It is 10 p.m. and Madonna knows exactly where her children are. Rocco, just learning to walk two weeks before his first birthday, is asleep in the family's 14—room duplex on Manhattan's Central Park West. Four-year-old Lourdes—or Lola, as she is known to the giggling girlfriends at her side—has been hosting her own over-the-top play date. Over the past few hours the girls have played with stuffed animals and colored with chalk and crayons. And as most of Manhattan's tots brushed their teeth before bed, she and her pals danced—under the watchful eye of her father, Carlos Leon—to loud music. Only at this party it wasn't a CD player that set the girls squealing. It was Lola's mommy, singing her hit single "Beautiful Stranger" on a Madison Square Garden stage 15 feet away. Good girl that she is, Lola sang along to nearly every word.

But is the kid impressed that, at 43, the superstar in the belted top and bondage pants is the force behind the sold-out, 48-date Drowned World Tour 2001? That eight years after her last tour she is pulling in an estimated $2 million in ticket sales per show? Not so much. After all is said and sung, Lola's probably just thrilled she's still up. Says Madonna's longtime pal and publicist Liz Rosenberg: "Usually Lola goes to bed early."

Nowadays her mother often wishes she could do the same. "I feel very blessed. I can't complain," a weary Madonna said before taking the stage July 28 during her five-night stand in Manhattan. (The tour, which ends in L.A. Sept. 14, hits Atlanta this week; HBO will broadcast the show live from Auburn Hills, Mich., Aug. 26.) But like many working mothers—even those who have an assistant and at least one nanny on hand, as she does—her life is "exhausting. There isn't a second in my day that isn't taken up looking after my family or thinking about my show."

A show that, backstage at least, has changed from the days a decade ago when the singer spent free time lolling around in bed with her Blond Ambition dancers talking about sex and plastic surgery. In a dressing room complete with scented candles, organic fruit and brown rice crackers, daddies, nannies and friends come and go. A few steps away is a playroom filled with books, crayons and stuffed animals—toys that are carefully carted from city to city to provide the children, says Rosenberg, with "familiar surroundings" in the hotels and private homes they usually stay in on the road. On Madonna's makeup table, propped next to the cough drops, cell phone, pager and Yves Saint Laurent purple mascara, sits a snapshot of pal Stella McCartney—who designed the wedding dress Madonna wore when she married director Guy Ritchie last year—and photos of Lola and Rocco.

"In building this tour, we worked around the concept that her family comes first," says Caresse Henry, 35, Madonna's close friend and manager of 10 years. "We routed it so it would be manageable for the family, and in Europe we wanted to stay in the same city for a week at a time so the kids wouldn't have to change planes so much. Madonna builds everything around her family."

Which isn't to say things are completely G-rated. As she belts out 22 songs—mostly from 1998's Ray of Light and last year's Music—the famously raunchy rocker offers up a grab bag of tricks: She cusses, she gyrates, and she kicks butt as she flies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style above a 4,900-sq.-ft. stage, between other airborne dancers and past a stage tree before landing effortlessly in a predetermined spot. Or seemingly effortlessly. During rehearsals in Los Angeles before the tour, Madonna spent two hours a day for a month learning how to leap and twirl while hanging from a harness on a rig. "She ran into that tree a few times before she got it right," says production manager Mark Spring. At a rehearsal July 26, the problem is a wobbly landing. Dressed in a warm-up suit, Madonna grimaces as she hits the ground, then tries again.

"She's a perfectionist," says lead dancer Christian Vincent. "She knows if you're onstage and your outfit is crooked." Says dancer Ruthy Inchaustegui: "She comes in with notes about lights, sound, staging—everything." Practicing Ashtanga yoga for the past five years has helped the historically temperamental performer find what she calls "inner core strength" (not to mention the ripped look of a bodybuilder, thanks to yoga's emphasis on lifting one's body weight). Others chalk up the change to maturity. Says Vincent: "When she's not happy with something, instead of exploding, she breathes. She closes her eyes and she says, 'Okay, how can we fix this?' "

By 6 p.m. the only thing Madonna is fixing is her eyeliner. As she sits for a two-hour hair-and-makeup session, she has warmed up on her guitar (she began playing seriously only last December), said hello to Leon (who has remained close to her since they split in 1997 and is friendly with Ritchie) and watched Lola color in her play area. "It's very sweet," says Rosenberg. "They just sit and talk." Ritchie, 32, who attends almost all of her shows, has left Rocco (whose grandfather John Ritchie, 72, sang him "Happy Birthday" in a phone call from England Aug. 14) at home with a nanny and arrived to watch from the VIP area. (The director of tough-guy films like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ritchie just announced plans to direct an adaptation of Lina Wertmuller's 1975 film Swept Away, with Madonna playing the haughty aristocrat who falls for a working-class ship's mate.) At 7:30 a black SUV pulls up near the back of the stage and drops off Demi Moore, who chats with Madonna's pal Ingrid Casares before taking her seat. Below stage 15 minutes before showtime, Madonna's five costumes—including a duplicate set in case of last-minute problems—are wheeled into an 8-by-10-ft. dressing area. She has chosen each piece herself, from the 20-lb. rhinestone-studded chaps to a kimono with sleeves that span 52 ft. In the changing room, her dresser Tony Villanueva has only a few minutes with her between acts: "Zippers are down. Things are turned inside out. Her tights are set like a telescope so you can pull-pull-pull and they go all the way on."

Meanwhile the dancers say a prayer backstage, then walk over to wish an unusually anxious Madonna luck. Though she was born in Detroit—where her kids will visit her family when she performs there in late August—and calls her husband's native London her "adopted city," New York City is where things began 23 years ago. "I'm overwhelmed with feelings of nostalgia," she says. And butterflies. "Oh my God, I'm nervous!" she tells her dancers, including Inchaustegui, who recalls, "She laughed. It even surprised her. She's human, like all of us."

And like all of them, ready to collapse by the time the last encore—a wild rendition of "Music"—ends around 100 minutes later. (Laryngitis forced Madonna to cancel an Aug. 3 New Jersey date.) Drenched with sweat, she throws a baby blue cotton robe over her last costume—a black tank top with "Mother" on the front and its usual partner in profanity on the back—and at about 10:30 p.m. climbs with Ritchie and Lola into a black Mercedes sedan headed for home. Within hours she will be back at it, eating miso soup for breakfast, chatting with Lola and watching Rocco take baby steps. But for now the only thing on her mind is retirement. Not the final tallyho to showbiz she is rumored (falsely, she says) to be planning. Like most working mothers, her goals are less cosmic. Says Madonna: "Tonight I'm retiring to bed."

Karen S. Schneider
KC Baker in New York City and Pete Norman in London

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