Me - The Early Years

I was born in Montreal on November 30th 1973 at the Jewish General Hosptial.  My parents (Sarah and Stan) were pretty sure that I was going to be a boy so they hadn't bothered to pick out a girl's name.  So for the first few days of my life I was "the baby".  My mother wanted to name me Petra but my father nixed that one (thank you Stanley).  Then she suggested Tamara but my father was scared that the other kids would call me Tammy Tomato (my father had been a pretty rotten kid himself so he figured that he had a good handle on the mean kid psyche).  So they dropped the m and decided on Tara.  Tara Lisa Pesha Leah, actually.  Unfortunately my father hadn't considered the adult psyche.  When they called my grandparents to let them know what they had named me, my grandmother burst into a heartfelt rendition of Tararaboomtiay, and when they called my father's office, one of his coworkers dubbed me a little Taranchela.

My first three years were blissful.  I was the centre of all attention.  And then my parents decided that I needed a little sister.  And so came Dayna Beth.  For the first year of so she was great.  Cute, cuddly and without speech.  Then came 18 years of her being an enormous pain.

When I was five we moved into the house that we would live in until we left Montreal.  4986 Connaught.  The next year I started at Jewish People's and Peretz School where I went until the end of grade six.  Picture if you will a skinny little blond girl, hair in a braid, with bifocal glasses and a Hang Ten sweat suit dancing around the living room to Cyndi Lauper or Boy George. Aah, the eighties.

                 Me at one.

My summers were spent in day camp and swimming lessons, my winters busy with ballet, piano lessons and The Children's Shakespeare Company.  Somewhere in all of that we had a cat named Cali, a dog named Suzie, turtles called This and That, and a gold fish that lived to be eight.

My very first ballet exam.