Cathy Rigby Quotations

Flying is such a joy. You just want to hoot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I never realized until recently how much my life parallels Peter Pan.

Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure.

I've been able to play a kid up to this point and pretend that I'm not a grown-up - well, at least for two hours a night!

It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.

Seeing the show is like a visit to the fountain of youth for parents and the children.

In high school I never went to the prom because I was too consumed with gymnastics. Also, with my hair in pigtails and looking about 10, I wasn't exactly date material.

An athlete learns how to hold her breath, but that doesn't work in singing. You have to learn to relax.

I'll talk to kids afterward and somebody will always say, 'I'll leave my bedroom window open for you.

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.

Actually, performing is a lot like golf. You are alone, so vulnerable.

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.

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.

You see your peers weighing 80 pounds and you think, 'Oh, my God, I've got to be 80 pounds or I'll fail.'

I remember secretly going off and crying. All of a sudden I'm being blocked and have to be intimate in a scene, and I'm going, 'I can't even look people in the eye very well. How am I ever going to do this?'

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.

The thing I received from Girl Scouts more than anything else was a sense of real teamwork and working for the community, helping others, and it was not competitive. I remember working as a group to achieve a goal or to help the community. There was a great sense of accomplishment in that.

There's no disgrace in failure, the disgrace is not to try.

I have three dogs and a cockatoo.

I will jump into most any role.

Nowadays a gold medal is a $1 million contract. Our athletes are our heroes.

Nowadays a gold medal is a $1 million contract. Our athletes are our heroes.

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.

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.

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.

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.