An Endeavor on Thin Ice Ends With a Photo Finish

My child bride has the hots for another man.

You know the type: half French, half Italian, a hip little Romeo about half my age with enough Euro-charm to turn an average guy like me into some dweeby L.A. loser, a stoop-shouldered Quasimodo.

This guy’s a skater. But it seems I’m the one who keeps slipping up.

Let me explain. My girlfriend (OK, OK, so she’s not really my child bride. I just like the subversive, Jerry Lee Lewis sound of the phrase) is a young professional, a steely-eyed accountant with a firm grip on reality.

Except for her crush on Philippe Candeloro, the 27-year-old heartthrob who won a bronze medal in the last Winter Olympics. Philippe is a dashing flirt on ice. He gyrates his hips, blows kisses, plays to his female crowd like some half-clad Chippendale with his skates laced up a bit too tightly.

Candeloro is known as much for his reputation as his sport’s sexiest man and the skater most likely to take off his shirt as he is for his on-ice skills.

And audiences respond: Women shriek and scream. They throw hotel room keys.

Especially Lily.

During the Olympics, she sat glued in front of the television, cheering on Philippe’s every hip thrust. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the first coming of the Beatles.

*

Still, I thought I had come to terms with all this.

Then came my recent business trip to Las Vegas. I was lying in bed watching the coming attractions at the MGM Grand when I saw it: Philippe was coming to Vegas as part of a touring show called Champions on Ice (which played two dates in the Los Angeles area last week).

I got right on the blower and gave her the news.

“Mister,” she whispered, “you march right down there this minute and get us tickets.”

“Yes, dear,” I said.

As the date neared, Philippe was all she could talk about--Philippe this and Philippe that. Pretty soon, even I began to get excited about seeing Philippe.

My tickets for the show weren’t great, far from the front row. And so I decided to try to heighten the drama. I called the show’s promoter in Denver and told a very nice woman a story, the likes of which she no doubt has heard a million times: “Well, ahem, you see, my child bride has this crush on Philippe and she wants to meet him. . . .”

The nice woman understood. Amazingly, she told me she could take care of my little problem and arranged for VIP passes so Lily could meet Philippe after the show.

When I told Lily, she didn’t believe me. (I mean, how could a luckless loser like me pull off something so . . . impossible?)

But she soon realized I wasn’t lying. The biggest clue that she’d turned around came on the day before the ice show, when she got her hair done. “To look good for Philippe,” she said, smiling.

My camera was loaded with film, and my instructions were to stay out of the way and just keep taking pictures until there was no more film left.

On the night of the show, of course, nothing went right: At the ticket booth, our VIP passes were nowhere to be found. When we finally located them, the doormen insisted that they weren’t valid for backstage entry.

I saw my chance to shine.

With Lily on my arm, I battled the bureaucracy. I verbally stiff-armed the backdoor bouncers--all the way to the dressing rooms. And then she saw him.

Philippe walked toward her in an underground hallway. From my jaded vantage point, it played like the sappy slow-motion footage of two lovers running into each other’s arms.

After rehearsing her lines a million times, all Lily could muster was a weak “Oh, Philippe.”

*

But I did my part as Philippe did his. He played the charmer and signed her program and T-shirt. I snapped away, getting an especially good shot of him giving her a peck on the cheek.

But then Philippe had this idea. He dashed into the dressing room and returned with a bouquet of flowers and dropped to his knees in front of his fawning fan, as if to propose.

“Here,” he said in that Lance Romance accent. “Take this picture.”

Except I couldn’t. I had snapped so many shots I was plumb out of film.

The look I got from Lily would not exactly make for a Kodak moment.

Luckily, Philippe had a friend standing nearby with a newfangled digital camera. He suggested that the friend take the shot.

“Oh,” Lily pleaded. “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars! Five hundred dollars!” Philippe took Lily’s business card and promised to e-mail her the photos.

Afterward, I mumbled excuses for blowing the photo op. Then I dug my hole deeper, noting that celebrities make all sorts of hollow promises and telling her not to get her hopes up that she’d soon be receiving any pictures.

The hole soon got even deeper: My pictures were a disaster. Heads

cut off at the neck. Legs swiped off at the kneecaps.

*

On Lily’s first day back at work after the skating show, she checked her computer to find them. The pictures. Big, beautiful, digital shots of her and her ice-skating sweetie.

Out-romanced and now out-shutterbugged.

She wrote Philippe a thank-you note explaining how, despite my dark warnings to the contrary, she had trusted him all along.

And now that I have stoked this Philippe fire, I have one, perhaps two more Olympic runs to endure. Eight more years of this Lothario on ice.

So what am I going to do?

Take a photography class, I guess.