Fighting Cancer

Oh, that's life, that's life. That's a microphone. Can anybody hear me OK? Because I'm pretty loud anyway. But I want to make sure that you can hear me OK. And and I just have to tell you some really kind of fun news. Well, I'm we're going to be speaking here till about one o'clock. We're going to sign some books. But I have to leave right away because I have a rehearsal for Dancing with the Stars. Yes, I do.

I started rehearsing a week ago, and the premiere will be September the 12th.

So you'll have to watch. Please vote for Derek Hoff and me and. And it's just been an incredible experience. And it's funny because it's funny how your life kind of comes full circle. I'm going to give you a little bit of my history and how I got into health and now talk about how Michael and I got together and our whole story, which is the whole love story and so many other things. Anyway, I grew up in Chicago, in the heart of the city. My Chicago. In this sweet little lower-middle-class neighborhood called Logan Square. Now it's like sort of hipster. But back then it wasn't. But my mother always wanted to be a dancer. And so she fancied herself a dancer. We had a little garage, a two car garage. But she started teaching dancing classes in the garage. So she started it with my sister, who was 14 at the time. They were my first teachers. My sister, 14 years old, was my dance teacher. And it was a lot of, you know, point, step, point, step. And then at 14, I got to class and taught little kids as well. Well, the garage became this little hotbed of culture in our neighborhood because not only did we have the nuns coming over for stretch classes from the Catholic Grammar School next door, but also my mother decided to run a beauty shop out of our kitchen. She had about twenty five women from the neighborhood who would come over and get their hair done. The kitchen was set up like a salon. The refrigerator was in the basement and in its place was a blue hair drying chair. Right. So we had the dancing school in the backyard in the garage, a beauty shop in the kitchen. And upstairs from us lived my uncle, my mother's younger brother. And he lived there with 10 cats, two dogs, two birds, a skunk, 150 fish, and his boyfriend, Charles. And he taught art at the Catholic Grammar School next door. And after school, he had art classes. So we