Like everyone, I have experienced some extreme challenges in life. While growing up, the one constant in my life was that I always had excellent teachers. Fate put me in the best of hands when it came to my training. For this, I am grateful. In dance, there is nothing more important than good training.
When I was nine, I started taking gymnastics from a woman named Margaret Morrison. I tried out for her competition team and made it, which totally shocked me. I was in awe of the girls on that gymnastic team. They were extremely talented. One of the girls, Julianne MacNamara, went to the Olympics and won the silver medal! It was so exciting to watch her train as a young girl. Being around her electric energy really excited me. You could just see that she had a magnificent future. She was so focused and serious. Our workouts were long and intense. It was great exercise, and it formed our muscles beautifully. We were so strong and fit!
When I realized that I wasn't going to make it as a gymnast, I shifted my focus to dance. I was told that I needed to take ballet. I wasn't very enthusiastic about it, because I had found ballet slow and boring as a young child. But, this time, I started to really get into it, and I found that I loved the music and the class structure. I particularly appreciated the way that it made my body and spirit feel. My physique started to mold into the shape of a ballerina. It was exciting and rewarding. I took classes daily at a small Cecchetti school called Kirkpatricks Dance School. I had been tap dancing there since age nine. I gave up gymnastics and put my entire focus on training to be a professional dancer.
We had wonderful guest teachers from San Francisco Ballet, and I found it exhilarating to study with them. They were professional dancers, and I was in awe of their expertise and talent. They all had impeccable training, and they passed it on to us. We worked slowly and methodically, and we had to pass a difficult exam at the end of each year in order to be moved up into the next level. Not everyone passed. The examiners were strict and intimidating. It was exciting to achieve your certificate, though. We worked so
hard all year on the syllabus.
As I got older, I continued to seek out the best teachers and invested a huge amount of money into my training. I took voice lessons, ballet, pointe, variations, tap, jazz, flamenco, Argentine tango, and yoga. It really helped me to land auditions. Often I was in the middle of a sea of other women who wanted the same job. My goal was to be a clean, well proportioned dancer, with perfect line. I also really focused on musicality and exactness. I tried to match the choreographer's body positions perfectly. This strategy seemed to work for me, and I went from show to show. I continued to train with master teachers the entire time, in order to build my base of knowledge. One thing I love about the arts is that you never stop learning.
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