The Story Behind “The Dancing Realtor”

If you dance, you know that recital season has a way of unlocking memories you forgot were still sitting quietly inside you somewhere.

This week, I found myself digging through old photographs after one of my former dance teachers and forever friends, Loree Cloud, handed me an envelope of old pictures she had saved over the years. Inside was a very real and very awkward teenage dance photo of me from the 1980s, complete with what can only be described as an entire orthodontic ecosystem attached to my teeth.

Naturally, I immediately put the photo on the internet.

But somewhere between laughing at the hair, the braces, and the intensity of my dance pose, I started thinking about how deeply dance shaped my life, and how connected it still is to the person I became.

A lot of people know me now as a Realtor. Some know me as “The Dancing Realtor.” But what many people probably don’t realize is that dance was never just a childhood hobby for me. It was one of the deepest parts of my identity long before real estate became my career.

My mother is the entire reason for that.

She saw something in me very early, and she pushed me toward dance long before I understood what it would eventually give me. It wasn’t necessarily the path my father would have chosen for us, and money certainly wasn’t endless, but my mother found ways to support it anyway. She drove me to lessons, encouraged me, invested in it, and made room for this creative part of me to grow.

Looking back now, I realize she wasn’t just paying for dance classes. She was helping shape my confidence, creativity, discipline, performance skills, and ability to express myself publicly. So many things I use every single day in my career and life trace directly back to those years in the dance studio.

By the time I graduated from Westfield State in 1992 with an English degree and communications concentration, I thought my future was probably heading toward media, public relations, or writing. I was already licensed in real estate by then and selling homes to help pay my way through college, but I still thought of real estate as the practical path while creativity was the thing I loved.

Life, of course, had other plans.

The recession hit New England hard in the early 1990s, and the more traditional communications jobs I imagined suddenly felt unstable. At the same time, my mother gave me room inside her real estate company to explore media and marketing in ways that were incredibly unusual at the time. I hosted a weekly television show called ERA Homes Today on Channel 40, worked in marketing and public relations for the company, and eventually received an international award from ERA for my media work in 1994.

At the same time, I was still teaching dance constantly.

Somewhere along the way, “The Dancing Realtor” became an actual thing. I recently unearthed this old video of me tap dancing while fully leaning into the nickname years ago, long before personal branding was even really part of the conversation in real estate.

Watching it now feels equal parts hilarious, nostalgic, and strangely emotional because I can already see all the pieces of my life starting to merge together.

For years, I thought these were separate parts of my life. The creative side and the practical side. The dancer and the Realtor.

Lately, though, I’ve started realizing they were never actually separate at all.

The storytelling, the communication, the performance background, the creativity, the understanding of emotion and presentation and human connection… all of those things became part of how I built my real estate career and how I connect with people today.

I recently wrote a much more personal essay about all of this over on my Substack, including the full story behind that awkward dance photo and the realization that maybe I never stopped being a creative person after all.

You can read the full piece here:
[INSERT SUBSTACK LINK]

And yes, those braces were absolutely their own ecosystem.