Interview with Tanya Memme - Part I

This is part I of II of the interview with Tanya Memme, host of the Emmy-nominated Sell This House and former Miss Canada. Part II can be viewed here

Dan Sanchez : Tanya, you are a multi-talented performer, a TV-host, actress, dancer, singer, and writer. What is that quintessential thing about you that drives you to achieve so much?

Tanya Memme That quintessential thing... I just think that life isn't very exciting if you don't set goals and try to achieve them, all along holding your integrity in check and seeing how well you do. I've always been extremely ambitious. I started off as a dancer and then got into pageants and then acting and went to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, which honed my craft, and now that I'm on a television show that focuses on home design and staging, I'm about to write a book on staging. So I have no idea how all of this came about, but I'm the type of person who when I see an opportunity I seize on it right away. Seize the opportunity, seize the day... and it makes me very happy to set a goal and see how long it takes me to achieve it. [laughs]

DS : Professionally, what would you like to accomplish? What do you see in your professional future?

TM : I eventually want to parlay all of it into helping others somehow, whether it's as a talk-show type or hopefully as the female Ryan Seacrest where I'm working with teenagers and helping them achieve their dreams and their goals. I just finished a film with Corey Feldman in Orlando, Florida. I played the lead, so we'll see what happens when that comes out. But years from now, eventually I want to do something where I can affect a lot of people and help them achieve their dreams or achieve what it is they're trying to strive for, their issues at hand. But right now, I'm really, really just enjoying the ride. I've been so fortunate to have all these different opportunities come my way and I try to do my very best at each and every one of them.

DS : Of all the things you do professionally, what seems to be that which you enjoy the most and why?

TM : Everything has its ups and everything has its downs. I think there's something about acting, there's something about singing, and there's something about doing films as opposed to hosting...there's something about everything that I absolutely love. So I don't really have a favourite. I know that's a lame answer [laughs], but I wouldn't say that I have a favourite because I really love the variety too.

I'm a Gemini, you know. Geminis like variety and I think that's why I'm doing so many things. I think that if I got stuck on one thing....unless it was film, in which I could do a different film—one movie I was this, another movie I was something else completely different—that would be different. I think that because I'm doing all these different things, I get to express various sides of my personality. I really like them all, I don't have a favourite.

DS : Your main show is "Sell this House." Since your family is in the construction business, do they play a role in the development of your show? and do you get any tips or ideas from the family construction business?

TM : I was born and raised in the housing industry and the construction business. When I was a little kid, my father used to take me to all the different sites and tell me, "Okay, so next we have to do this and build this and dig that," and he'd show me all the model homes and I could see all the different designers, and how they're all different and what I would do to change it. So they don't have any influence on the show now. I only see my family twice a year because I'm so busy, and we're both busy with our own lives. It's definitely a big part of who I am, so with all of the houses that I go into and the different things that I can add to the show, whether it's invites or whether it's just my personality, it all comes from growing up in the housing world. It has a big effect, I would say. It had an effect on me actually getting the job. I think that was the icing on the cake. Because not only am I a television host and I had a lot of experience, but when they found out that my family builds between 200 and 400 houses a year, I think it was a nice little [laughs] topping on the entire deal.

DS : Now that you are a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight Canada, which end of the microphone do you prefer being on?

TM : Well, I always like being on the other side of the microphone. I like it better being interviewed than interviewing, but at the same time I do love interviewing. It's just that when you're being interviewed it's usually because of an accomplishment you've achieved, so to me that's a really wonderful place to be. And how fortunate can you be to want to be interviewed by anybody? I think it's a very fortunate position. Interviewing is more work-related for me—it's work as far as something that I love to do. One is for pleasure and one is for work. But I love it either way.

DS : There are quite a number of professional motivation speakers or authors, and self-help is a growing industry. How can people stay positive? Where do you derive your motivation?

TM : I get bits and pieces from a lot of different people. Marianne Williamson. I'm a big fan of Marianne Williamson....

DS : And who is she?

TM : She's a motivational speaker. She's pro-women, she's written a million books, about how to live your best life. She's actually quite famous. If you go into any Barnes & Noble, she's right there in the self-help section.

DS : And what has she said that has particularly helped you or motivated you in any way?

TM : [Her books are] geared more towards women and helping them achieve their goals and feel good about who they are and take the whole body-conscious image thing and moving it over and working on who you are as a person and trying to see the glass half-full instead of half-empty and knowing the only way that you can achieve something or change yourself is if you decide to do that. Nobody is going to do it for you and there are no shortcuts and you really do have to do the work and you can do it and you can achieve things by keeping your integrity in check. It's not always easy. Sometimes people will make you feel less than what you know you are because you're a woman. And women do it to each other too, that's the crazy thing.

DS : So is integrity important to you?

TM : Integrity is very important, yeah. Very, very, very, very.... If I can't look at myself in the mirror in the morning, then what's the use of having whatever it is you have? I just like to live my life that way. There's a variety of different steps and stages and things that I go through, but I share mainly the mistakes that I've made, the journey that I've been on, and how it's not about what somebody looks like on the outside: it's about who they are on the inside. And you know, there are pros and cons to being beautiful on the outside, and there are pros and cons to not being so beautiful on the outside. You work on the inside—that's where it all begins. I kind of take them* on the journey of how long it took me to get to where I am and how many auditions I've been on and how many times... you know, I won Miss Canada and I gave up the crown five months later...

*[Note: Tanya Memme occasionally gives motivational speeches to young women and talks about her life and career]

DS : Why?

TM : Oh, that's a whole other story. [laughs] I didn't feel that at the time... The Miss Canada title to me means an incredible amount... it's very prestigious and it's all to help a woman's dreams come true... help them financially and help them in any other way... to give them a step ahead. But the gentleman to whom the Miss World Organization has sold the license to was not worthy at all to be carrying the license of the Miss World Canada Pageant—and the way he ran the entire show, and the way he ran the whole project after I had won was less than admirable, so it was something that I didn't want to be a part of anymore. So I gave up the crown, I moved to New York City, and I got accepted into the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.

You know, I grew up in a fairly well-off family and then all of a sudden when the recession hit, we almost lost our house, so there were four or five years where we had nothing and my father calls me up one day and he says, "The well is dry. You're on your own. And if you want to keep your dreams alive, you gotta go do it on your own." [laughs] So, here I am working in New York City. At first I was working under the table, four jobs, and attending the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with six girls and it was... I wouldn't want to repeat my 20s if I was paid. So it was a tough, tough struggle, but you can do it and you can get there. And there's always going to be a better day ahead. Always, no matter what happens. There's always going to be a better day ahead. So my speeches are more about that. I share my journey, because women want to relate to each other. I share my journey with them and how I got out of certain situations and how I dealt with it and how I didn't deal with it the right way sometimes. This is very uncut, very raw, very open.

DS : I think it's very impressive how you gave up this title. Not many would do that.

TM : It was actually a very difficult decision. The year before I won Miss Canada, I called my wedding off. I was engaged, yeah...[laughs]. I was engaged to—he was not at the time, but he was my high-school teacher. We dated after, of course—about a year after I graduated. We started dating and he was six years older than me, so it was a big thing. I was Miss Niagara and everybody knew that I was dating this person. And then right when I won, I entered in the Miss Canada pageant, and he proposed to me. I ended up calling it off three weeks before the wedding and then six months later, I won Miss Canada.

DS : Seems like you have all the stars positioned in the right place.

TM : Well, it seems that way, but I'm a big believer that you have to do the work in order to open up the right doors. He just wasn't right for me. Everyone saw the writing on the wall except for me. There were 500 people invited to my wedding. My family's Mountain View Homes, a construction company, built me a house, a beautiful house—way too big, something I didn't even need at the time—so there was a lot of pressure on me to go through with the wedding. My dad lost a lot of money. A lot of money. But my mother finally convinced me to just have the guts to go and let him know that he was just not right for me. So I finally did. It took me forever to get over that disaster, and then six months later I won Miss Canada, and then five months after that I had to give up that crown [laughs].

It was definitely a roller coaster event at a very young age, but I learned that you can't trust everybody and you can't believe in everything that you hear. I came from a very, not restricted, but very Italian Catholic family, and I was very naive, let me tell you. It was tough to call that off because that was a big dream and it takes people a while to realize that something they believed in and hoped for for so long isn't what you thought it was going to be. And then you have to make the hard decision to do what you need to do. I didn't want the next girl that won Miss Canada to have to go through what I went through. The Miss World people said to me that the only way I could get the license taken away from him is if I give up the crown. So I said, "Ok, I'm going to give up the crown, because I don't want the future Miss Canada to go through what I went through and I really hope you'll give the license to somebody new." And they did.

DS : When you say what you went through, what was it that you went through?

TM : Well... [laughs] [One thing was,] I didn't get most of my prizes for Miss Canada. Training for the Miss World Pageant—you know there are 86 women from across the world—we gathered in England for a week and then we went to South Africa for five weeks. It is a big, huge pageant. I had to borrow all my friends' clothes at the last minute—I was promised a wardrobe, I was promised all these things—and nothing came through. I came to the airport, my ticket wasn't even there—I didn't even have a ticket to England, and then I go to South Africa. Everything he said was going to happen, when I would get there, just didn't happen. So I didn't know what was going on. My father had to transfer all of his credit cards into my name, so that when I was in South Africa, I'd have money.

It was a very, very tense time in our family's lives. First of all, to rewind, when I got to the Miss World Pageant, the Miss World officials told me I was not allowed to have any contact at all whatsoever with the gentlemen who owned the pageant and I'd have to just concentrate on their pageant. Which I understand because there must have been stuff going on behind the scenes that I didn't know about. But then when I got back, I found I wasn't even legally entered into the Miss World Pageant anyway, and I couldn't have won anyway because he didn't sign all the paperwork properly. So that happened, and I'm thinking, "You know, this is not good for me." He basically broke into my house one night when we were having dinner, just came storming through the front door and demanded the crown back. The crown was worth $13,000.

DS : Before?

TM : After.

DS : Oh, after you gave it up.

TM : Yeah, he wanted the Miss Canada crown. He said it was worth $13,000. So I went upstairs into my bedroom and grabbed my little box—my little crown... my memento that I had—my most precious memento that I had from this whole disaster, handed it over and I asked him not to contact us ever again. That's only a fraction of what happened, but I'm just giving you an idea – it was pretty crazy [laughs]. Nothing like that has happened since and I'm all for the Miss Canada pageant, but I'm so happy that nothing like this has come up since.

DS : This is a question about that so-called eating disorder that you had. Is that something that you wanted to tell our readers about?

TM : Well, I never had an eating disorder—it was more. When I was 18 and I started to get into the Miss Niagara and the Miss Canada pageants, I was always told, "You've got to lose 20 pounds. You've got to lose the last 15-20. You have to do that. You're never going to win, you're never this, you're never that." You know, I ended up winning anyway. So what you realize is it's not necessarily about weight. It's about being happy, and it's about shining through it all. But that was ingrained in my head so much at the time when I was in high school, and I had no idea what a protein was, what a carbohydrate was, or what different kinds of sugar were, or anything... So I just didn't eat. I decided, well, if I have to lose the weight—that's the only way I'm going to win, I really want to win, so I'll just not eat. I didn't know how to diet. So I had about a month of eating literally celery, and diet coke, and probably non-fat bran muffins or something like that. And so one day, I had a hypoglycaemic seizure in my English class in high school, and...

DS : Not enough calories or sugar in your system?

TM : Yeah, and my body just freaked out. And I never did really lose all the weight anyway, because your body holds on to fat if you don't do it properly. So since then, I've been on a quest to understand the body, how to lose weight properly and how food affects the body chemically and physically. I'm a bit of a health nut now, and I love living my life that way.

DS : Are you a vegetarian?

TM : I go in and out of being a vegetarian, but if I do have meat, it's very little. I will only eat chicken and turkey—I barely have any red meat anymore, I don't really like it. I do eat fish, but yeah, I definitely cut down on the meat. I would say about 10 per cent of my diet comes from meat, excluding fish.