So, out of high school I got an audition in Las Vegas from an acrobatic teacher. She is kind of famous, Kit André. She was the one who taught Jean Benet Ramsey. Her legend still lives in Colorado and she was one of my coaches when I went to school at Kit André and Performing Arts Studio in Colorado.

She told me about the audition in Las Vegas and I was 18. It was for the Tropicana. It was for a cast of sixty. I went there to watch the show and was in shock to think that I might actually be doing this. I had to do the dance combination and the tumble and I saw this big stage. When I was eighteen, I was pretty much right off the mats, as they say, but I did a pretty impressive tumble act. I literally got hired on the spot.

That was 1980. They offered me a contract that was $450 a week. That was big money back then. That started my whole career. I stayed there for two and half years. I was new at it and didn’t know what to do. In the eighties, it was still kind of classy. You still had to dress a certain way to get into showrooms. You couldn’t just wear shorts and flip-flops. But there were lots of drugs. Quaaludes and cocaine. So, there was this incredible lifestyle with these incredibly beautiful people.

We would go on stage and dance nightly and then have these outrageous parties. And then we would sleep all day and do it all again. I would go home, pull down the black-out sheets and sleep until five or six pm. It didn’t start out like that, but you definitely get sucked into it.

It was natural; I was working with six-foot naked showgirls. My first memory was meeting a showgirl standing there with just a g-string on. I am five foot and three quarters and I would come right to their breasts. At that point, I knew that I was going to like this. I was so lucky. I was working at one of the top shoes on the strip. So, I did it twice a night, six nights a week. And we would have one night a week off.

Twenty years, thirty-six shows later, I’m here. I worked on other shows at the strip and I traveled and came back. There was always work in Vegas. I worked in Abracadabra at the Aladdin, Country Tonight, at the Aladdin, and in Branson, Missouri, Wild Things at the Dunes. I worked at the Mirage, original cast in 90 when they opened up the hotel. We had the longest rehearsal periods. I also traveled around. I went to Atlanta City, did shows in Florida, Walt Disney World. Then I traveled abroad.



Performing Stories

In Malaysia, I broke my right ankle in a back flip in the show and I had to have a cast and the whole bit. They kept me on as a stage hand and I wore a brace and ran around. And once it got fixed, I joined the show in Thailand. You always get injuries. I had tears. And especially was that it was a very fast lifestyle. And I did it for twenty years. You are very susceptible to injury when you party as much as you perform.

Not that every performer is like that, but I think that the majority of them are. Even to this day when I visit my show girlfriends Sasha and Cathy, they are still doing the same thing that I did. The dancers today are smarter. They are investing and going to school during the day. They are buying places instead of just renting.


It seemed like everyone in the theater was so corrupt that they were all into coke. They would get it from somewhere higher up. You would get in trouble if they found you out, but it was very hush-hush. Down the road, they started doing drug testing. If you were still doing that, you would just clean up for a drug test. In the ‘80s, a lot of shows would have blender parties in the dressing rooms at the end of the night or the end of the show.

It was funny because you are around these people and naked with them every night, six nights a week. That was cool because we became really good friends. I still keep in contact with a lot of my friends after years of performing with them. When you are forced to be with people, those are your families: on the cruise ships, on Guam, in the Bahamas.

Leaving the Business… and starting my own

After so many shows, and you get older, younger dancers come in. And after so many shows and contracts and negotiations, you were always the hardest worker with the least pay.

The magic acts would come in and make ridiculous amounts: 4 to 6 thousand a week to do a little twelve-minute thing a night. And I was busting my ass flipping all over the place. And down the road it got to be contracting issues, housing issues. I was just a bitter bitch. It just didn’t seem right.

My last show was in Guam in 2000. I was there and just was at the age where I was done and my body was done. It was physically demanding. I was about 38. I had worked two shows a night, six nights a week for twenty years.

I have always felt a little pull to go back but now I perform every day for my two, three, and four year olds. I opened one of Santa Cruz’s only mobile gymnastics. It had been done other places, but not here. So, I did the research and started the company.

When I first moved here, I worked with the city for Parks and Recs and taught a gymnastics program for four years. Then I worked with Santa Cruz gymnastics and met a lot of kids and that is how I started the company. I moved here and got a job as a manager at Carniglia’s Restaurant. I taught at Santa Cruz gymnastics, and then I started doing my research. Then I started my company of February ’02. I also did this before in Vegas. When I working for a show, and they have them in Colorado also.

My sister gave me the name Tumbling Tutor. It started with one day running into Janet, a nurse at Dominican. I told her what I was doing and she said that her sister had a daycare, one of the oldest ones in Santa Cruz, Jenny Hudson, Sandcastle. My school is coming up on five years of working with her. I had her helping.

I never, until recently advertised. And we have 200 kids. I have Vern as a teacher. I have Stephanie who works the office. Her dad lives behind us. She is a great gal. So, I teach about four to six classes a day. We have about fifteen facilities. The transition to teaching has been great. I do miss performing, but I perform for these little kids all day long.

So, I teach preschool gymnastics. These are two, three, and four year-olds. We teach them balance, coordination, confidence, self esteem, waiting in line, waiting their turn, cartwheels, hang on the high bar, balance beam, springboard, I take as much equipment as I can into these schools once a week for forty-five minutes and it’s an intro the sport. It is tumbling: an introduction to gymnastics.

What I like is being an entertainer, and I think that is why my company is successful, because I entertain these children and they are gaining confidence. We carry our own liability insurance, and all of our employees are totally background checked.

My vision is to get more schools. I want to expand and have little Tumbling Tutor vans all over the place. We have a great logo. There is a company called the tumble bus with all of the equipment in it and they pull up to the school and the kids run in the bus and do all of the gymnastics and then they go back to the classroom. And there are interchangeable parts within the bus, so you can change it every week.