Our parents made a lot of sacrifices because dancing is not the cheapest sport. The dresses are expensive, so my mum learned to sew, and she started a catering company to pay for the lessons and the travel abroad for competitions.
Because we had no money when I was growing up, when I started dancing, I wasn't allowed to be frivolous - my mum made me go to every lesson because she was paying for it.
When I was younger, the people making the sacrifice were my parents. It's not a cheap sport. Luckily, I had parents who made a lot of life sacrifices so I could continue in gymnastics.
Some folks call tennis a rich people's sport or a white person's game. I guess I started too early because I just thought it was something fun to do. Later, I discovered there was a lot of work to being good in tennis. You've got to make a lot of sacrifices and spend a lot of time if you really want to achieve with this sport, or in any sport, or in anything truly worthwhile.
I started competing internationally when I was still in school. Every summer I would travel abroad to England because England was the place to be for ballroom dancing.
My brother became so enamored with that film [West Side Story], that he started taking tap-dancing lessons, and I followed him and started tap dancing, and my mother and father started tap dancing - I was in a class with my family, tap dancing!
I've been thinking a lot about the journey of my parents - just seeing the sacrifices they've made to allow me to do what I do. How much of a difference their sacrifices have made through the generations.
My mother always wanted to be in show business, but her parents discouraged her. So when I started performing for the mirror she enrolled me in dancing, singing and piano lessons.
My parents said they had to make a lot of sacrifices to pay for my education... because they were both druids.
My mum enrolled me in this free dance class because I had so much energy in the night-time, and she just wanted me to go to sleep. I ended up falling in love with dancing, singing, acting, the whole entertainment world. Then, my mum ended up taking on an extra job so she could fund me to take singing lessons or go to drama classes.
Our mother always raised the bar and believed in us. I am glad she made the sacrifices she did, and we honoured her sacrifices.
Normal people, fear the day their parents die. Screwed up people, fear the day their parents kill. My mum killed a guy, at my wedding. So I can pretty much check that off. But, she's my mum. And no matter what she did I just can't walk away from her. She gave me birth. She gave me love. She gave me the ability to make a cigarette fire look like it was started by the hot water heater.
I am big on - even with our whole team - it's always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn't work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?
When I started my company in the U.S. I was always told by my mentors, 'If you want to start a tech company, you need a technical co-founder,' because outsourcing just doesn't work. It is too slow, it is too expensive, and the product is going to change a lot.
The parents say, 'Can you talk to my daughter and say that it's OK? That she can have muscles?' They'll say, 'I show her pictures of you so they can know she's good at what she does but still looks like a girl. She wears dresses.' It releases people to be whoever they want to be in the sport.
I started flying because I had a fear of it early on. I figured if I learned to fly, I would understand better what was happening and started taking lessons in the late 1950's, once I had made some money on tour.
Because she knows what it's like to live in a world of black, and black, and the tiny bit of white, but when she escaped it, she didn't find the rainbow of colors, the dresses, the singing, the dancing. She only found ugliness.