I won my first medal when I was nine years old. It was at the Boston Open.

There is no age, height, or weight requirement to skate. It is good exercise no matter what your age is. If you want to be competitive, most start young. But, I practice with many adult competitors.

And I love what I do and I love skating.

It was always fun to skate with Paul Wylie and Paul Martini.

Sometimes it was difficult to make friends and be social in school because I was always practicing while other kids were getting together and doing things. But it just made me closer to my family, and I realized that they would always be there no matter what.

My life has been a whirlwind since the '94 Olympics.

It is a process of finding the right music then planning a costume to fit that style of music.

My hobbies are painting, crafts, and I like golfing.

I took group lessons at a rink near my home. We first had to learn how to stand up on the ice wearing skates. Eventually we learned to move forward, but soon found out that it was not that easy to stop! So that was our next important lesson.

I won my first medal when I was nine years old. It was at the Boston Open.

I was a tomboy who liked to play rough just like my two older brothers. That's probably why I liked the athletic part of skating - especially the jumping!

I started skating when I was six years old.

I was thrilled one year when I was younger when not only did my brothers get hockey sticks for Christmas - but I did too!

My dad worked several jobs to pay for my expense in skating.

Even now, my husband Jerry, our son Matthew and I live only five minutes away from my parents home, and my brothers live about ten minutes away. It's been great having such a supportive family.

I worked also, doing things such as our paper route and, later on, waitressing.

I get to see the different sides of skating now which involves not only competing, but entertainment.

But it seems that the judging maybe they shouldn't at least see the practices all week long. That can taint the way they go into the judging and the outlook of what's going to happen, instead of just watching those four minutes and judging on those minutes alone.

My parents never pressured me to skate. They always said I could quit if I wanted to. They only expected me to skate when they had already paid for the expensive lessons. But, otherwise they said I could do what I wanted to do.

I think it's a lot harder for the pros to have a long career in ice dance and in pairs. It seems the singles have a little bit of a longer career.

It wasn't always easy getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning to go to the rink. Sometimes I wanted to just go back to sleep.

But after a few minutes of convincing myself that I really wanted to go - telling myself that I love skating and that my coach is there waiting for me - I would get up and go. And my mother would always get up and eat breakfast with me!

I like to try all kinds of styles so it always challenges me and forces me to try to look different.

People are really sick of seeing the winner not win and what the public thinks should happen.

One of the things I like best about the Halloween show is that I change outfits about six times in the show. It is a lot of fun to play the different characters.

People would ask me why I was doing what I was doing - but I always told them that I just loved to skate. There was no other explanation.

Falling down became second nature and it really didn't bother me.

I do not have any pets. We travel too much.

Even now I can't describe why I love skating so much.

It was never about winning medals or being famous.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.

Our situation here, without any exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive Boston ever to arrive at.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

At a Boston signing, someone from the audience asked why I was so obsessed with furniture in my books. The question rattled around in my head. I had no idea that I was obsessed with furniture.

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

Boston is the engine of the state's economy.

And it was from Boston that one in every six American families began their journey into the land of the free.

I don't believe a manager ever won a pennant. Casey Stengel won all those pennants with the Yankees. How many did he win with the Boston Braves and Mets?

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

When I go abroad I always sail from Boston because it is such a pleasant place to get away from.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Here's what I see all across this great city - people working together to make Boston a better place to live and to raise children, to grow and pursue dreams.

Paul Farmer has helped to build amazing health care system in one of the poorest areas of Haiti. He founded Partners in Health, which serves the destitute and the sick in many parts of the world from Haiti to Boston and from Russia to Peru.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.