Product Description He has been described as “bold, brazen, and totally unabashed,” “one of a kind,” and “clearly a genius.” He won the Canadian figure-skating championships six times and brought back a bronze medal from the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. He revolutionized men’s figure skating, single-handedly transforming an athletic competition into a modern art form. He is an artist, celebrity, costume designer, broadcaster, choreographer of skating routines, coach, bon vivant, world traveller, art collector, legend, and enigma. And Toller Cranston has stories to tell.Like the time at Lake Placid when a woman drove her car directly into his bedroom and seduced him, and the groupie who broke into his house and waited for him naked except for a few strategically arranged rose petals. He writes about his encounters with the great and famous. (On meeting Joni Mitchell, for example, he asked, politely, “You sing, don’t you?”) With mixed feelings, he describes his reaction upon viewing a German-made pornographic film in which he played an unexpected part.This is not so much a sequel to Toller Cranston’s previous best-selling memoir, Zero Tollerance, as a companion volume. There are skating stories and stories from the world of art, there are stories of good times and of bad, high times and low. There are portraits of extraordinary people who have shaped and coloured his life, parting thoughts about his relationship with the management group IMG, about his own retirement, and about the condition of skating today. But this is chiefly an entertaining look back on the first half of an eventful, unusual life by a great Canadian artist and performer. From Amazon Outrageous on the ice, outrageous off the ice, Olympic bronze medallist Toller Cranston is, not surprisingly, outrageous in his second volume of memoirs, When Hell Freezes Over. His signature flair for skirting the thin ice of life--though not always to his own benefit--makes this a deliciously entertaining read. Cranston tells funny stories, gossipy stories, and insightful stories drawn from the myriad roles he's played on the public stage. He uses his middle-age awareness to look back with perspective on his competitive skating career and his more recent struggles as an artist; to explore the often absurd arena of ice shows; and to ruminate on the toll taken by fame, drugs, casual sex, and living on the edge. In one Cranstonesque encounter, he reports on his lunch with Liberace following a skating exhibition at Rockefeller Center. "As though playing a perverse parlour game," he writes, "I tried to find one patch of Liberace's body that was not unnatural. He wore the most horrifying toupee.... His extensive facial plastic surgery had turned him into a gargoyle with a permanent grimace." He rolls out a marvellous litany of detail, until he screeches to a halt with the realization that Liberace was dying of AIDS, and what he was actually witness to was "heroic, one of (Liberace's) greatest efforts to pull himself together." In the end, it's an anecdote that gracefully skates from funny to sensitive to smart to wistful and wise. So much of the rest of the book does, too. --Jeff Silverman From the Inside Flap described as “bold, brazen, and totally unabashed,” “one of a kind,” and “clearly a genius.” He won the Canadian figure-skating championships six times and brought back a bronze medal from the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. He revolutionized men’s figure skating, single-handedly transforming an athletic competition into a modern art form. He is an artist, celebrity, costume designer, broadcaster, choreographer of skating routines, coach, bon vivant, world traveller, art collector, legend, and enigma. And Toller Cranston has stories to tell.
Like the time at Lake Placid when a woman drove her car directly into his bedroom and seduced him, and the groupie who broke into his house and waited for him naked except for a few strategically arranged rose petal
