Gelsey Kirkland Gelsey Kirkland was born to Jack and Nancy Kirkland in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1952. Her father, Jack was a playwright and an alcoholic, and her mother Nancy, was an actress. Having two parents who were so involved with theater, some say that Kirkland was destined for theater. In her autobiography, Dancing on my Grave, Kirkland says that she was “not born a ballerina. I did not emerge from the womb on pointe, nor did I wear a tutu instead of diapers.” However, one could argue otherwise when witnessing the amazing style and grace of this beautiful ballerina.
As a child Fanny's mother took her to every show they could get at and started her love for performing at a very young age. Even though she was the third of four children and had a drunk as a father, her mother still made time for Fanny and cheered her, on her journey to her dream. After winning an amateur talent contest at age 13 singing "When you know you're not forgotten by the girl you can't forget" at Keeney's Theater in Brooklyn. She then quit school at the age of 14 to become a performer on the "low-down" burlesque circuits. She later changed her name to Fanny Brice and got her first professional job in the chorus of The Talk of the Town but ironicely she got fired during rehearsals by the big current star George M. Cohen.
(Biography 1) The brink of her successful career was short lived due to a traumatic murder caused by the betrayal of Yolanda Saldivar. Selena was a Tejano artist that changed the style of music by uniting a clash of several cultures and therefore leaving a mark in history even after her death. (Texas 2) Fame never comes without a price and Selena paid that price by living a short, difficult childhood. While eight year old girls were outside having fun Selena was out singing at bars, weddings, fairs, and restaurants. She lived in an unstable household that eventually relied on the family band, “Selena y Los Dinos”, to eat and have a roof over their heads.
On the other hand Hannah is a devoted young 15 year old, who appears to be very mature and eager to please. At the age of 14, Hannah moves in with her aunt to devote all of her time into becoming a pianist. Her aunt was happy with her move, and continued to teach Hannah. But later on, Hannah became annoyed with her aunt’s rules and breaks them. After her aunt kicks her out of her house, Hannah began to cry and says “Don’t make me go, Tante Rose” (Horton 39).
In a similar manner “Two Kinds” by Amy tan depicts resistant against authority. The story like Bambara is also told from a first person narrator in the protagonist Jing-mei. She moves to America with her family when she is little. Her mother’s goal for her is to be highly talented piano player. In the beginning Jing-mei seems to accept it and become a prodigy when she says “…look forward to my future fame…in the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother” (405-406).
She was named after the famous Tejana singer, Selena Quintanilla. All her successes and achievements throughout her career have been an inspiration to many of her own heritage. She then realized the importance of being a role model to her ethnicity when she got nominated for an ALMA award. She had parents who are of Hispanic heritage come up to her saying how incredible it is to have someone like her serve as a role model for their kids on television. It truly is an honor for Selena Gomez to make such a huge cultural impact in Hispanics and is very proud to be a Latina.
For the last fifteen years of life, I have spent all my free time from family, and school focusing on one of my passion in life which is dancing. I started my first dance class at the age of three and it was a ballet class with Mrs. Helen as a teacher. I spent most of that class jumping up and down to my own beat of the songs. It must have been very nice for my parents to see me use part of my performance time during recitals looking for them in the crowd, especially after they spent hundreds of dollars on classes for me. This only lasted a few years though, because as I grew up so did my attention span and by the age of seven I really started to make dancing my main focus.
The locals quickly perceived Oprah “gifted” at the age of three because she was a talented speaker when she spoke at church. In kindergarten, she wrote to her teacher, “I don’t think I belong here because I know a lot of big words”, so she skipped kindergarten. She learned discipline and drama in the Southern Baptist Church, but she left the organization as an adult. Oprah moved around several times as a child. When she was six years old she moved to Wisconsin with her mother.
It was probably too painful of a memory. Charles J. Shields writes: Nelle (Harper) regarded her unhappy mother with sympathetic but confused feelings. When it came time to write To Kill a Mockingbird, Nelle wiped the slate clean of the conflict between herself and her mother. Since she could not be her mother’s daughter, so to speak, in the novel, the fictional Finch family has no mother. Or, rather, it did have, but “Our mother died when I was two,” says Scout, “so I never felt her Absence”.
Not long after her death Sergei’s parents divorced and Lubov took custody of the three remaining children. In 1885 Rachmaninoff failed miserably in all of his classes at school and his mother moved him to a school in Moscow. This is where he began to really show his true musical abilities. He studied piano under Nikolai Zverev who pushed him to be the great piano player he knew he could be. He also took lessons from Alexander Ziloti, who was a former piano student of Franz Liszt.