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GYMNASTICS. I was a pretty hyper-active child and started gymnastics at the age of 10 when my parents (both former gymnasts) grew tired of me flipping around and breaking the furniture in the house. They enrolled me in a local gymnastics gym and years later I went on to become a member of the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Gymnastics Teams for the United States of America. I was an All around finalist in the Olympics. I was also fortunate enough to compete in three different World championships (89,91,93) and earned 4 world medals including a Gold medal on the High bar. I am grateful to have been an honored guest at the White House on three different occasions meeting two different presidents (Ronald Regan and George Bush senior). In 2001, I was inducted into the United States Gymnastics Hall of Fame. Since my years of competitive gymnastics I have been speaking, teaching and traveling the world performing my own acrobatic variety gymnastics show in which I incorporate comedy to give insight into the world of gymnastics.
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MEMORY. I am a mnemonist. A mnemonist is someone who can commit extremely long lists and large pieces of information to memory. There is nothing special about my brain but I have trained, studied and demonstrated memory methods and it changed my life. For years I have been giving seminars on memory improvement - teaching how to greatly improve memory and brain health.
I have committed to memory the order of 20 decks of playing cards in a couple of hours, one deck of playing cards in under 2 minutes and a 100 digit number in under 2 minutes. There is no such thing as a bad memory, only an untrained memory.
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JUGGLING. I have been juggling since I was a teenager and find it very challenging and relaxing. Since becoming an entertainer, I have had the privilege to practice with and learn from many world champion jugglers. Juggling is very much like gymnastics to me and I approach learning a new juggling skill very much the same way as when I learned a new gymnastics skill. I try to perfect the basics and then build on those basics. I am comfortable to juggle 7 balls but I really enjoy the more technical patterns with 3,4, and 5 ball juggling. There is always another skill I want to learn in juggling. Creativity, difficulty and technique all open up new doors of originality and challenges that both excite me and calm me. .
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PIANO AND MUSIC. I have been playing piano and singing for years and love the creative process of writing music and songs. I learned how to play piano from musicians all around the fleet of cruise ships that I have worked on. One of the great things about working on a cruise ship is that everybody is very good at what they do so it is a great place to learn things. I believe we all express ourselves in many different ways and writing and playing music is very expressive for me. I have released a CD called "We're all going somewhere" which you can download for FREE. Just look under DOWNLOADS.
Acrobatic Silks. My gymnastics background helped me learn silks very quickly and although there is always something new to learn, silks are not as demanding as the Rings in gymnastics and come pretty natural for me.
Silks are very much like gymnastics requiring strength, flexibility, and body awareness. Although I enjoy performing dramatic silks routines, I prefer the more comedic interpretations of my silk routine when I tell stories, jokes and give insight while performing many different skills on the silks. One of the more challenging routines I perform on silks I call "movie silks" in which I sliced and cut many songs and movie scenes together into an audio track and I physically and acrobatically act out the scenes as the music plays. It is fun, original and sometimes challenging to keep in rhythm with the music.
Silks are very much like gymnastics requiring strength, flexibility, and body awareness. Although I enjoy performing dramatic silks routines, I prefer the more comedic interpretations of my silk routine when I tell stories, jokes and give insight while performing many different skills on the silks. One of the more challenging routines I perform on silks I call "movie silks" in which I sliced and cut many songs and movie scenes together into an audio track and I physically and acrobatically act out the scenes as the music plays. It is fun, original and sometimes challenging to keep in rhythm with the music.
