Dance was never a subject of conversation or an issue as I was growing up, even though I grew up in a southern Baptist church - so I never really thought about it. The only times that I remember dancing were at a church social and at my junior and senior proms. Then it was on to college where I took a couple of dance classes as PE requirements, of which I was very unimpressed and uninterested.

My next dance encounter was with "Aerobic Dance," which I learned in New York City, (I was a District Service Manager, along with Fitness and Aerobic Dance Instructor for Jack LaLanne/ Holiday Health Clubs). I trained for and taught some of the very first aerobic dance classes. I seemed to be a "natural" at it - and I had a great time! There was even a write-up in a New York paper about my classes. It reviewed classes all over New York (including Long Island, where I was teaching at the time), and the reviewer said: "...This class was the most fun, highest energy, sexiest class I've ever seen!" Well - that was fun! What was even more fulfilling and wonderful was that people who believed they could not and would not ever "dance," learned to dance in my class. Over and over, someone would come up to me and say "I actually went out DANCING last night - is that incredible or what!?"

About three years after no longer teaching aerobic dance and while living in a new city, a friend of mine suggested and encouraged me to dance in the aerobics room (when there were no classes going on) at the health club where we were members. At first I laughed at the thought; but people had been walking up to me, out of the blue, for some time now and telling me, "You're a dancer. Where do you dance? Do you teach?" And I'd begun to wonder if God was trying to tell me something. So I considered it and at the club manager's "go ahead," I began going into the aerobics room, putting on whatever type or style of music that moved me on that particular day, and dancing to it. I did this 3-6 times each week for an hour at a time and I learned how to dance! The steps are inherent in the music, I discovered - as people who saw me dance were now thinking (they told me so) that I had studied dance all of my life and was, of course, in a dance company.

Thus, did I come to dance professionally - my dance style is improvisation/ interpretive.