Who I Want to Be
I was a six-year-old girl when the 1984 Olympics were on television. [Insert: these were the stone ages of TV. You watched ABC, CBS, NBC, or PBS because that's all that we had.] So when the Olympics were on, we watched that only, every night, for two weeks. And I could show you exactly where I was in the floor of my parents' den, on the brown carpet, glued to the screen watching Mary Lou Retton compete. She was larger than life, even on my parents' 36-inch screen. I had been taking gymnastics for about a year, and to me she was IT. Always smiling, tons of energy, and seemed never to mis-step. I remember asking myself, "How does she do all that stuff? How does she handle it with all those people watching?" And when she won the gold medal, I distinctly remember thinking, "Yep. That's who I want to be." I poured myself into gymnastics, got the leotard (like every other self-respecting gymnast of the 1980s) and dreamed of standing, back arched and a