Country Singer Shania Twain, 58, Looks At Her ‘Naked’ Body In Mirror To Maintain Confidence Amid Aging and Her Third Vegas Residency

As you get older, people think that they need to take it easy.

My first thought is, wow, that's kind of dangerous.

Thank the skateboard gods.

This saved my life.

I definitely didn't want to follow the path of getting married and having a baby.

The way that we look is a signal about our ideology.

I think I will be punk till I die.

B-boying is a specific kind of street dance.

I can do some shit that you can't even dream of.

Hip hop can heal us.

I was having a big birthday, 75 to be specific.

Tattoos have changed my identity far more than I ever could have possibly anticipated.

Everybody has their own issues and their own reasons that they fight their own demons.

Ageism has been the toughest opponent.

It basically has been walking into the mouth of the lion.

Hello? Hi, wow, you're here.

Do you want to come in? This is Mary.

Hi.

Six years we've been together, spouse or partner, life partner.

We're married.

You can come in this way.

He has more shoes than I do.

So we're like advanced hoarders.

In other words, we're-- He goes through a pair of shoes in two weeks.

We we're trying to improve our life.

Now, here's the first bathroom.

So you can come on in here.

I'm actually going to have the last cup of coffee here.

But I have some coffee brewing for you guys.

Skateboarding is the child of surfing.

I'm Neal Unger.

And I'm kind of into skateboarding.

And I'm 60 years old.

I was already quite old and worn out just from sitting in the sun for eight hours a day, burning my skin to a crisp.

I saw this one character that shifted my whole paradigm.

He had a Foster's beer.

And he had long blonde hair.

And he started spinning on his skateboard.

And his hair was like an umbrella.

And he was drinking this beverage while he was spinning.

I was so impressed, it was like watching a magician.

And that's when I quit smoking marijuana.

And I didn't smoke anything else.

I never did.

And that's when I began to connect the dots with the-- oh, I'm losing my train of thought.

The kickflip occurs in less than a second.

So it's like magic.

I was 52 years old.

I landed my very first crummy kickflip with the help of five kids.

And they were saying just stay over the board.

And I was like, I can't, I can't.

And then I did it.

[GROANS] It kind of sucked, sorry.

Wow.

The joy of falling.

I'm Einstein of falling onto concrete.

I'm skateboarding falling 10, 20 times a day.

There comes a point when you know you're going to get hurt, and you're going to bleed.

And you don't have a choice.

So in the middle of the fall, you're calculating, well, I can afford to break my arm.

Or I can break all my fingers and I can knock the teeth out of my face.

If you relax and you're relaxed and you're not panicking, the body knows what to do to achieve that goal of breaking the parts of your body that are less important.

Wow.

Oh, how would I describe the sport of skateboarding to somebody who didn't know? Imagine the sun just coming up over the horizon.

And you've got a cup of coffee in your hand.

And you're looking out at the ocean.

And there's a big line of waves coming.

And then there's a dolphin jumps, jumps up.

Yeah, but that's surfing.

I'm talking skateboarding.

But that's what skateboarding feels like.

But if you were trying to describe it to an alien visiting from another planet, you had to convey to them what the sport of skateboarding was about-- Yes, I've often thought about aliens, and what they think.

I think the best description of skateboarding for the layperson is to realize that this is a human powered vehicle.

And it's a vehicle that will get you from point A to point B.

And in the middle, while you're getting there, you can do some fun things on your path.

I chose skateboarding because I thought I could show the world that you can live to be very old and break some boundaries.

I think if you believe you're too old for something, you'll make yourself too old for something.

There's no feeling like choking out a grown man and making him tap.

I consider the cage my home.

Let's do this right.

Ready, one, two.

Good one.

My name is Ann Perez de Tejada.

I'm 70 years old.

And I'm a mixed martial arts fighter.

I didn't start martial arts until I was 53.

I just had this compulsion to do it.

Remind me of my mouthpiece today.

I didn't realize how many naysayers there were.

But still, you can't let that stop you.

That's actually what just knocked me out about Luke because he saw me, and nobody else really did.

But he saw me.

And he treated me as though I were another adult and not just out of my mind.

You eat some Wheaties this morning or what? Good set, yeah.

Thank you.

When I was getting into my early 50s, I was kind of struggling with raising four children on my own, sort of fading in the stretch, I guess.

My son was kind of getting picked on at school.

And so my other son suggested why don't you put him in karate.

And he took to it like a duck to water.

And then I got intrigued with the movement.

Oh, God.

Mixed martial arts, to me, is the highest mountain that you can climb in martial arts.

You need to basic wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, jiu jitsu.

Luke is my main coach right now.

Attack the bottom hand here.

Yeah.

I recently started working a few months ago with Rakan.

He's a wrestler.

And he's just awesome at takedowns.

Bring it hard.

Nice.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

And I work with Jake because he's a striking master.

So I work with him several times a week.

It's been maybe three hours a day, six times a week.

Oh I love it.

There's no Guinness Book for this.

But as far as we know, that we've been able to find, I'm the oldest woman ever to be doing this.

Set 1 Jack, quick 1 2, reset Jack.

Go-- You know, there's a saying we have in Spanish, it says [SPANISH],, which means that the devil knows more from being old than he does from being the devil.

Everybody has their own issues and their own reasons that they fight, their own demons that drive them to do it.

I was married to Dr. Jekyll for a while.

Then I saw Mr. Hyde, and it was kind of too late then.

Got married when I was 21.

And my thought was, I'll get married moved to Mexico.

What's the worst that could possibly happen? And then I spent 20 years finding out.

Once I had my first child, I was kind of captive.

Every time something happens, you think, well, we'll just smooth things over.

And then you end up tiptoeing around all the time.

And then your kids end up tiptoeing around.

And that's when it's time to pack up.

There was something in me that just wouldn't let me fold and be dominated.

It really basically has been walking into the mouth of the lion.

And you find out that the physical battery without an emotional context is just a sport.

[GRUNTING] That was good.

She's crazy.

She's crazy, I told y'all.

No one believed me.

You can be big enough to build bridges, Helen Irene.

That was my mother's words.

I'm Helen Lambin.

I'm 84 years old.

And I'm into tattoos.

I have at least 50.

I figured this is money well spent, since I don't have any other bad habits whatsoever.

Or well, never mind.

I have a space-time one.

And then I have a cardinal for my mother.

That was her favorite bird, and a railroad crossing sign on my leg for my father because he worked for the railroad.

I have a tattoo for each of my children.

When I look at myself in the mirror, I like seeing the tattoos.

Now, I can't imagine now looking at myself without them.

Once in a while this nonsense, you'll be sorry when you're old and gray.

Well, I am old and gray.

So what? I was having a big birthday, 75 to be specific.

And I decided I needed to do something significant.

I thought I will get a tattoo.

It's different, it's permanent.

And a part of it was the permanence of it, that once this is done, it's there.

So I got my first tattoo, a peace daisy.

Coming back on the L with a bandage on my arm, and I'm thinking, wow, I am somebody with a tattoo.

And that night, I wouldn't roll over on that arm just in case I disturbed the tattoo.

Young people will say, nice ink, can I take your picture? And they might tell me what they're thinking of getting.

I do advise them, never get one in anger because there's enough anger in the world.

If I'm going to have people look at the tattoos, I want them to see something positive.

Them equals us, it's a statement of solidarity that we're brothers and sisters across various divisions.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

But how do you treat other people? How do you treat one another? Whether you're gay or straight, this is not a moral issue any more than my being gray is a moral issue.

I and a friend of mine went to Holy Name Cathedral on Pentecost Sunday wearing the rainbow sash.

The priest says to me, are you wearing that as a symbol of the rainbow sash? And I said yes.

And he said, then I'm sorry, but I can't give you communion.

But I can give you my blessing.

And I said thank you.

And I will give you mine.

And did, and went back to my pew.

I received a letter request to leave the Catholic church by formal act.

So it was inviting me to excommunicate myself.

But I didn't sign it.

I decided I didn't need any permission.

I left.

The Episcopal Church of the Atonement-- it was summer.

And I deliberately went in short sleeves so that if this was going to be an issue, I'd know it right away.

Well, it simply wasn't an issue.

I was welcomed.

It's a very welcoming church in its diversity.

There are times when I think you need to point things out.

Jesus Christ challenged the thinking.

If you think something is an injustice, then you shouldn't go along with it because if you go along with injustice, you're supporting injustice.

I wanted to prove everybody wrong that likes to stereotype people because I was stereotyped as the short little vulnerable kid.

I can taste that anger.

My name is Stephen Leafloor, a.k.a.

Old School Buddha.

I'm a B-boy.

And I'm 58 years old.

Growing up for me was somewhat tough.

My dad was a united church minister.

And he had a big family.

He wasn't really around.

I don't think I started out as an angry kid.

But I was the smallest kid in the entire high school.

I think I was 4 foot 7, maybe 85 pounds.

Puberty isn't kicking in for me, and severe bullying.

B-boying is a specific kind of street dance, technically the original hip hop dance.

There was never any money in my family, so I couldn't take a dance lesson or I couldn't be on a hockey team because we couldn't afford skates and things like this.

So I wear it like a badge of honor that I've never had a dance lesson in my life.

I wanted to prove everybody wrong.

And it's like, I'm going to get strong.

I'm going to be talented.

I'm going to be a little bit out there.

[CHEERING] The Canadian Floor Masters have been together a long time.

I'm going to say it was 1983.

We were so busy trying to be the best.

Literally we used to bleed from the top of our shoulders because we were windmilling so much that we never let that heal.

It was always the friction of the floor keeping the open wounds.

We got to open for some big names, James Brown, Ice T, Black Eyed Peas, Public Enemy.

That does sound like bragging.

But B-boys, for us back in the day, were not just dancers, but they were people that were against the system, you know, screw the man.

And I loved it because it also had space for the angry edge that I felt as a human being.

But also check out what we can do.

I can do some shit that you can't even dream of.

That kind of street swag is an interesting thing.

And I think vulnerable people, sometimes we fight to reclaim that.

The rest goes bang bang.

Daddy's going to count it out when we do it.

Is that all right? Let's go, one two three four.

Aaron's got Down syndrome and autism.

I think my son got involved in hip hop because dancing in hip hop is kind of who his old man is.

My dad had anger.

I still have anger.

I think we've been sold a bill of goods about a man as someone who can take it, who can suck it up inside.

Things can escalate really quick when men get caught up in not knowing how to recognize their anger and how to deal with their anger.

Strong men cry.

That's not a weakness.

Our vulnerability is our strength.

The times I felt the most spiritual, when I was at the point where I could go to the club, and I would close my eyes for 10 minutes and dance with my eyes closed.

And I could literally almost feel like this beam of connectiveness rising through my body to something bigger than me.

Music got me there.

I actually see hip hop as this thing that has wonderful potential to be this huge collective political movement towards a better world.

If something was a gift to you, how are you going to pay that gift forward? Punks wanted to make the world a better place.

That's what they're still doing today.

You're the boss of me, huh, innit? Back in a minute, deal.

The only time that I really feel like I'm maybe my age is when I'm humping all the gear to a gig and stuff.

It's so much hard work.

We doing a run through? Ballet dance.

Ballet dance, yeah? So in the band at the moment, we've got Sid playing guitar.

We've got Jake playing bass, and Charlie playing drums.

The guest guitarist we've got is 14 years old from Birmingham, and his name is Dave.

I'm very loud.

He's not very loud.

Yeah.

[PUNK MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Zillah Minx.

I'm 56.

And my occupation is a singer in a band called Rubella Ballet.

When I was 15, I became a punk rocker.

I was intending to go to university and be a solicitor.

By September, I was playing gigs with Sid.

People were just beginning to start their bands, like the Slits, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, and the Sex Pistols.

Punk changed a lot of things for a lot of people.

There was a lot of things going on in the '70s.

Politics at the time were changing things.

People realized that women weren't getting paid equally to men for the same jobs.

Unemployment was high.

The thing that everybody was worried about at that time was whether there was going to be another nuclear war.

It's still issues that are still being fought over today, which is why I think in a way that we're still doing our punk band because we found that we still had more things to talk about.

[COUGHING] When the Sex Pistols were on TV, the headline was the filth and the fury.

These disgusting punks, they're spitting, they're doing this.

And they're doing that, none of which was true.

Punks weren't violent.

The whole point of being punk was you was escaping from the violence of society.

Oh, by the way, the toilets down here have got the best acoustics of any toilets anywhere in London.

People were attacking us all the time.

And people would be really, really put out at the fact that women were doing that to themselves.

They would often say things like under all that makeup, you're probably quite pretty under there.

Wouldn't you want to get married? And who's going to marry you if you look like that? You just laugh because who cares.

We don't care what you think.

No, we don't want your attention.

Go away.

You smudged it.

Oh no.

What are you looking for? Black eyeliner, black eye stabber, scandalous eyes.

And this bit really hurts.

Fuck, oh.

Oh, the things we have to do to look like a freak.

[PUNK MUSIC PLAYING] I started making clothes when I was about 11.

I'm really interested in color.

I think when you get on stage and it's really dark and you've got the fluorescent really glowing, I think it can give you a buzz and a different feel to the whole show.

It should be about the visuals on stage.

You know you want to see something interesting if you out.

Otherwise you can just sit at home and listen to the record.

Being different does mean that you get a lot of attention.

I'm happy and confident in the way I look.

Unless you believe in who you are, you just wouldn't be able to take the abuse or the looks or the attention or any of it.

You've got to be able to be who you are and back it up.

[PUNK MUSIC PLAYING] That's where the spirit of punk comes in.

Clothes, makeup, hair, all of that is part of what I am and what I do.

So I think in a way, you could say Zillah Minx is the day-glo punk.

[PUNK MUSIC PLAYING] Daniel really knows his athletics.

He's probably arguably the top teacher and trainer of martial arts acrobatics.

He has a real amazing understanding of muscles and musculature of the body.

I help my mom by coaching her with rehabilitation movement recovery exercises.

What we'll do then is we will concentrate on just sort of moving the spine in all possible directions.

I got myself a perforated intestine from training too much.

I had my other shoulder operated on.

My surgeon said I can fix everything I've already fixed one more time.

I do remember when my mom told me about her cage fight.

It was a big moment because this was something we all knew she was desperately wanting.

Good, again, again.

This has been the holy grail.

It's been the goal for me for a long, long time.

The perception when I started looking for a fight was don't be ridiculous.

Girls didn't want to fight me because they didn't think they'd have much to gain.

If they win, it's like you beat an old lady, big deal.

And if they lose, it's like oh my god, you lost to an old lady.

I talked to Luke about it.

And I told him that was what I wanted to do.

And he was a little bit surprised.

But he was game.

Kick it hard, kick it hard.

Sit up on it, sit up.

He told me on Christmas Eve, he said, have you been a good girl? And I said yeah.

He said, well, I hope you have because we've got a fight.

It was a dream come true.

We worked our tails off for that fight.

I was 68 and she was 34.

A good, hard fight, but I'm going to show the people and show everybody that age is just a number.

Facing off against Laura Dettman representing Trials MMA, she's wearing the blue tights.

For that first move, I was just reacting so I caught her kick and shoved her back against the cage.

Couldn't take her down.

Ann Perez I know comes from a really good-- We exchanged a few punches, kind of lost focus.

I did the deer in the headlights thing for just a split second, and that's all it takes.

She took me down.

Laura was awesome, just came in, did her job.

I made a stupid rookie mistake, and that's how it goes.

I didn't get hurt.

I had one little cut that the doctor said, well, that needs a bandage.

[ANNOUNCER SPEAKING] The next day, it was all over the place.

That's when the whole storm broke loose of bad publicity.

I think somebody told me there were over a million views on that fight.

We had-- I think there were probably 200 and some thousand trolls that picked that up and said, oh, grandma got what she deserved.

There were people calling the boxing commissioner, that how could you let this poor old woman fight and get herself beat up like this? But the vitriol that I got was amazing.

Ageism has been the toughest opponent, and still is.

There's such a tremendous deep prejudice against women who are older and who are assertive or who are still competent or who are trying to do things that people think they shouldn't do.

I think it's a combination of ageism and sexism.

So it's kind of an unholy combination where you're hitting prejudices on both fronts.

Women bother you, and then older people bother you.

And then you get an older woman who's assertive, that's going to drive you crazy.

I've run into that over and over in my life without really realizing what it was.

But there's a confidence that comes from age too, that you start to know yourself and know what you can do and what you can't do.

At this point, I just do it anyway, and they can think whatever they want to think.

She's absolutely doing what she should be doing.

She would much rather go down in a blaze of glory, but get to do the fight than not take the risk.

Let's say she got another fight tomorrow and she went and did it.

Win or lose, she would just keep on fighting.

So I feel like I've got some unfinished business.

I want to do one more fight.

So I think I'm thinking one more.

Any person doing an extreme sport, you want to go farther, take it to the next degree.

That was called unwinding.

Whenever I do that 360 spin, I have to unwind because it's like a spring.

I get wound up, and I have to unwind it.

It makes me sick if I don't.

Sign my backpack? Sure.

Sign my board? Yeah.

This sport is perfect for me because I love attention.

The fact that I'm a late bloomer is a plus because I've never got comfortable and thought that I did any trick well enough that I would want to stop trying to do that trick better.

But the fact is I'm progressing.

I'm actually continuing to get better.

Because I'm so old, people were interested.

Well, why are you doing this? And it was quite cruel.

They would laugh.

They would make fun and yell things from their cars.

And mostly they would just say you're too old to skate.

Thank you.

It was devastating every time.

I certainly wasn't going to stop just because they were telling me that I was terrible.

The Next Up Foundation has a special place in my heart.

It supports at-risk people and mostly children.

It's a wonderful thing to teach kids, for instance, that falling down is part of life and skateboarding will teach you how to fall down 100 times.

Get up every time, go again, go again, go again, you'll get it.

You'll get it.

I wish I had a grandpa to skate because that'd be pretty cool.

I saw him on a YouTube video.

And it was like, the caption was like this old dude skating.

And he did like a flip.

But I've never seen anybody do it.

I thought it was awesome.

Unger flip, it's kind of an advanced old man trick.

All I knew is that I needed to come up with some better tricks because I couldn't kick flip.

You can't land a trick and you get angry.

So in anger, I threw that skateboard down.

I threw it down hard.

All I knew is I wanted that skateboard to be crushed.

And because of the speed of the throw, it bounced into my hand very aggressively.

In a split second it was in my hand again.

And it was impressive.

Once you got the bounce, you got this trick because then you just have to hit it.

Yeah.

If you can catch it-- I think the kind of people that are attracted to skateboarding are very independent people, that don't like being told what to do.

I'm going to do this.

I'm doing this.

This is what I'm doing.

And you can't stop me.

And I fit in there too because I was too old to skate.

And yet I'm doing this.

And you can't tell me what to do.

Skateboarding is destructive.

And destruction is a part of life that is very important.

You have to destroy something to clear the path.

Go grind that curb to a crisp.

Turn that concrete into dust.

Turn it into sparks.

Enjoy doing it.

Just skate and-- skate and destroy.

It just makes me cry.

Out with the old, in with the new.

What I'm destroying is the thought that you can't be a skater and be old at the same time.

[PUNK MUSIC] You sit back.

Life is gold.

Your empty days are all that come.

The time is passing, passing you by.

Time is passing you by.

I got the feeling every second [INAUDIBLE]..

I got the feeling every second-- The album we're doing at the moment is called "Danger of Death." A long time ago when Sid was drunk, he suddenly fell over something that was in the middle of the street.

And it was a big electrical thing.

And it had on it a big sign that said danger of death and a picture of a man falling over with a big lightning spark hitting him.

And we thought, oh, that's a great title for an album.

You used to have to go to studios in those days to record something.

Nowadays, you can do all of that on a computer.

So I was wondering if there's any of our old lyrics that we could use, Sid.

Play me what you've got.

In 1979, I went to a gig.

And as I walked through the door, there was this bloke standing at the bottom of the stairs that was about seven foot.

And he had pink hair and makeup on.

I was 18, and he was 19.

So in a way, we've grown up together.

I was beaten by my mom, bullied at school.

I wasn't hard at all until I met Zillah and then she sort of taught me to stand up for myself.

He'd been bullied all his life.

So even though he looks like a big bloke that's scary, he was completely the opposite of that.

One, two, one, two-- I was born into a working class family.

My dad's family, his dad is a boxer.

And he had 13 brothers, and they were all boxers.

And so I wasn't afraid of men.

If a man would say to me, you fucking slag, I'd hit him back.

And I'd have fights all the time with different men because of the way I looked, being a punk.

(SINGING) They say that we're all terrorists, and free thinking is a crime.

It's the 1% that we don't trust, and we've known it all the time.

Cool.

I definitely didn't want to follow the path of getting married and having a baby.

I remember thinking, that doesn't sound like much of a life if all I'm going to do is go to university then get married then have babies.

That's a bit boring.

Where's my excitement in that.

Bang up the effects on your voice.

In punk, there was a lot of females that we could look up to.

For instance, with Penetration, one of the songs she sang was "Don't Dictate." ["DON'T DICTATE" PLAYING] Don't dictate, don't dictate, don't dictate dictate to me-- She's saying, leave me alone.

I'll do what I want.

(SINGING) Don't dictate dictate to me.

Vi Subversa was the lead singer of a band called Poison Girls.

She was a mother as well as a political activist.

And then there's Poly Styrene.

She's sang "Oh Bondage, Up Yours," which was about the bondage of women and how she was going up yours to that.

(SINGING) Oh bondage, up yours-- (SINGING) I slit my wrist.

It'll add another twist.

Emotional blackmail-- So we were definitely fighting against being girls, as in we weren't going to be stereotyped into what you think we should be.

And we were very vocal about that.

Looks easy enough.

This actually is a very old dress.

It's from the 1980s when I painted that.

It's not recently that I've painted that.

Most of our clothes are from the '80s.

The way that we look definitely is a signal to people about our ideologies.

We knew where we was, we were with people that were into politics, into racial equality, into liking disabled people.

We weren't prejudiced.

We didn't have those ideas.

I used to have bow legs.

I think there's definitely less sexism within the punk scene.

So that has given a lot of space to women and what they want to say.

Subcultures arise as a response from people who are disenfranchised in capitalistic countries.

The idea to me was a couple of things.

Healing can be fun.

Culture can also be healing.

Hip hop is a culture.

But my hip hop for the future is one where we pay more attention to this mentorship thing.

Nice.

We're going to show you some basic B-boy moves.

Now these are moves that I used to do, but can't do anymore.

So I brought my backup.

I brought I brought Sammy, I brought C, and I brought my son Aaron.

And I've taught these guys since they were about 15.

So maybe we'll start with just showing some top rock.

I'm creating a vibe, an interaction.

I'm also kind of like staking out my turf, my area.

And then I would get into moving to the beat and stuff.

And this is called the top rock because it's happening up top.

Now I'm going to show you my footwork.

The standard footwork is like a six step.

There's a whole bunch of other styles and things that would come from your heart and adapt that would make a statement in your footwork.

Power moves are things that are powerful.

They look powerful.

They look like they're taking a lot of energy.

And they're often spinning moves.

Freeze is kind of like imagine if you're taking people's pictures.

It's almost like a snapshot in time where you hold a position for two or three seconds.

And it also kind of is like the exclamation point.

It's like you finished your big paragraph, and then boom.

As we get older, we start thinking about why the hell am I here, and how much time do I have left? And how am I best going to do something with that? For a while, I thought I would be a teacher.

But I made the decision that I liked social work.

How are you guys doing? Are you good? It's Friday, show day.

So show time tonight.

So today, we want to run through everything the best that we can.

So when you rehearse, rehearse like your performing.

Blueprint for Life is us bringing large groups of young people together to celebrate art, music, dance and traditional culture.

It organically grew because it made sense to me and my gut in terms of my own past and my own healing.

Most of the kids I work with have trauma.

They have complex trauma.

There's issues in the home.

There might be poverty.

There might be racism.

There might be bullying.

So we do a five day intensive.

We roll through life.

And maybe when we're born, we have a little backpack on our back.

Let's call the stuff that goes in the backpack is like drama.

And sometimes new pressure gets put in that backpack that you got to carry through life.

We can't always get rid of all the things in our backpack.

But maybe we can lighten it a bit.

We're there to create a safe space where we can celebrate life, but also talk about all the difficult, complicated issues going on in their lives, and have them find a voice.

All right, open mic time.

I was fine but I hate you.

Start to cry because you think I do.

I wish I could say I love you, memories.

(RAPPING) It makes me so mad to see that the world does not understand me.

But I can't stop sipping on brandy.

I feel it in my feet.

I feel it with the beats and mad beef.

I cut away [INAUDIBLE] start to Ottawa.

(SINGING) I want to break through.

I don't know about you, but I ain't going to let you through.

Ottawa zone, Ottawa zone.

--living in the projects, we dodged bullets, doing things that people said I couldn't.

Tell me to stop it, I won't.

Tell me to leave it, I don't.

I think healing comes through telling one's story, by doing that process of understanding maybe what happened to you.

Maybe it has less power and control over you.

They come for the hip hop, but stay for the healing.

(RAPPING) Got this pressure on my shoulders, and I gotta hold it up.

Gotta keep on [INAUDIBLE] up on your shoulder.

I've been counting up, damn.

I was a master of confusion and depression.

And I actually gained joy.

My joy was my depression.

And I used my depression as an excuse to feel something.

It was like I could feel this.

I can really feel it.

I felt alive being depressed.

Skateboarding can quiet my mind.

It's like, shut up and skate.

Thank the skateboard gods.

I mean this saved my life.

And somehow skateboarding just completely saved me.

As you get older, people think that they need to take it easy.

My first thought is, wow, that's kind of dangerous.

I don't think it's safe.

I don't think it's safe to get relaxed and to get comfortable.

I was about six years old.

And my mom was having some problems with headaches.

She had a tumor.

And that was what was causing her headaches.

And they operated on it, but they caught it rather late.

She finally had a hemorrhage and died.

And I remember thinking that I wanted to show the world that you could live to be 110 and be strong.

My previous partner, she had developed a problem in her ovaries, ovarian cancer.

When you lose someone dear to you, you are literally ripped apart.

And you don't know what to do.

The grief class is not a place to meet a partner.

That's where I met Mary.

Mary thought that we'd been together in other lives.

And I think that Ken, her passed-away partner, brought us together.

Mary and I decided to go get juice.

And we had to take separate cars.

And I was in the front, and she was behind me.

And before we left, she said don't lose me.

And I said I won't lose you.

We basically got kicked out of the class because we were way too happy to be there.

Life is progress.

So you can go over an obstacle.

You land back down, and then keep rolling.

Joy, J-O-Y, juice of youth.

Joy comes from moving.

If you're learning and passionately moving to the next step, nothing, none of the rust or any of the stuff that related to stagnation can occur.

Motion is pleasant in this dimension of life on Earth.

The wind is in your face.

And you see the beautiful objects going past you.

I love that.

The spirit is moving in the universe.

And the spirit might be now saying it's time for a change.

Hello, there.

I don't know at what point it was in my widowhood that I decided I will not be someone less.

I have to become someone new.

And so that's when you begin building brick by brick.

I was 24 when I met Henry.

He was a psychologist.

We're married, let's see, I think it was 33-some years.

Henry's nickname for me was Bunny or Rabbit.

Just went back to our dating days.

We were at a party.

And I said to him, why do you like me better than your other girlfriends? Is it because I'm prettier or smarter? And he said, your big wide bunny grin.

And I said, you like me because of my smile? Well, yes, what's a better reason? And that's why I got the bunny tattoo.

OK, tell me what did you want to do today.

I want to do C 2 N, the number 2 for Chicago tonight.

OK.

I'd like it in those colors.

I could put it kind of small like right here.

What do you think? I think right there is good.

And you wanted to add another leaf? Yeah, I do.

Yeah I can just draw that on.

Yeah it'd be up here, up high.

OK.

Is it painful? Part of it depends on where you get it.

And of course now they have electric needles, which speeds up the process a great deal.

Where do you want me? Come around over here.

--the night and Paris [INAUDIBLE] on TV.

Henry collapsed in the morning they thought it was like a minor stroke.

He died of a dissecting aortal aneurysm.

They're called the silent killer.

So he was himself in the morning when we first got up and died that night.

Oh, by the next day, I wanted to die.

It's just such an ache and an emptiness.

It just seems you can't believe it.

It's a loss of identity.

I was 62.

And I thought given the longevity of some of the women in my family, I could live another 30 years.

And it just seemed impossible.

So I divided those years up into 360 months, like on a grid.

And at the end of a month, I think, one month, and I'm still standing.

Two months, I'm still standing.

Finally, after about a year or so, I thought, this is not a way to live, just marking time.

I was looking for a good book on widowhood.

But I couldn't find a book.

So I wrote one.

That's when I started more serious writing.

(SINGING) Today the lord of La Mancha, my destiny calls and I go.

It's the first time I went across the ocean alone, this is what I'm saying to myself.

So I am I, Helen Lambin.

My destiny calls, and I go, I'm somebody.

I have a destiny.

I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if Henry were here? And it would be.

But I thought, at this moment, I'm going to enjoy this.

And so I discovered that I could.

Things change things change.

And you have to respond to that change.

The healing process is quite interesting because when the tattoo is finished, the pain has ended for me.

It forms a scab.

And for healing, you wash it several times a day.

And then the real colors come out when it's finally healed.

Something positive comes out of pain.

You have to go through something uncomfortable before you have this thing that you want that has permanence.

The pain is transitory.

I found it difficult to associate myself with being old, until recently, when Sid got ill.

I have to do this every day.

So I usually try and do it first thing in the morning because my ulcers weep, exudate they call it.

I have to change the bandages regularly because they just get wet.

Sid is dealing with two forms of cancer.

One is called multiple myeloma, which affects his blood.

And the other one is called polycythemia rubra which also affects his blood.

Basically, it's not terminal so [INAUDIBLE] you'll never recover from it.

You can't cure it.

You have to live with it.

And it's an ongoing battle.

Nobody ever comes up with why he's ill in this way.

When we went to the hospital for them to talk about it, the consultant said, I might even have to cut off more than your toes.

It could possibly be your feet.

The thing is, Sid is nearly seven foot, and if he's only got stumps, it's going to be a very difficult life for me and him because I wouldn't be able to pick him up.

Basically, if they cut my feet off, that's it, end of the band.

And it just went from bad to really fucking bad.

And-- [SOBBING] Oh, Sid.

I think we ignore it.

I think we pretend it's not happening.

Oi, love, what planet do you come from? (SINGING) I'm from planet punk, punk, planet punk.

[INAUDIBLE] planet punk.

She's a punk, punk, planet punk.

She's a punk rocker on planet punk.

[INAUDIBLE] I change my identity.

[INAUDIBLE] culture [INAUDIBLE] Even though it's pretty difficult to go out on the road and perform, fact is that when you get to a gig and you get to meet people and talk to them, it brings a joy to your life.

What you're doing is giving yourself goals.

You're doing something that gives you a future.

People come up to you, and they're holding onto you.

And you can feel that magic coming off them the same as you're giving to them.

How can you feel old when everybody is welcoming you, everybody wants you there? It makes all the difficult bits worthwhile.

So even though someone said to him, you're going to die.

You're never going to get better.

We go, let's just ignore that and get on with what we want to do.

Thank you, everyone.

Think that was it.

Done, finished.

Thank you, everyone.

We heard you.

It was brilliant to see you.

Had a great time.

Thank you.

Everybody knows that they're mortal.

But when you think of human existence compared to what the scale of geologic time is, it humbles everybody, or it should.

Do you want me to say anything? No, I want you to not to talk, actually.

Oh, so it's like that, huh? Yeah, it's like that.

So this is the start of the journey through time, takes you right to the beginning of life, which is about 600 million years ago, 530 I think.

I worked at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for four years.

I was an administrator for grants, federal grants.

We'd go up and visit the dinosaurs in the collection when I had a few minutes in the afternoon sometimes.

I'm a kid, basically.

So I have always liked dinosaurs.

And I've never got over that.

Now we're about 65 or 70 million years back.

And the dinosaurs, you can see the dead dinosaur, the dead fossil dinosaur down there.

This is a creek bed.

And this is a fight between two little guys.

This is like a, what, 14-foot fish, choked on a 6-foot fish.

You can see the bones of the other fish inside of him.

So he couldn't-- before we were talking about bit off more than he could chew.

They have fossils where they could tell where the chamber for the heart was and that kind of stuff.

So they know a lot about the insides of the dinosaurs.

When I was diagnosed with cancer and it was stage two, I felt like, my god you got to do something now because this could be a fatal disease and you have these kids.

At the Cancer Center, I felt like a number.

I was just kind of rushed through the system.

It was 14 weeks of chemo.

I eventually had a double mastectomy.

I refused radiation because if you have radiation you can't fight.

It's like you lose control.

So a lot of the reason why you do martial arts, that kind of stuff, is to get control of your life.

And all of a sudden, all these people are controlling you.

I have a high tolerance for pain.

But in addition to that, I'm used to taking chances.

So I'm used to like walking to the edge.

I trained through my treatment.

So I didn't take pain medications.

I didn't take tranquilizers, all the stuff they want to prescribe.

I threw out almost all the prescriptions.

And by the time I came off chemo, I wasn't on anything except just an asthma medication.

Time slows down when I'm in the ring or the cage.

That's just how it is.

The only thing I clung to during all of that was martial arts.

The whole time, I go from work to chemo to jiu jitsu.

So I'd be out on the mat.

And it would be a way to get away from what was going on.

And so there were times I was out on the mat, and I couldn't see or hear.

I was just out on the mat.

And people would hold me or whatever to get me through it.

Bang, bang, bang, very good.

Put that all together.

Bang, bang.

Love it.

Again.

Bop, bop, bang, bang.

I lost my hair and that was devastating.

That was really difficult. I remember telling some of the other guys, I said I'm going to be bald.

Is that all right with you guys? And they looked at me and they said, but a lot of the guys are bald.

And I said, well, consider me one of the guys.

And they said we already do.

Man, you're hitting that hook.

Why do you think you're hitting that hook so hard? Because I'm doing it right.

Plain and simple, plain and simple.

Just a thought.

That's right.

Her toughness, her mentality, beating cancer the way she beat cancer, that right there-- you're way bigger of a fighter than any of these guys on that mat right now.

I'll tell you that right there.

Her biggest strength is the power of her mindset and her willpower to keep coming in here and training.

All the way up.

Hold it up.

Hold it away.

I need to ask you a serious question.

Are you on steroids? I can tell.

Look at that.

Where you least expect it, you find support.

You find a Jake or you find a Luke if you're really, really lucky, who supports you and fights with you alongside you with these obstacles.

Good session today.

Thank you so much.

Tomorrow we fight another day.

[INAUDIBLE] good job.

Fighting is very similar to life in a lot of ways.

You win some and you lose some.

You have to keep trying.

And you have to not let these obstacles get to you and get you to quit.

So I've never had the option to quit in my life.

And I just don't want to take it now.

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.

And so there's all this out there that I don't see don't understand.

This fascinates me the idea of everything around that I don't see, can't hear, and it's there.

There are all these worlds out there.

I love the idea that we're all stardust.

It's marvelous to think that you've been around for 13 billion years.

I think I look marvelous for being 13-some billion years old.

Since I believe in spiritual things, certainly there are things I can't see.

Conrad Aiken, who was a story writer and a poet, he saw this ship in the harbor Cosmos Mariner, and he loved the title.

So he looked in the shipping news to see where it was going.

And it said Cosmos Mariner, destination unknown.

And Aiken said that's the story of my life.

I love that idea, sailing through the cosmos.

The journey is a very important part of it.

Otherwise you're just sleeping through this trip.

You may not know where you're going.

But you're on your way somewhere.

Sometimes the wind is high.

Sometimes it's lower.

Maybe sometimes you're marooned briefly.

But we're not sedentary.

We're moving through space at this quite high rate of speed.

Growing up in Iowa, sitting out in the back porch at night, the whole sky was filled with stars.

It was like they were scattered all over.

And you could see the constellations.

And my father would point them out to me, really vivid and shining.

Then moving to the city with very bright lights, you see very few stars.

But of course the stars are there, the constellations are there.

And the little dipper is still swinging around the North Star by its tail.

Orion's still there Cassiopeia still sitting in her chair the Pleiades are still dancing.

So they're all still there.

I just can't see them.

So what else is out there I can't see? People who don't believe in an afterlife do cope with it with grace.

But for me, I would feel very constrained if the world were only finite.

I'd feel like there was a lack of oxygen. With the loss of Henry, if I didn't believe that he's still there in some way, that it has all ended, I would find it intolerable.

Someone had said when Henry died, oh, now, he'll have all the answers.

I said I hope not, for Henry, to be at heaven, there always has to be at least one more question.

There's so much to learn and know and discover.

It's kind of like you get to a certain point and you're so old.

And then you kind of fade away.

Why are we fading away? Why aren't we going out like you know blazing stars? I think it's coach from my crew, and he started calling me Buddha.

They actually used to rub my tummy for good luck.

You know, you heard of rubbing the Buddha's tummy before we'd hit the stage.

But it was given to me.

And it's kind of like a spirit name.

Bling in hip hop is a bit of a status symbol to stand up and show your individuality.

Back in the day, we used to sometimes wear different gold bling and stuff like that.

And I've kind of transitioned to bling that was gifted to me or made or bling from indigenous communities.

This is one of my favorite.

This was made by B-girl Lunacee.

She's part of Blueprint.

She's a Cree woman.

This was done by some of the kids that are in the maximum security facility in Winnipeg.

This was a rose done by kids in the Edmonton facility.

And then I've had all this bling blessed by a shaman up in the Arctic.

This one is a Buddha with the sacred Inuit drum around it.

So it's pretty precious to me.

At the end of the week intensive, we will do usually a Friday evening community showcase.

[DRUMMING] How do we come into this world? We come into this world listening to our mother's heartbeat, come into the world with maybe a little slap on the butt and our own heartbeat.

I think it's really like a primal comforting thing to connect to a beat.

And so then if you take it further in the complexities of music and the drum beats, it can then move from kind of comforting to playfulness.

How do you respond to the beat? How do you play with the beat? How do you be creative with the beat? How do we keep being playful with life, responding to the different beats and stuff that we see out there? We put up these barriers and these beliefs that we can't listen to our beat.

We can't listen to the beat of life.

Life's to me meant to be a journey that kind of pulls us forward, and you build some wisdom and some ideas.

And you share and you build connectivity and relationships.

At the end of the end, the kids go out and get their little brothers and sisters up dancing.

It's the time to look your parents and family right in the eyes and just kind of celebrate the moment.

Yes, it's all of us together.

But it's all of us together.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, collectively, like a breathing organism.

They're jumping up and down and they're hyping each other up.

I view it as an exchange of energy.

Maybe I've become a little wiser over the years.

Maybe my body's taking a more Buddha-esque form as I get older.

The goal is not to leave a legacy in an egotistical sense.

The goal is as a human being to feel like your life wasn't insignificant.