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You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, 'Oh, my God, I've got to be 80 pounds or I'll fail.'
Cathy Rigby -
It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.
Cathy Rigby
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I have three dogs and a cockatoo.
Cathy Rigby -
This is so much better than flying on a balance beam or on the uneven bars, where you don't have the fairy dust to keep you up. And it was just such a great sense of freedom.
Cathy Rigby -
Seeing the show is like a visit to the fountain of youth for parents and the children.
Cathy Rigby -
I was always very active as a kid. I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.
Cathy Rigby -
I'll talk to kids afterward and somebody will always say, 'I'll leave my bedroom window open for you.
Cathy Rigby -
I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.
Cathy Rigby
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There's so much denial in gymnastics. It's a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They'll refute this, but I've been around it. I know.
Cathy Rigby -
I never realized until recently how much my life parallels Peter Pan.
Cathy Rigby -
When you're on the Olympic team at 15, you don't do anything else. There's no normal social development, and your decisions are made for you.
Cathy Rigby -
Nowadays a gold medal is a $1 million contract. Our athletes are our heroes.
Cathy Rigby -
They are sweating as much as anyone onstage. Their focus has to be that of somebody working on the balance beam. We're all three in sync. We have to feel what the other is doing. One lifts me up, the other, side to side. They're like puppeteers almost.
Cathy Rigby -
It's that athlete's obsessiveness - the need to prove yourself and work harder than anybody else. I think it's what helped me do well in the theater.
Cathy Rigby
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For the parents, it is a way to be young physically and emotionally for awhile and not have to deal with the troubles of the world.
Cathy Rigby -
I just like to act.
Cathy Rigby -
You're just into it at that point and you're alive on stage and you get away with mischief and good stuff and you know, I don't know many adults who get to do that.
Cathy Rigby -
I will miss it terribly because it's been a fabulous run for me, but there are other things I want to do. It's one of those roles that is so amazingly physically demanding. I would never want to do it halfway. I think it's the best it can be right now, and I don't want it to be anything but that.
Cathy Rigby -
Flying is such a joy. You just want to hoot.
Cathy Rigby -
I grew up in a sport that didn't allow you to grow up. There was always the threat of younger competition. So you had to maintain the image of youth.
Cathy Rigby
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So it really does have a sort of bittersweet quality. Kids like to have adventures and to believe they can fly, but there's also that fear about people leaving you.
Cathy Rigby -
There's no disgrace in failure, the disgrace is not to try.
Cathy Rigby -
I will jump into most any role.
Cathy Rigby -
An athlete learns how to hold her breath, but that doesn't work in singing. You have to learn to relax.
Cathy Rigby