What Twenty-Eight Years Actually Looked Like

I was about three years old when I was on stage for the first time, doing who knows what. I don't know why my mom and my auntie put me on stage. Now I know why, because I put my kids on stage.

Auntie was our dance teacher. She had a huge background in dance in general, and also in Polynesian dance. That's where we got our start. It was everything but fire up until I was 12. Then she flew in a trainer from the islands to start working with me.

I practiced with no fire from age 12 to age 15.

My brother and I drove up and down the valley in Utah when we were teenagers, doing fire shows. That was our thing that we did together. We learned together.

When I was younger, I was kind of crazy. I've come up through all the burns and all the lessons I couldn't learn any other way except the hard way. I've got really bad burns on my feet before. Now it's very controlled, a very safe use of fire. The kids always ask me after shows how I hold it on my feet. I tell them it's mind over matter. If you think you're going to get burned, you're going to get burned.

The first summer that we started our business, we did a lot of shows in Utah. They were little luau shows, sharing our culture, spreading the Aloha. That's everything I grew up with, and I wanted my kids to be able to grow up and learn as much about their culture as they could.

I didn't realize we were going to do over a hundred shows. It was taking over my life in one summer. In Utah, that was from about the beginning of May until probably the end of September.

I didn't really walk away from my marketing company. I relocated a bunch of our clients to friends' companies, because I wanted to make sure everyone was taken care of. I didn't just drop them. I maintained that business and the entertainment business for about 12 years. That's insanity. I don't recommend that to anybody.

I picked up the microphone, and I sucked. I sucked bad for like 30 shows. It took 30 shows for me to get comfortable. I still was having the nervousness and the butterflies before I would go on stage. I'd make a joke and it just was flat and I'm just like okay I'm not gonna say that ever again.

I was trying to record them, because I could never remember what I said when I got off the stage. Full-on blanking. So I had a lot to work on. I thrive under pressure and I figure it out as I go. But I realized pretty quickly that if I can just say hey everybody, leave me alone, I need some me time before we kick this thing off, I would do a lot better.

I realized I knew every circus performer in the valley in Utah. Designing a Polynesian show and designing a circus style show takes the same amount of effort. Different kinds of performers, different costuming, different music. So I started to step into that slowly, and I realized we were really onto something. Why do a circus show if it could be a fire circus show.