Free Life with My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone

parents’ home in Darien, Connecticut, I call Madonna and ask her if I can visit her in Manhattan. She says yes. Moreover, she will take us out to dinner when we get there.
    By the time we get to town, en route to Connecticut, Madonna is living in Corona, Queens, in a synagogue that has been converted into a studio, and playing drums in her boyfriend Dan Gilroy’s band, the Breakfast Club.
    So my friend and I arrive at the airport, rent a car, and drive out to Fifty-third Avenue in Queens, right by the World’s Fair grounds, and end up at the synagogue, a big, wide-open space, still with religious carvings on the walls, but with clothes and instruments thrown all over the place. The whole thing seems a bit sacrilegious to me.
    But at least my sister seems pleased to see me.
    She immediately tells me how great the band is, how big they are going to get, and orders them to play a song for me. She’s at the back of the band, playing the drums, but is still drawing all the attention. I feel compelled to look at her, not at the person fronting the band. That’s just the way it always is with Madonna.
    At the same time, I can’t help wondering what has happened to the serious college student, the dedicated modern dancer who dreamed of one day opening her own dance studio. Although she tells me she still takes an occasional dance class, Madonna the modern dancer has clearly gone the way of Madonna the cheerleader, the all-American girl, and Madonna the nascent prima ballerina and besotted disciple of Christopher Flynn.
    Now she’s morphed into a female, punk Ringo Starr in ripped jeans, a white T-shirt, black fishnets, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail. It seems to me she is just goofing off, with no direction anymore. I am somewhat bemused and rather disappointed, but yet again admire her breathtakingly stubborn sense of self-confidence.
    Later in the evening, a stretch limo pulls up outside the studio. Madonna tells us she’s taking us to dinner at Patrissy’s, a music-business hangout on Kenmare Street in Little Italy. I think to myself how weird it is that she’s living like a starving artist, but has suddenly got a limo at her disposal. I remember thinking, or her telling me, that it belonged to some guy she met in Paris, set on wooing her. I am puzzled, but impressed.
    However, I am distracted from the studio, and even my sister when we drive over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, which seems to me to be spangled with stars, and for the first time in my life I see the lights of Manhattan glittering in front of me. I am engulfed by a sense of wonder. I’m not yet in love with the city, but I’m definitely in lust.
    After a brief weekend in the white wilderness of Darien, Connecticut, I go back to Oakland University. To support myself, I work the entire summer, first as a janitor in a retirement home, then in a local hospital’s kitchen, which I enjoy.
    At college, I devote myself to dance, and by the second semester of my second year in college I’m the lead male dancer in the college company. I am now twenty, and for the first time ever, my father and Joan are coming to see me dance onstage, in Rodeo, an Agnes de Mille ballet.
    I have never been onstage performing for an audience before, so I’m naturally nervous. I’m also terrified that my father will make the connection between my dancing and my being gay. Since our night at the Rubaiyat, Madonna and I haven’t discussed my sexuality again, nor does anyone else know about it. My nerves take over to such a degree that backstage at the dress rehearsal, my mind on the upcoming opening-night ordeal, I trip and fall. I am rushed to the hospital, where an X-ray establishes that I’ve broken my big toe in two places, and two other toes as well.
    I’m in terrible pain, but the next night, after my toes are taped together, accessing some hitherto recessive trouper gene that Madonna and I have inherited from