My love was dancing, and a huge opportunity was given to me and then taken away before I could say Botafogo. It wasn’t at all of the romantic kind, but the kind of heartbreak where you see no other option, no other remedy and no other love. When I was nineteen I suffered my first and only heartbreak. I begged my parents to let me leave school at seventeen, they refused, and I finished my final year of school doing my assignments in the eight minute form assembly we had to attend before classes every morning (Melbourne Uni did not, however, find it amusing when I applied for Engineering/Law just for a LOL). I became obsessed and I worked hard at it because I wanted to be really good, no, I wanted to be the best. My brother once taped over a whole year of my competitions with the Sunday night movie “Free Willy”… Let’s just say he never did that again. I was banned from saying “Does anyone want to watch me?” and sometimes, I would stay up way too late for a school night, wait until everyone else had gone to bed and then sneakily put the volume on low so no one would whinge about me watching dancing on the only telly in the house. I watched dancing videos endlessly, especially any footage of my dancing. As it turns out, I was pretty good at it so it wasn’t long before I fell in love with it. I started dancing when my mother opened her own studio in my home town of Ballarat (shameless plug). I think my Dad was fairly disappointed when I swapped my childhood hero from an Aboriginal track star to a Russian/American Latin dancer with the last name the same as a top shelf vodka (ok not top shelf but Smirnoff is better than most). I was quite taken by the idea of being an elite athlete and at one point of my childhood, I was being groomed to be a heptathlete. If I’m honest, as a child I was not very interested in committing my life to being a ballroom dancer. “Ready…this is the best bit!” my sister screams “dunna nah nah!”. Twenty years later, I danced the same routine on stage in the the cast of Burn the Floor and the whole time all I’m thinking is how bloody excited my ten year old self is… ‘I’m doing Proud Mary!’ … she screams. It was with my sister in the lounge room of my parents house. The first time I danced to “Proud Mary” I was ten years old.
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