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I come from a big family of storytellers and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born.

In 1953, Mom and Dad, living in Toronto, discovered, to their shock, that Mom was expecting. I was born in June 1954. My parents, thrilled, showered me with love.

As the youngest, I wanted to be my father's son and perpetuate the family name.

When I was growing up, my mother would take me to plays and museums, and we'd talk about life. Those times helped shape who I became.

My daughter arrived when I was five months pregnant with my son. We adopted Melanie from Korea; she was 2 years old, almost 3. I always wanted to have a family. I had a good example because Melissa Hayden was a ballerina in our company, and she had two children and danced afterward, and Allegra Kent also did.

My mother was 13 when I was born. My childhood was pretty frantic, to say the least. My mother left when I was about 5, and Daddy started me singing in clubs. Then I started singing on the radio in Oklahoma City when I was 7.

I was born two months early, and everyone had given up on me. But my mother insisted on my life.

My mother's incredible diaries, which she'd written from when she was 21, and even before that. She fell in love with my father when she was 12.

My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life.

My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.