The U.S.S. Millicent Kent: power-game prodigy, secret dancer, and the Old Man she fled

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING — profile and childhood back-story, all delivered inside the mid-Oct YDAU stroll of scene 037.
• What: Millicent Kent is "a sixteen-year-old out of Montclair NJ, #1 Singles on the Girls 16's-A squad and two hundred kilos if she was a kilo" — a southpaw with a one-hander off the backhand and "an overwhelming haul-ass-up-to-the-net-and-loom-over-it-like-a-titan game in the Betty Stove/Venus Williams power-game tradition," one of only a couple female E.T.A.s with visible forearm veins, and winner over Kahn in the fiercely-wagered bench-press challenge Pemulis organized. Her hair is a hard reticulate loofa (a misfired summer home-perm). Off the record she confides that she never really loved competitive tennis: her real love and passion was modern interpretive dance, practiced as a little girl in a leotard before the double-width mirror in her Montclair room. She took the E.T.A. scholarship at age nine "for the sole reason of getting away from her father" — her Old Man, capitalized: almost three meters tall and morbidly obese (hence every double-width mirror and bathtub in the house), a cross-dresser who, it turned out, always had to wear a female relative's clothes. At eight she came home early from drills in Passaic and found him in her own leotard and her mother's abandoned strapless pumps, capering, pirouetting, and simpering before the wide dining-room mirror; catching his eye in the glass was when she knew she had to get away — and E.T.A. Admissions called that very evening, "Like it had been fate." Her mother had run off when Millicent was five with a Con-Edison home-energy assessor; one older sister (synchronized swimming) got pregnant and married in high school, the other joined the Ice Capades at fifteen — and later relayed the family's first inkling of the Old Man, a Cupid costume discovered in use in the rumpus room.