Tamara Taggart Interview

I am making the transition from actress to actress AND freelance writer. My plan is to write for magazine/newspapers, as well as online publications and that ever-so-elusive novel.

I will be posting my articles here; the first, in honor of Valentine's Day, is an interview Tamara Taggart graciously gave me last year. What a fantastic woman.

Here is the article:

Tamara Taggart has a terrible cold and has to preserve her voice. But when asked about how she met her husband, the Weather Anchor seems to lift herself out of her murky condition and her voice becomes the silky tenor we have come to be so familiar with on CTV.

“I met my husband at a hockey game…I felt a connection right away and I thought he did too…but then I found out he had a girlfriend he lived with…he’d been with her for ten years…”

Resigned to the fact that this would be the end of the love connection, she put the brief encounter behind her for the next year and a half. Until fate intervened.

“I was at a party and someone said ‘Did you hear Dave and his girlfriend broke up?’…and I went to the same Christmas Party I always go to and he came in and made a beeline for me and that was that.”

How did she know he would be the one for her? “I’ve had a lot of first dates and I think I have a really good sense of a good person…and that’s what I knew about him from the beginning.”

Her son Beckett, born August 2, 2007 and daughter Zoe, born a year later on September 24, 2008, taught her how big her capacity for love could be. “I didn’t think I was able to love as much as I love them. They definitely hold your heart, you’d do anything for them, throw yourself in front of a bus for them.”

With so much love in her life, what has surprised her about it? “I guess there are so many layers to it. I love my dog, I love my job, I love my husband, I love my kids, I love a lot of things…when you peel away all the layers you get to the most intense part of it and the thing I love the most is my husband and kids. It can be just a word until you find something you intensely love.”

Does being a full-time mom and career woman leave much room to celebrate Valentine’s Day, the yearly symbol of everlasting love? “It never used to symbolize anything for me…but now it means more because it’s the day David and I were engaged…he asked me in a Japanese restaurant, so we always go back there on that day to exchange little presents and be together.”

What advice would she give herself about love if she could go back to her younger years? “I remember I was 14 or 15 and this boy broke my heart and I was devastated and I remember my aunt said to me ‘I know you’re hurt right now…you need to know you’re going to feel this way again, this is not the first time this is going to happen.’ I was horrified but I’m so glad she said that to me because the next time it happened, I remembered what she said and I knew it would be okay.”

-Alisen Down.