Saturday 8 November Fabian and I went to see a dance show called the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the Radio City Music Hall. I understand that the show is a New York City tradition and that it has been presented since the 1930s. I had heard it mentioned since coming to New York, with New Yorkers often assuming that everyone in America associates the show with Christmas just as they often assume that every American looks to New York for everything else. In the show, a troupe of girls called the the Rockettes sing and dance in elaborate Christmas-theme stage sets. It is a technical show with the actors moving in tight scripted formation, tapping their feet as they remain in straight lines. It was fun to watch and compelling as any show where people move well to music to tell stories, and it is especially impressive to see a stage full of coordinated movement.
In the beginning of the show Santa Claus speaks to the audience and talks about how traditional the show is, and how it started so long ago. That made me start wondering about its history, and when I saw the Rockettes, I saw about 30 girls one of whom was black. My mind honed in on the black girl and I realized that there was a time when Rockettes were not allowed to be non-Caucasian, and most likely, they also used to be sorted to only be a certain height and to look as much as possible like the American ideal. The dancing is very complicated, and as I understand, the Rockettes show is only around Christmas, so then I started thinking also that these actors have this traditional respected job for some weeks of training and some weeks of performing, then for the rest of the year most of them will not have this job. If there were 30-35 Rockettes for a show, then since I know the show plays several times daily there must be 80-100 Rockettes total so that some can take breaks. To make that pool there must be at least 3-400 girls who audition for these roles, so that perhaps a third of the capable dancers with the right look who want the job get the job.
I started wondering what it means to have the job. It is physically demanding and requires years of dance training to play the role. Actors age out of the position. I expect most performers to be in their mid-twenties, and expect they are done with the role at the latest by their mid-thirties, and that most of the performers likely only play it for a few years. I wondered what Rockettes do for the rest of the year. How do they get other dance jobs like this? New York does employ a lot of dancers but a Rockette job must be especially nice because it draws so many crowds. If they get paid like Broadway dancers, then I would expect them to make something like $150 a show. If they do 10 shows a week, that makes 6000 for a four-week month, and 12,000 for a November and December season. Perhaps they get another $3000 somehow, so perhaps they make about $15,000 for their contribution to the show if it lasts two months. Might they get another 2 months of work at a lower pay rate, perhaps earning $20,000 for four months? Obviously this amount of money will not go far in New York and while being a Rockette could be a full time job for a season any worker will need other funding after this ends. This must be one of the most desirable, stable, and high-earning performance jobs in New York City for someone who is not personally a celebrity. It is an aspirational role and among the highest attainments that a performer can achieve in the United States, and yet still it leaves the performers on a pay scale that for this area is not really middle class. Additionally, I know with high-stress positions like this job many performers will have all kinds of extra personal expenses to keep their stress down. When living expenses in New York were lower I can imagine this being a better job for performers, but I know that the pay of performers is not keeping up either with inflation or New York’s oppressively fast-rising costs.
Rockettes should take pride in what they do, and I wish the New York community could take more pride in its performers because these kinds of roles are only available to people who have training associated with middle class lifestyle, yet a lot of these performance roles and careers seem unlikely to actually allow a person to earn middle-class pay.
Tuesday 11 November was Armistice Day and I had work off that day for Veteran’s Day. I stayed with Fabian the night before, and we went to a photo show in Alphabet City. In the show a person who participated in the rise in popularity of New York’s drag scene was showing photos and explaining them. At the time, she said, she was taking pictures for fun. But since this was in a time when most people did not take pictures or have cameras, now in retrospect those photos are rare, and they are interesting to discuss now because in retrospect the 1990s New York drag scene has been culturally significant. At the time, very large New York City nightclubs made enough money to fund drag performers of all kinds to wear outrageous costumes and behave in outlandish ways in order to attract a client base. This culture no longer exists, perhaps because the cost of living has risen so much in NYC, and because drag is not now the spectacle that it was at the time, and because the business model of a night club no longer empowers local celebrity culture in the same way. A legacy of this cultural is the integration of drag into mainstream culture; on this point New York City seems to want a lot of credit, but I am sure that other places have their own less documented and recognized stories about how diversity in sexuality and gender became more accepted through their own local activism.
It seems that the business model in these nightclubs was to attract some wild looking and acting set of people to promote the night club, and that they in turn would invite their wild friends. In some kind of hierarchy, the people who were more able to attract a crowd had higher status, and these more attractive people had more access to social favors and were even paid outright to appear and promote events. Initially, as the story went, the money from the nightlife business was not trickling to the drag culture participants, and instead they would be encouraged to accept celebrity treatment to show up. As there was more competition to recruit these performers, they began asking for pay, and most of them always operated as free agents. I was interested to hear what was presented as a minor branch of this story, in that one enterprising performer began acting as an agent of sorts to connect people who wanted drag performers with the community, and this person eventually founded a business which exists today called Screaming Queens. This business Screaming Queens developed the act of a wild-looking person attending a party into a performance act which could be marketed and exchanged in a market transaction.
Having recently thought about the pay for Rockettes, I started thinking about the pay of party workers. Obviously the clubs made a huge amount of money in a short period of time on a significant but relatively small and risky investment. There could have been money to pay performers to make the business sustainable and support the community. To what extent did this happen? I asked Fabian what happens to party people as they age out of their work. It seemed to me that people could be in their prime of this field from perhaps age 25-35, with the ideal worker probably performing between age 23-30 then moving on to something else. That “moving on to something else” part would be difficult for a party person as it would be for a Rockette, because stage performance does not translate into another career very easily except to the extent that in some cases, it sometimes but not always makes a person very sociable and able to do any social job.
Fabian shared something personal with me, and said that some individuals in this community respected him for having been a party person for a while then for having gone on to get a job as a hair stylist, which is his current profession. Fabian has a nice job that he finds gratifying and that meets his needs. I know how much he likes his work, and he does have a position that I can imagine people in general might want to have. It is also very true that even with training, most people could not learn to do what Fabian does, because undoubtedly by any standard he has mastered his art and anyone would say that his practice is in the top 1% of his field, and so he has job opportunities in his field which other people cannot access. That is partially because of his skill, and perhaps as much because of his personality and mind for business. But when he said that, I realized that people who enter these performance jobs sometimes expect that they will be able to work in this space forever, and they take it for granted that the opportunities associated with youth and the early-life tolerance for low-income living conditions will somehow result into a good opportunity for a career in the future and a more comfortable life when the time comes. I started to think that this might not be the case.
Fabian and I looked at pictures of people in the 1990s who had celebrity lives and public esteem. I am sure that these people poured their hearts into self expression and art and that their work made a lot of money for business-minded people around them, not only in nightclubs but in the way that they time they spent with all kinds of people inspired them to improve their own lives. I was seeing this 1990s art movement as something which improved a local community and which spread nationally or internationally, and actually impacted at least millions of people. The movement increased acceptance of all kinds of people, encouraged people to better express themselves, brought more peace to people who previously focused on differences, and overall made the world a better place. But what happened to the artists who made this happen? Fabian told me that many of them still seek jobs doing the same kind of work. I know the market for this kind of work does not support so many people now and that it is not as bright as it was. I asked him whether performers of that era were able to buy simple homes in New York City now, which were affordable by middle class standards then but would not be affordable now. He told me that homemaking, investment, and retirement was not among the priorities of the performers of this time, and that typically, people in that space spent their money as if they would always earn at that level.
I wish that personal finances could be more of a part of basic education. Costs of living only go up and so much of a person’s quality of life is decided by the career directions they pursue is decided perhaps in teen years, or perhaps by what interests a person follows in their early 20s. These decisions are especially influential in communities which cannot depend on family resources, so if a person is from a lower income family, they have fewer opportunities for career changes, and LGBT people who had family disconnect likewise will have less empowerment to change careers if it happens that it would be financially prudent for them to do so and especially if the career change requires any kind of up-front investment.
I wish for fruitful career opportunities for all people and that people whose art is appreciate by others get fair pay and good lives from the patrons who have benefited from consuming this art. I regret that I hear in this stories that art can be captured by entrepreneurs who do not add value by the market, but who do become middlemen in sequestering an existing market which on its own is already providing an exchange between buyers and sellers of performance art. I have a lot of respect for what I heard about Screaming Queens as a community-level business which helped its employees actually get more pay and recognition for the art they have to share.