Podcast interview on LGBTI Conversations

Hosted by Anthony Doick, LGBTI Conversations Podcast draws you deeper into the life story of someone you may, or may not, have heard about – someone who has seen and done amazing things within the LGBTI community for around the Globe.

In talking with Anthony, I share about growing up in a small country town, pop. less than 400 people and being outed as a teenager. I also share about the Kings of Joy community and connecting with Lucretia and friends at Block 13 in Kakuma, Kenya.

Enjoy some holiday listening!

Love,

Danica

Anthony Doick 0:07
On today's show, our next guest has her first lesbian lover in her small country town at age 17, who suffered with anxiety and at the age of 21 (was bedridden) and found herself homeless and sleeping on a park bench in Melbourne winter and through all life's challenges has managed to give back to the LGBTI community locally and around the world. Welcome to the show, the Kings of Joy coach, aka Daddy Joy, Danica Lani. Welcome to LGBTI conversations.

Danica Lani 0:36
Thank you so much, Anthony. I'm so happy to be here.

Anthony Doick 0:39
Now, you grew up in a small town. Can you tell us a bit growing up about your childhood?

Danica Lani 0:43
Sure. Yeah, I grew up in a family of seven, there were five children. And we didn't have neighbors on either side. So that was a new thing later on in life - having neighbors. I went to a very, very small primary school, I was the only person in my entire grade all the way through primary school. Yeah, I was recalling this event that I remembered the other day, about a time where our school had about maybe 20 kids in it. So when we played team sports, we all played together. And so you'd have two captains, and then each pick a team. And as I went through that, picking people for the team picking people for the team. I was not getting chosen, my younger sister got chosen before me. And then a girl who went to our school who had cerebral palsy got chosen before me and I decided that team sports are not for me. So I went into dance instead as my athleticism instead of team sports.

Anthony Doick 1:38
I feel your pain there. I do believe I was the last one to get picked in many sports. But there is probably a reason because I did spend a lot of the time on the field finding the closest shady tree and sitting under it while everyone else run around. So I do feel your pain there. Now the town you grew up in. It was a small regional town I take it if the school was that small.

Danica Lani 1:57
Yes, it was tiny. It's like blinking. You'll miss it. I think the population is about 374 people. There's like a church, a primary school, had a pub was on a highway and a milk bar and a garage like a petrol station on the way in between Wangaratta on the way to Bright and Mount Buffalo.

Anthony Doick 2:17
Good ol necessity having a pub and a fuel station, many a country town have got those.

Danica Lani 2:22
Yeah - priorities.

Anthony Doick 2:23
Now I suppose growing up in a regional country town, being any kind of different is not really acceptable.

Danica Lani 2:30
And it was interesting because I always found like, at primary school, and in that small environment, I got to be myself. I grew up climbing trees and playing with Barbies. My gender expression is bi-gender, which means both it's, you know, masculine and the feminine. And then the whole of it. So it's interesting looking back and going Yeah, I was kind of free to do whatever I wanted in that small community.

It was when I went into the next largest town that I had problems, especially as I fell in love with my first girlfriend when I was in Year 12. My grades has rocketed down, and we were terrified because we had a gay boy who came back to town who got bashed up the street and we were just terrified. I didn't come out. I was outed because I hadn't realised that I was a lesbian. Der - but I had not realised. And so I was terrified, and I developed panic attacks and regular panic attacks from the age of 17 through to 24 when I saw a really great hypnotherapist who disappeared them in one session. Amazing. But yeah, it was terrifying. We called 1997 was the year of the great escape when we both left the country town and moved to the Big Smoke and moved to Melbourne.

Anthony Doick 3:44
So how did you find your first girlfriend in a small country town?

Danica Lani 3:50
Good question. How did she find me actually. This is an interesting story. As a dancer, I was a dancer and I was on the school competition aerobics team. Can you believe it?

Anthony Doick 4:00
Wow, big time.

Danica Lani 4:02
Yeah, in year 11 and 12. It became a thing competition aerobics. I couldn't do one pushup when I auditioned, so I got in because I was coordinated and could do the dance moves. And I built up some strength and got to do the push ups. We went to the Nationals and we won silver the first year in the Nationals.

But my first girlfriend, she was not on the team, but somehow she was mates with our coach who was also an art teacher. So I think was through the art connection. And she was like, I will screenprint T shirts for the team. And why don't I come on the excursion. Somehow she just managed to like fit herself in to the community, even though she wasn't on the team and she got to come on all the excursions. And, yeah, one time we were driving back in our minibus and all like, you know, 16 year old girls all having a great time running up and down the aisles with the music blaring and I remember going really quiet and I was looking out the window it was dark and I'm looking out the window. But actually I was looking at her reflection.

Anthony Doick 5:03
The good ol reflection.

Danica Lani 5:05
The reflection trick! And I just had this experience of falling in love and I had a boyfriend at the time but I fell in love with a woman and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to me. And when we got together, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Suddenly Alanis Morissette songs had a whole new meaning to me, you know,

Anthony Doick 5:27
Was she realising that she was also a lesbian? Or was it something that was new to her as well?

Danica Lani 5:32
It was new in the sense of being out. I think she probably had crushes on other girls before, but it was a big deal for the both of us to be like, Oh my god, I'm a lesbian. Yeah, on one of our excursions up to Newcastle for the competition aerobics, we found a shop and there was a t shirt in that I really wanted to buy. It said, "nobody knows I'm a lesbian." I was too afraid to buy it. We let that one pass.

Anthony Doick 5:58
And then you're saying you made the great escape? And you left for Melbourne? Was that something that you guys plan together that you're going to get out of the small town and live your true life.

Danica Lani 6:09
Live our true selves. That's right. And we moved to Melbourne, miraculously, I don't know. She's an incredible person. My first girlfriend, she managed to convince her parents to let her move to Melbourne with me and finish high school because she was a year younger than me finished year 12, at an artist kind of driven high school in Melbourne. And they agreed and so we had our apartment our unit. And it was a two bedroom unit. And we set up one of the rooms as a fake bedroom because she wasn't out to her Italian Catholic father who drove me to work every Saturday morning, but we weren't out.

So when the parents came to visit, we continued this facade that we were best friends for quite a while. So that was interesting. But yeah, we did move to the big smoke. And I went to university and my girlfriend came and you know, met all the queer people at the university. And I really got taken under someone's wing who mentored me as an a little bit older, queer person who was the queer officer for the Student Union. And you know, she was great. She just like really took me and my girlfriend under her wing and really supported us in discovering who we were.

Anthony Doick 7:17
Now you were saying that her parents didn't know her father didn't know that she was a lesbian. How was your parents with the whole arrangement? Or did they not know either?

Danica Lani 7:25
Well, like I said, I was outed. So I wasn't very good at coming out. I was absolutely terrified. And I hadn't realised that I was a lesbian. So it wasn't something I thought about for a long time about myself, even though we had my uncle is gay. And I was brought up humanitarian. I mean, my dad is there writing letters to Amnesty International as I'm growing up. My mom is writing in a women's acapella singing group writing, you know, feminist songs about women's rights and human rights. So I was kind of brought up as a humanitarian.

So the idea that I was gay or a lesbian was, in one sense, it should have been acceptable, and it was on one level, but it's that difference when it personal. When it's that close. When it's your daughter. And my mum, particularly struggled with it at the time. This is years ago now. But she struggled with it at the time, because one of her main fears I remember her saying was that she feared that she wouldn't have grandchildren because I was a lesbian. You know, I've got four siblings, and she has had grand grandchildren. Yeah, but that was one of her biggest concerns. And I think it's that thing of often, when we come out to our parents, we've had more time to think about it and process it and adjust to it. And then you know, they find out or, you know, we come out and then they haven't had any time to adjust to the idea at all, and go through a journey. And my mum went through that kind of grief.

My dad on the other hand, he was the one who asked me, he said, You know, is this something going on a little bit more with you and your best friend, and I was like, No dad! You know, like, teenager response. I was 17. And I was like, No. Denied it. And then he was very supportive. He had a background in youth counseling. He was the director of Lifeline for a while, and they had a PFLAG chapter. And he was going to be part of that and even offered to be the president of the PFLAG group.

But we said no, because my girlfriend wasn't out to her officially out to her dad. So he didn't take that opportunity. But so you know, varying levels of support. My eldest sister is also queer. So you know, and came out later. But now, I mean, my family is so incredible and so supportive and accepting beyond just tolerance beyond just acceptance that they're very actively supportive. So.

Anthony Doick 9:44
And it sounds like your father had a lot to do with LGBTI plus community, or people within it before so he would have kind of been brought up to speed on a little bit more than than your mum. But I do find it quite interesting when children do come come out and say we're gay that the first response is the grandchildren. And the second response is, usually I don't want you to be alone, I don't want you to live a lonely life and I always find that really interesting. No matter who I talk to, they're usually the first two things are mainly from the mother's side that come up.

Danica Lani 10:15
I think it's, you know, I'm a parent and it's a mother's job to really worry about your children and, you know, care about them in that way. And my mum, one of my mum's other things was, I remember her saying, she didn't want me to have a hard life like a life harder than it kind of needed to be not just with my sexuality, but the fact that I started getting dreadlocks, you know, long hair and with dreadlocks at the time, and you know, that I've maybe been making life harder for myself. She was concerned, you know, she was wanting to make sure I had a happy, happy life, happy and fulfilled life. So that's all you want for your kids is you want them to be happy.

Anthony Doick 10:54
And I think the thing is, to what parents don't understand is that being gay, you automatically You're fabulous. That's just a given. But you also develop life skills that I don't think other people develop that early on. You learn to survive, you're a survivor. And I think throughout your life, you actually pull on them skills that you developed at a young age, when you realize that you're a bit different to everyone else. So I think in some respects, it's a bit of a plus, because you learn them so early.

Danica Lani 11:27
I totally agree with you, Anthony. I think that is so true. The resiliency and strength that we have to - the things that we have to contend with. And one of them for me at age 17-18 was, like I said, I was outed. And then I had to really confront the idea of living a life where I was closeted, or tried to keep closeted, or coming out and living an authentic life for myself with integrity, where I was open about this is who I am, deal with it or you know, take it or leave it kind of thing. So having to go through that as a human being and really look at your identity and and develop yourself in those ways is the kind of resiliency that I think is really powerful in our community.

Anthony Doick 12:08
So tell us - 21 didn't sound like a great year for you, you became bedridden?

Danica Lani 12:13
Yes, yeah, I'd been a dancer studying at tertiary level studying dance. So that meant training twice a day, it was quite a rigorous training program, and I loved dance. I was, you know, really, really quite good. I'd been working at it for since I was five years old. So and to be honest, I don't think I fed myself properly how an athlete should really feed themselves. I didn't have that nutritional education. And I had that poverty mentality as a university student where it was like, well, we don't have the money, so therefore, I won't eat or maybe I'll just eat macaroni cheese.

It's just insufficient to be able to deal with that level of physicality. Yeah, I developed various things like, and I was still dealing with those panic attacks that I mentioned, at 21. So I developed kind of like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, anxiety, that type of thing. And at this particular point, couldn't dance anymore. Didn't finish the end of my third year at that stage. I finished it later. And while I was not able to dance anymore, I picked up the guitar and taught myself how to play the guitar, and I became a musician.

Anthony Doick 13:23
Wow, that's a total 360 there. So you must have been pretty devastated when you couldn't perform like you were being a dancer.

Danica Lani 13:31
Yeah, it's that experience of your body failing you. It was body mind was the whole the whole thing and my sexuality and my politics and trying to discover who I was in the world and what I stood for and what I cared about, and how to do that in a way that was effective in making change. I was a feminist activist. Yeah.

So I think all of those things contributed to this kind of breakdown in my well being, and even a breakdown in my relationship with my family at that stage and ended up being homeless. And often for women who are in a situation of being homeless young women that they often don't end up we often don't end up on the street as such. We're kind of one step away like a transition - it's called transitionary homelessness. I never knew where I was going to be staying that night. And I just had two places that I could kind of call on friends or my girlfriend at the time, but I didn't always know where I was going to stay and I tried sleeping on a park bench in the middle of Melbourne winter. Freezing. I can't live there now. It's too cold.

Anthony Doick 13:51
Not a great idea that one.

Danica Lani 13:52
No and I just couldn't do it. No wonder I don't like the cold. I really don't like the cold. I was overdressed just in case.So it kind of got to that stage. And from my experience with homelessness, I believe that the source of homelessness for people is the breakdown in relationship and your support network, and I think I was probably one person away from living on the streets or maybe. Because I just had the two people that I saw as people that I could call on. So when your relationships break down and the communication breaks down, that's when you end up in that kind of situation.

Anthony Doick 15:10
So there must have been a pretty scary time and you were in your early 20s at this point.

Danica Lani 15:14
Yeah I was 21.

Anthony Doick 15:15
And you were saying that you picked up the guitar? And started to sing.

Danica Lani 15:20
Yeah. And I'd grown up singing. I grew up singing with my mum and my three sisters, singing four part harmonies while we did the dishes. And we'd make recordings on cassette tapes, if anyone remembers cassette tapes, and we'd send them over to my Nana in Wales. The Welsh have a very strong choral and acapella tradition. So yeah, we were raised on that kind of folk, acapella music.

And so I did, I taught myself guitar and started singing and then eventually started songwriting. Eventually, some friends were like, can you please record some of your songs. They really make a difference to me, I'd love to have a recording of them. And at that stage, I was travelling around Australia with my guitar, and going to various folk festivals getting up on the chalkboard, the open mic kind of section. And I met this woman who, who was the sound engineer, and she botched up my sound on one of my sets. And I didn't even really notice, but she was really apologetic afterwards, and she gave me her business card. And she said, we have a home recording studio.

So later on, I reached out to her and ended up going to her home recording studio, and recording an EP of original music. This is before the days of crowdfunding, but I had heard from another lesbian folk artists, what were they called Blue House, I think. They'd done pre purchasing with their fans. They'd said to people, you know, if you want to help get the CD made, then you know, pre buy it. And so I went around to my community and asked them to do the same thing. Everyone put in $20 to pre make the EP and it took me a little while to make it. But once I did, I had a launch in Melbourne. And then one of my songs was selected to be on a women's compilation CD in LA. Yeah, so that was my kind of full time thing for a while.

Anthony Doick 17:06
That's amazing. So you obviously got back on your feet well, and truly in both senses of it, and then you also started the Kings of Joy community. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Danica Lani 17:18
Yes, absolutely. So one of the joys of being married to my spouse, Chris, who is non binary trans masc is they started an event called Queers of Joy. And Queers of Joy was to create a performance night where trans and gender diverse artists could perform and get paid. And Chris and I met doing a group Drag King performance. So we had a mutual friend, who had asked me to choreograph a group performance, a Drag King performance. And I'd been doing Drag on and off, here and there from 2011. And so I was ready to choreograph this routine. And that's where I met Chris. We're both backup dancers. Yeah, on the second rehearsal, Chris, does this Patrick Swayze slide across the floor on their knees... And I was a goner.

Anthony Doick 18:07
That was, that was it?

Danica Lani 18:09
That was it, that did it. And then, you know, in true lesbian style, we started dating quite immediately and got together on the first performance. So yeah, that's how we met. And we had such a fun time Anthony being in this Drag King group. Because it's one thing to do Drag King, like Drag Kings can draw on humor and entertainment and dance and performance, and it's really fun. But to do it in a group and have like, some bromances or have a crew of Kings is super, super fun.

So when Chris started Queers of Joy, they said to me, we've got to do a Drag King group for first time Drag Kings. You can choreograph the routine and teach people and then they can perform at the event. And so I was like, Yeah, okay. So we, we gathered a couple of friends together, we got four people together. And they formed the first group of Kings of Joy in December 2020. And it was a hit. They were they were amazing. We did a bunch of rehearsals, picked a song, did bunch of rehearsals and then they performed on stage all of them for the first time as a Drag King. Some of them first time on stage ever and it was just this incredible bonding experience for them and one of them afterwards Jim Junkie. Beck's is their name and they said to me, I'm caught afterwards. I'm hooked, I want to continue. So they've started a solo Drag King career and went on and did Kings of Kings, which was a Heaps Gay competition. And I choreographed their first routine solo routine and they won not only their category of first timer, Drag King, but the entire competition, King of Kings. So that was super, super fun.

Anthony Doick 19:50
Because we hear a lot about Drag queens and been around forever but Drag Kings it's relevantly new. Would you say?

Danica Lani 19:57
It's interesting, Anthony because there's actually been some research done on the history of Drag Kings. And you can trace a lot of history back to the 1930s, for example, 40s, 50s.

Anthony Doick 20:08
Really?

Danica Lani 20:09
Oh yeah. You can trace back to some early, early early kind of - I don't think they would call themselves Drag Kings back then necessarily. But Drag queens, I don't know when that term got coined either. So there's kind of been this parallel. But in Sydney, particularly, the Drag King scene was massive in the 90s. So it actually had this surgence in the 90s, and the 2000s. And then it kind of fizzled out for a number of years, both in Sydney and Melbourne, and possibly in other places around the world. And then there's been a resurgence. Yeah, there has been a resurgence in the last, what, five or six, seven years of Drag Kings.

And it is one of those things where, particularly if you're talking to a straight person, you say, Yeah, I'm a Drag King. They say sorry, you want? And you have to say, Yeah, you know how you've heard of Drag Queens? And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you have to explain, yeah, Drag King is like that, but and you have to put it quite simply a woman dressed as a man, which is not actually the whole package of what a Drag King is. Anyone can be a Drag King, regardless of gender expression, for anyone who wants to lean into their masculinity and then masculine expression. So yeah, it's been a it's been a journey, coaching and choreographing since December 2020, in that first Kings of Joy group, I've now coached and produced 64 first time Drag Kings

Anthony Doick 21:36
64 first time Drag Kings.

Danica Lani 21:39
Yes.

Anthony Doick 21:39
And is that why they call you daddy joy?

Danica Lani 21:42
Yes. So this is interesting, because at the very beginning, I was nicknamed the dance mum, because I was in the audience, like, as the people are performing on stage, the Kings of Joy, and I'm there doing the moves and crying and filming, like, cheering them on. So first, it was dance mum. Then it was the King coach. And I really liked that I've kept the King coach. Then people in the community started calling me the Mother of Drag Kings, from Game of Thrones. So I'm the Mother of Drag Kings. And then we had Mad B Diva, who is an incredible indigenous performer. And she actually named me in one of the show's Daddy Joy.

Anthony Doick 22:26
So if anyone wants to get involved in this, what's the best way?

Danica Lani 22:31
So on Instagram, you can go to Kings of Joy @kings.of.joy, and click on the link in the bio, and it'll take you to a waiting list. You can sign up for the waiting list. And, yeah, we have a new group starting to perform at every Queers of Joy. So that's every two months Queers of Joy is run we'll run a new Kings of Joy group. And the group now goes, it's now developed, I've learned some things Anthony along the way, about what works.

Anthony Doick 22:57
As you do.

Danica Lani 22:57
And now it's a streamlined process. So I took six years to really find a Drag King name that I loved. And I spoken to other Drag Kings who took like three years or so to really develop their persona and their look and all of that. And what's happened now is in the Kings of Joy Gold Star program, which is the first- timers program, you go from six weeks from zero to hero. You come out of it with a Drag King name, a backstory, you know, costume, makeup, and you've got your bros that you're performing with as well. So you've got your Drag King crew, and that program is a community program. It's a Pay It Forward program. So people if they are in the financial position to pay at the start, they can, but otherwise, at the end, if they are, again, if they're in a financial position to do so they can pay it forward for a future King.

Anthony Doick 23:48
And does every state have something similar like that?

Danica Lani 23:51
So we're in Sydney. Queers of Joy is held in at the Red Rattler in Marrickville. But having said that, we actually did do one group in Melbourne, and it was during some of the COVID peak times. So we did it all on zoom, and they even performed on zoom. So we had a couple of online shows during the lock downs, and that took our reach to a more global stage. We had someone in a trans person in Pakistan buy a ticket to come see Queers of Joy, and then we met a group of LGBTQIA refugees living in Kakuma in Kenya. Kakuma is like the second largest refugee camp in the world. It's located in the desert. There's 200,000 people there in this kind of hellhole. Say it how it is.

And so we met Lucretia who reached out on on Facebook to Chris. And Lucretia is a young trans woman who calls herself a human rights defender, an incredibly beautiful hearted, intelligent person who reached out to Chris and we sent a recording of the Queers of Joy show because she was like, what is this is 'queer joy?' I've never heard these words together in a sentence.

Now she's from Uganda. And they're a group of them about 56 adults and their children have all fled Uganda, either they've had their partner murdered, been threatened to be killed. And the only reason the hitman who was paid to kill them didn't kill them was because they knew their brother. And so they said to them, run, take your children and run leave the country. So people have fled horrific circumstances in Uganda because of their sexuality because of their gender expression. And they've fled and found themselves in Kakuma, Kenya, only to be surrounded by a diverse range of refugees from all over Africa, including Kenya, homosexuality is illegal in Kenya. And it's illegal in many nations in Africa.

They're receiving discrimination and acts of violence, not only from the Kenyan police, but also from other refugees. So when we met them, their shelter had been burnt down to the ground in a petrol bombing.

Anthony Doick 26:04
That's terrible.

Danica Lani 26:04
And unfortunately, one of their comrades died. Trinidad, and he died because of the burns that he received in that. So they were sleeping on the ground, they had nothing to sleep on. Out in the elements. And so we started raising money for them through Queers of Joy through the show, asking people to donate, we had some raffles, that kind of thing. And they were able to buy some mattresses, buy some rice. They had one cup of rice left to Christmas, I think it was October, and they had one cup of rice between 56 adults and their children. You know, and they've banded together because they found each other and they're a group of people who are activists. They are people who are committed to having a voice and committed to not just assimilating and trying to blend in to be safe. They're like, No, I am who I am. And I'm going to have a voice and I'm going to be who I am, even if that means in resulting violence. So that some of the most courageous people and we have fortnightly zoom calls with eight adults from that community. And we've developed an incredible friendship and a mutually beneficial friendship with them. So.

Anthony Doick 27:05
And I think that's something that we need to also not forget, just because in a lot of the Western worlds, we've got our rights now. And there's still parts of the world where you can be harmed, and not even a second thought is given just because of your sexuality,

Danica Lani 27:19
Yes. And they really are related to as subhuman. So it takes nothing for someone who's come to the water well, where they all get their water from and say to them, no, you have to go to the back of the line. And we'll drink the fresh water. And then you can have the dirty water. So they're always dealing with drinking dirty water, which results in malaria and typhoid, which you need medicine for. And, you know, so needing to spend money on medication to deal with the fact that they've drunk this dirty water. And, you know, it's just, it's out of being related to as subhuman.

Anthony Doick 27:51
And it's good to see the community of Kings of Joy are helping and doing their bit for for the world's LGBTI plus community.

Danica Lani 27:58
Absolutely. And it's been so mutually beneficial to have Queers of Joy be connected with people who live at Block 13. So they've created their own website, www.freeblock13.com, as well, so you can hear more about their stories and see how you can contribute to them as well.

Interestingly, they've never become bitter. You know, I think a lot of us would be bitter about the amount of discrimination and violence they experience. But they're just very generous hearted people. Still dealing with being impacted by that kind of trauma, but they haven't become bitter, which is just inspiring to me. I want to be like them.

Anthony Doick 28:36
They're taking the higher ground and showing you how humanity should be.

Danica Lani 28:40
Yes, exactly.

Anthony Doick 28:41
Now, can you tell us a bit about the LGBTQI+ plus yoga? That sounds pretty interesting.

Danica Lani 28:47
Yeah. Well, all of my business is really set up to empower LGBTQIA+ people to feel good in the body using dance, yoga and tantra. So that you know we can be 100% at home in our own skin and stay sane and tap into community. So when the first lockdowns happened, I lost 67% of my revenue overnight. And because I was a choreographer who specialized in flash mobs, so you can imagine flash mobs were no longer a thing.

Anthony Doick 29:18
Not a good thing to be during COVID - a flash mob? No.

Danica Lani 29:21
No, we're not doing flash mobs anymore. And similarly with I was teaching yoga in gyms at that stage, and of course, they all had to shut down. So luckily, a dear gay boyfriend of mine in Melbourne rang me and said, Okay, we're going to get a group of people together. We're taking your classes online. Let's start next week. And I had zero clients, but really thanks to him, I was able to transition online quite quickly. And we've stayed online.

So you know, we've got a small number of people who participate in what we call the Online Yoga Club. We're thinking about making it application-only and in your application, you'd have to demonstrate that you're willing to show up to a yoga class where you've just rolled out of bed and you've got bed hair. You know, it's that kind of thing. We're not there to look good. We're just there to do the practice. And you know, there's there might be kids in the background, there might be pets in the background, and they're included, you know, in the whole thing. And one of the services that I provide as well through yoga. Online Yoga Club.

Anthony Doick 30:18
And we'll also pop all the links in the show notes for that too, because that sounds really interesting. And also during COVID, it was a great thing, but a lot of people do like the convenience of doing well, a lot of things online, now. You're able to do stuff that you probably wouldn't have the time to do if you had to physically go to all these places and do it.

Danica Lani 30:35
Absolutely. The zero commute aspect has been brilliant. Like you cut out the commute, you can fit a lot more in.

Anthony Doick 30:42
So very true. We askall our guests this: if you could go back and tell your younger self anything, what would it be?

Danica Lani 30:48
That is just a beautiful question, Anthony. I would tell my younger self that everything always works out magnificently for you. It's always working out and sometimes it looks like it's not but it actually does. It always works out. And you know, here I am now and I'm married in a incredible relationship that I didn't even dream being possible. In an incredible partnership. I just I love my life. So yeah, things get better.

Anthony Doick 31:14
Thank you so much for coming on today's show. It's been a pleasure.

Danica Lani 31:17
Thank you so much, Anthony.

Anthony Doick 31:23
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