She has a full supply of tutus. And wings too - if you need them. "And I can bring 'em by your place anytime," says the woman they call The Princess . "You should give it a try," she adds. "You know, there's something very liberating about wearing a tutu. I think everybody should try it at least once in their lives..."
Yeah right.
At first I thought it was all an act. I mean, nobody could be this far-out and still survive at Whistler. "Peace and love and pixie dust," she says all the time. "Hey beautiful person," she'll call out to a stranger, "I love your aura." She wears plastic daisies on her coats - the kind that used to be plastered on VW bugs. Provides healing crystals for ailing friends. I wouldn't be surprised if she even stashes candy in her pockets to pass out to kids and wannabe-kids in times of stress.
Her smile is huge. And permanently pasted across her face. Her blue eyes are crinkly with humour. It's like the '60s never ended with her. Like the whole psychedelic decade kept spinning on and on while the rest of us just sighed and knuckled down to real life.
Nobody could be this happy all the time, I figured. It's gotta be an act. Besides, I reminded myself, she hasn't had it all that easy in recent years. Single mom living from paycheque to paycheque in a town where material wealth is becoming increasingly conspicuous. Self-employed ski pro in a resort where instructors are increasingly considered numbers on a list. Surely that perma-grin of hers disappears the moment she closes her door and retreats to her own quarters.
Don't you think?
But the more I've gotten to know her, the more I've come to realize that Stephanie Reesor is the real thing. A true mountain princess. An against-all-odds kind of gal. And the more we talk, the more I'm impressed with her strength and vision.
And her humour of course.
"I'm a poster child for hope with the Canadian Ski Instructor's Alliance," she says with a gravelly chuckle. Meaning? "I've failed more instructor certification courses than just about anybody else in the country," she explains. "It cracks me up. Heck, I've tried for my Level III seven times." Silence for a moment. Then she resumes. "If I believed all the stuff those examiners told me over the years, I would have quit ski teaching years ago."
Yet she remains one of the most popular ski instructors at the Whistler Blackcomb Ski School. Particularly with children. Go figure...
"People come from all over the world to ski with me," she says (with just a hint of pride in her voice). "Some of the kids I taught as five-year-olds are now 17 and 18. But they still want to ski with me."
Another rainbow smile. "You know why that is?" I can tell this is a rhetorical question. So I don't even try to answer. She continues: "Because I'm passionate about what I do. I love the spirit of the mountains. And I want my guests to feel the same way about them that I do." She pauses for a breath. "Skiing isn't about making the perfect turn," she says. "That's not it at all. It's about having fun sliding down the hill on snow. I figure if I can get that point across to my guests then we all win."
She laughs. "And if that means having to wear tutus and wings to get my students to loosen up a bit, then so be it. I mean, if we can't have fun on skis, what else is left?"
Indeed. But it's not like this go-for-it philosophy is something new in her life. "I grew up in Ottawa," says the 44-year-old dynamo. "Right on the river. We skied every weekend - Camp Fortune, Edelweiss, Vorlage, even Mt. Tremblant from time-to-time." Another long pause. Another burst of happy laughter. "I can't say I loved skiing back then. It was so cold. And the hills were so short." And then in true princess-style: "But I remember I loved my new ski suit..."
At 17, Princess Stephanie left Ottawa for Brock University where she studied theatre. "I wanted to be an actress," she tells me. "But I wasn't all that great at it. So I became a lighting designer and stage manager instead."
It was at Brock that she met her husband-to-be. "Aaron - bless his heart - came from exotic New Brunswick," she explains. "And he had this great motorcycle. I knew I shouldn't get married to him but I decided to go for it anyway." Why? "Well, my granny had just died and my grandpa was so sad. So I thought - wouldn't it be nice to have a big party and get everyone happy again. My parents said: 'You don't have to get married...' But I was 23, and I thought I knew it all." She sighs. "It was a hurricane of weddingness."
Shortly after the ceremony, the newlyweds headed off to Europe for an extended honeymoon. They washed up on the shores of Leysin, Switzerland - where the marriage quickly foundered. "I fell in love with another man," admits Reesor. And that (and the local culture) would keep her in the Alps for nearly four years, from 1988 to '91.
"That was the beginning of a really fun time," she says. "I got a job with the Leysin Music Festival and worked with such renowned bands as Pink Floyd and Tina Turner and Prince and..." She smiles. "You know, I can chat with a rock. Well, one day I found myself talking with Lenny Kravitz. And I didn't even know who he was at the time."
The skiing and snowboarding around Leysin also appealed to her sense of adventure. "We mostly rode in Saas Fe and Villars," she explains. "Even did a little bit of teaching there. And it was great. That's where I first met (Whistlerites) Becky and Yves Wenger and Big Al Rumble. It was like this big skiing family. Everybody was really tight."
Her Swiss idyll ended when her boyfriend found another lover. Broken-hearted, Reesor returned to Ottawa but soon realized that the nation's capital no longer resonated with her. "I didn't know what to do," she says. "But I remembered meeting these hot snowboarder dudes in Leysin," she recalls. "And they'd told me: 'You've got to go to Blackcomb. There aren't any snowboard chicks there yet. You'll kill it.' So I convinced a girlfriend to head to the West Coast with me."
It was the fall of 1991. And from the moment she set foot in Whistler, Reesor knew she'd arrived home. "It felt so right," she says. "Becky and Yves and Big Al - and a whole group of Leysin friends - were already here. We lived, seven of us, in Gondola Village. I loved the lifestyle. But it wasn't easy at first. We survived on Kraft Dinner and air..."
She also remembers lining up for the annual job fair at Dusty's. "There was a huge crowd that fall," she says. "And tons of cool people in the lineup." Another chuckle escapes. "I got a job as a waitress at L'Après. I was terrible. Still am, of course. In fact, I've been fired from just about every Whistler waitressing job I've ever had..."
That issue aside, she says those early years were nothing but fun. "Hot tubs, boys, late dinners with lots of friends - there was always something cool going on. You'd be sharing a bedroom with four strangers. Didn't know who was coming and who was going most of the time. It was hilarious. We celebrated our first Christmas dinner at Whistler at 2 in the morning. Why? Because that's when everybody was finally home from work." She sighs. "Whistler was a really different place back then. I remember leaving a pair of skis in front of Dusty's for three days... and coming back and finding them exactly where I'd left them."
Frustrated with her waitressing ineptitude, Reesor finally found her calling in the winter of 1997, just after her son, Zach was born. "That's when I started teaching skiing to kids," she explains. And then almost apologetically: "I guess I became a little bit famous in the kid world. I won 'Most Animated Ski Instructor' one year and 'Club Instructor of the Year' another." She stops. "You know, it's kind of funny. My folks still keep pushing me to get 'a real job', as they call it. They don't get that I'm one of the top-10 most requested instructors in one of the most popular ski resorts in the world..."
Impressive. No question. But I want to know about the "Princess" moniker. How the heck did she become Whistler royalty? And who bestowed the title? "Oh that," she says. "Well, when Charlie Doyle and Bosco were putting together the second issue of The Answer (Whistler's legendary underground paper), they stuck a picture of me on one of the inside pages." She pauses for effect. Smiles. "I guess I kind of looked dizzy in the photo, so they labelled it 'Stephanie, Princess of Fluffidom'. And it stuck." She laughs. "But seriously - every municipality needs a princess. And Whistler is no different. Don't you think I make a fitting Whistler princess?"
I do. Fits you like a glass slipper. Other municipalities should be so lucky...
