20 years ago,
I was living out my dream of being an actress
and a singer in New York,
and at the time, I was a swing on the national tour
of "Les Miserables."
I've actually performed on this stage
during that tour. (audience applauds)
Beautiful theater.
And if you don't know what a swing is, a swing is,
I understudied all the women, which was awesome.
So I was living out my dream
when I got a call from my brother Danny,
letting me know that our father
and our brother Alberto had both been,
they were both dead.
They had both been murdered in our hometown of Miami.
My father owned an import
and export electronic goods business,
and my brother Alberto worked with him and for him,
and I didn't know this at the time,
but business wasn't going well, so not well,
but one of them made some sort of shady deal,
and that deal went really south,
so south that one day, some men came into the office,
and took my father and my brother into the warehouse,
and then tied my father's hands behind his back,
and taped his mouth shut,
and then they made him watch as they tortured
and murdered his favorite son to death.
Alberto was everybody's favorite.
If you had met him too,
he would have been your favorite too,
and then when they were done with that business,
they shot and they stabbed my father to death.
So I was in a fight with my dad when he died.
I wasn't speaking to him, and the day that they died,
I had this overwhelming sense of,
there was this voice in the back of my head
that kept telling me to call him, call them both,
call them both.
Tell them that you love them, tell them.
And I was just like, no.
I had my reasons,
and I thought they were good ones at the time.
But when I got that call,
what I did first was just fall on my knees,
and I screamed out loud that I didn't tell my father
that I loved him.
So, after they died, my life got really small.
I had always been the kind
of person who was first one on the dance floor,
first one to laugh, first one to be out there,
just first, first, first.
After they died, I just got off the road, stopped singing,
could barely leave my house.
I was almost agoraphobic,
and I developed, unbeknownst to myself at the time,
a panic disorder, which if you've ever,
I hope nobody here has ever had a panic disorder,
but if you've ever had a panic disorder,
if you panic because you think you might panic,
It's very odd.
(audience laughs)
So I'm going to say something that sounds
a little crazy given what I just said,
but I'm really, really lucky.
I have amazing friends,
and they dealt with me during this time, like,
"Okay, this is a rough patch
you're going through right now,"
but they never lost sight of who I was,
and they spoke to me, they got me out of myself,
they got me out of the house,
and they never lost sight of who I was.
And one day, one of these friends, Sandy, she says to me,
"Oh, you know what we should do?"
Whenever one of us hears the other one say,
"Oh, I've always wanted to do X,"
or "I always wanted to do Y,"
it becomes then the other person's responsibility
to make sure that we do that.
And I thought, "Okay, I'm barely leaving the house.
That might be a good idea for me to do."
(audience laughs)
So fast forward, I don't know,
maybe a few months later, she says, out of the blue,
she says, "Oh, I've always wanted to sky dive."
(audience laughs)
Oh, okay.
Skydiving.
So I thought that if it was just going to be she and I,
that we're going to go skydiving.
I was not going to skydive, and I wanted to make sure
that we did, integrity was a big deal in town.
It was, "Do what I say."
And so I went around for a while, introducing,
"Hi, my name is Ana.
Would you like to sky dive?"
"Hi, my name's Ana.
Would you like to sky dive?"
I just figured that if I got as many people to go along
that I would finally do it.
So, all right, I ended up getting like nine people
to come along with us that day.
So the day comes, and we pile into two cars.
One is a neon green Metro Geo or something like that,
and the other one was this boat of a Monte Carlo.
(audience laughs)
And so we drive 2 1/2 hours
in the middle of New Jersey somewhere,
and we get there,
and the woman who's driving the Monte Carlo,
the woman who has the Monte Carlo,
she only has an American Express,
and the place doesn't take American Express.
So she's like, "I'll be right back."
She never comes back.
(audience laughs)
And we're freaking out, because this is way before Uber,
and we didn't like, we were like, "What are we going to do?
Oh my God, I'm freaking out."
We're all conferring like crazy people,
and all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye,
I see this beautiful man come towards us.
He looks like he's eight feet tall,
and 800 pounds of pure muscle.
He's like this Paul Bunyan man.
It's like, he's just coming over to us,
and I think to myself, "You eat," 'cause he's Australian,
and I think, "You eat Vegemite
and vagina for breakfast every day."
(audience laughs)
Start here.
So.
He's our jump master,
and he gives us this like ridiculous, minute,
30-second demo of how to jump from a plane,
which is just like, "You put your foot,"
I can't do an Aussie accent.
Like, "Put your foot here and do this,
and then we'll put a shrimp on the barbie,
and then I'll see you up there,"
that kind of thing. (audience laughs)
So, all right, we've put on
these onesie outfits and goggles,
and then we go to what is an outdoor waiting room,
and then we're there,
and then we watch people go up and fly up,
and then they fly,
and then they come down to the ground, and it's great,
and I start to panic.
I start to be like (hyperventilating).
I freak out a little bit,
and the thing that has me sort of not run
after the woman with the Monte Carlo is that I,
two things, is that first of all,
everybody's flying up there and jumping, and nobody's dying.
And then the other thing is, is that everybody,
people I came with and everybody else,
once they land, they have that look on their face,
like the wattage of their inner light
has been turned up to maximum.
You know that look.
And I wanted that, 'cause I knew I didn't have it anymore.
So finally my name gets called, and I walk over,
only I can't feel my body.
I'm just like a floating head,
walking over to the plane, and we get into the plane,
and the plane is this ridiculously small plane.
It's literally small enough
where my back is to the pilot's seat,
and my feet are touching the back of the plane,
and we're like, "Oh, it's claustrophobia."
So we start to fly up,
and I think it's like, I don't know, two or three miles up,
and I'm like, my adrenaline's pumping in my body,
and I'm like, have you ever had that like adrenaline feeling
where you can't hear anything,
because the blood in your head's like bomb, bomb, bomb,
in your head?
And I have this really weird response to the adrenaline.
I start to sing maniacally.
(audience laughs)
Les Miz songs.
(audience laughs)
This one in particular.
♪ But the tigers come at night ♪
(audience laughs)
♪ With their voices soft as thunder ♪
♪ As they tear your hope apart ♪
(audience laughs)
♪ As they turn your dream to shame ♪
(audience cheering)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's all fun and games for you now,
but I sang that over and over and over again
while I was on the plane, like a crazy person.
So we get finally up to the right altitude,
which is like three miles above the earth,
and we get into jump position,
which is like doggy style crouching,
right before the plane door thing,
and he straps himself into me,
and that might've been fun at another time, but I'm about
to jump on a plane. (audience laughs)
And he opens up the flap, and it's shocking,
'cause it's freezing air that rushes in, and it's August.
It's hot down below, but it's cold up there,
and I take a peek down at the earth, and I think,
"I'm not jumping from this fucking plane.
(audience laughs)
What was I thinking, jumping?
I'm not doing this."
And I start to like, I've at this point,
I am saying this so calmly,
but at that point, I was just panicked.
I start to like, (hyperventilating).
"I can't, I can't," and he's in my ear, like, "Ready?"
I'm like, "No!
I'm not having this, no, no!
We're doing this kind of thing, right,
and he's just wrestling with me a little bit.
I'm going over there.
He's got like 100 pounds on me.
The man is huge, you know?
He could have just grabbed me
and thrown me out of the plane,
but he does this amazing thing,
'cause I'm like, (hyperventilating)
and he does this amazing thing.
He just wraps his arms around me,
and he whispers in my ear like a lover, and he says,
"I promise you, I will get you down in one piece,
and I swear that you are safe with me."
And what he says just opens me up, and I start to cry,
and I start to cry, and I just let it go.
We're in this beautiful moment together.
(audience laughs)
And I realize in that moment,
that the day that my father and my brother both died,
I died with them, and then I had a choice in this moment.
I had a choice to either continue living the pathetic life
that I had lived, started to live, since my father
and my brother both had died,
or I could jump from this plane
with this beautiful Aussie man strapped to my back,
(audience laughs)
and I could live.
So I chose to live.
So then we really get into jump position, which is insane.
It's one foot on the wing,
a knee inside the plane straddling the open air.
Your Earth is just.
You're ready?
I'm ready.
Okay. Let's do it.
So we jump and as we jump,
we start facing the Earth,
and then he turns us around and I see the plane leave.
We're leaving the plane actually.
Then we turned back around,
and then we're facing the Earth,
and I don't know if anybody's ever gone skydiving
but the earth comes at you pretty quickly.
(audience laughs)
And then we go into full flying position
and it's so loud.
You're like, your lips are literally
wrapped around your face.
The air is just like, you know.
At the time I'm just like
and I can't process this at all.
I can't process.
All I'm feeling is my panic,
and my despair, and my rage, and my grief
and all the missing of my father,
and the fact that I didn't say anything at all
that it's just like going there and going there.
(speaker whimpers)
And then just like nothing.
So then he taps me on the shoulder
and tells me to pull the rip cord.
And so I pulled the rip cord
and the parachute opens up
and it's so loud before, right?
And then all of a sudden the parachute opens
and it's just silence.
Kind of silence it's like thick.
It does not exist here on Earth.
So, we float down to Earth,
he tells me to bring it in, baby
and we bring it in.
(audience laughs)
My friends all come over to me
and they've got their light up to maximum,
and I can feel my own light up to maximum,
and we just pile into that stupid
neon green Metro Geo, like Keystone Cops,
and we don't even drive back to New York,
we float back to New York, back to my life,
back to figuring out
how I could live my life again,
one day at a time.
You know, part of it is,
thing is, is that I had all this love to give
to my father and my brother and I didn't give.
And when you don't give love,
it rots inside of you.
So my life rotted for a little while,
but when I jumped from that plane, it stopped.
I started figuring out how to tell people,
I love you.
Even when I was angry,
even when I was really angry.
I also told people when I was really angry.
(audience laughs)
I stopped letting things rot inside of me.
Thank you.