion. It's pretty amazing stuff. And if you want to know more about the rockets, then go to Radio City Music Hall and find them there. How about that? That sounds great. Well, since I said that, then it's time for a listener mail. I'm calling this.

This was a search and rescue victim volunteer. So this guy, his dad, I'm going to summarize the beginning of it because it's kind of long, but his dad lives in the upper peninsula of Michigan and is a member of the local S.A.R. team. And so they were like, we need someone to play the victim here. And he was like, I'll do it. This guy's son. So here's what happened.

He set off into the heavily wooded area and did, he said, I did everything I could to think of to try and fool the dog in the handler. I ran in circles, went back over my own trail, I threw off my hat, I even found some garbage and rolled around in it to ask my scent. Once I had done everything I could think of to try and fool the dog and handler that would be tracking me. I found a nice comfy spot up in a bush on a hill where I could just watch the dog and the handler try and track me.

I thought I'd done a pretty good job, but once I called the handler and let him know I was in position, it was all over very quickly. I sat back and everyone was shocked to watch the dog basically retrace my trail step by step, every move I made, all those circles, finding my hat even that I'd thrown off, even getting into that pile of garbage that I'd rolled around in. I love that this dog is just basically making a fool of poor Ryan up there in the mountains. So he said needless to say the dog found me in short order, gave him lots of praise for the great job he had done.

Thankfully I was never in any real danger, so my experience was a lot more enjoyable obviously than when people are in a real need of a search and rescue dog. Thanks for the great episodes guys, keep me company on overnight shifts and make it all go by quicker. So if you read this on the show, can I get a shout out to my girlfriend, Taryn. She would be thrilled to hear her name get called out on the show. I think that just happened. Yep, so that is from Ryan.

I like the gusto that Ryan put into trying to fool this dog. Rolling in garbage. And I equally love that this dog was like, whatever. So thank you Ryan, thank you Taryn for listening. And thank you to the SAR dog. Sure, it's gruffy. If you want to get in touch with us you can go to our website stuffyoushouldknow.com, you can find all of our social links there.

I have a website called thejoshclarkeway.com and you can send an email to chuckjerryme at stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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