Recently the TLC show TWO IN A MILLION featured our friend, Tiffany Geigel, a young woman who we on the UCAN! team already have the pleasure of knowing. Besides being beautiful, Tiffany is smart, funny, and one heck of a dancer! TWO IN A MILLION brings people together who suffer from rare medical conditions. Tiffany was chosen for this show because she too lives this life. Even with a loving family, and her gift of dance, she must forge ahead every day and keep her head up. “It’s a hard life. It’s not easy,” Tiffany tearfully tells one of the show’s producers. “The worst thing is the constant ridicule, being made fun of and laughed at.” Tiffany was born with the rare genetic disorder Jarcho-Levin syndrome. People with JLS have distinctive malformations of the spine and ribs. Their organs are constricted in too small a space which often causes stress on the respiratory system. Other characteristics are long limbs, limited neck mobility and short stature. And then there is the chronic pain. “Sometimes I want to rip my body apart because nothing helps to make it feel better,” Tiffany says very plainly, as if she’s describing something normal like brushing her teeth. Even with the continual pain, and a heart that beats much faster than the average rate, Tiffany has always confronted the odds with which she was born. She attended Rita Hamilton School of Dance in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She then went to Dance Universal in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where she continued to study with Julie Ann Miranda. She then went to Hunter College to study dance. She has since become a ballet teacher at Dance Universal. Tiffany now works full time and also dances with two dance companies, Heidi Latsky Dance and Marked Dance Project. She is also a stage manager, a model, and an aspiring actress. Those of us who know Tiffany personally always knew she could dance. She’d been dancing since she was a little girl. In 2009 the whole world got to see her gift when she appeared on the TV show SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE. Tiffany came across the auditions for the show a week before they came to New York. She decided to audition because they were being held right in her hometown of Brooklyn, NY. She went there with no idea of what the process entailed. There are different rounds and other judges she had to impress long before viewers get to see her on television. Tiffany passed each
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