Where this was said
Childhood, Rita Moreno, and Dancing Without Fear
At 21:07 · chapter starts 18:40
Jason asks what came first for Lopez: inspiration from accomplishment or from witnessing a specific talent. Lopez is definitive: it was the arts, and it was Rita Moreno. Her mother watched West Side Story in theaters when it first came out and showed it to the family every year thereafter. Lopez can't remember the first time she saw it — she was probably three or four — but she distinctly remembers watching it one Thanksgiving on TV and thinking, 'That's what I want to do.' Her mother was vivacious, a room-taker; Lopez was more like her father, quiet and inward. But the desire to perform was always there. Jason then probes the self-consciousness threshold that most kids hit around ten or eleven — Lopez says flatly that she was never afraid to make a fool of herself. She attributes that partly to her athletic background: you fall, you get up. You're scrappy.
Lopez's mother played West Side Story every year, and Lopez credits watching Rita Moreno as the foundational inspiration for her career in singing, dancing, and acting.
