spotlight on member ronnie vigallon

All or Nothing

When club vice-president Ronnie Vigallon wants something, she goes for it 100 percent. Make that 110 percent if someone tells her she can’t have it. Take, for instance, the trumpet. With a saxophonist dad, a vocalist mom, a rock musician brother, and three sisters who played assorted instruments and sang “like the Supremes,” it was always a given that Ronnie, the youngest, would take up music too.

At 3 she started piano, but by 9 felt it wasn’t her calling. She went with her dad to the music room at her Hayward elementary school, where the teacher presented a table full of instruments. Ronnie spied the gleaming trumpet and pointed. The teacher’s response? “You can’t play that—it’s a boy’s instrument!” To which her dad hollered, “She can play anything she wants!” And she did.

Ronnie wears many hats: musician, athlete, and mama witch to Aaron and Alyssa.

For the next decade, Ronnie says, “I was really devoted to my trumpet. I practiced really hard, two to three hours a day…I had to be better than the boys.” And she was. Ronnie beat out boys to play trumpet in her junior high and high school jazz bands, and at 13 landed a coveted spot in Youth of America, an elite performing arts group that backed up celebrities from Bob Hope to Tower of Power and accompanied the Bicentennial Freedom Train as it traveled the country in the mid-’70s.

In the musical hierarchy Ronnie started out as “fifth chair,” but by age 16 worked her way up to lead trumpeter. No matter which position she held, though, Ronnie was the only girl trumpet player—and “someone was always trying to get my chair,” she says. Ronnie continued fending off would-be chair stealers, even late in high school, when, she says, playing trumpet “wasn’t cool anymore.” But her mom “wouldn’t let me quit,” says Ronnie. She’s grateful now, however: “Looking back, those were my best years…I was shy, and the only way I’d come out of my shell was through music.”

After racking up enough extra credits to graduate from high school early, Ronnie took off for the University of Reno with a music scholarship. She didn’t last long, however: “I was too close to my parents and didn’t want to leave home.” She returned to Hayward and played gigs with her brother while pondering her future, which she decided lay in . . . teeth. A kid who had “about 12 cavities” every time she visited the dentist, Ronnie was intrigued by dentistry and enrolled in a dental hygiene program at Chabot College.

While at Chabot Ronnie also started working out at a Gold’s Gym, where she admired the other female fitness buffs: “I liked the way the girls looked…in the early ’80s they were more toned rather than bulky.” Ronnie soon found herself doing full-on bodybuilding, eating essentially a no-fat diet and lifting weights four hours a day. After two years she was 95 pounds of muscle, with only about 5 percent fat. Ronnie did bodybuilding exhibitions and then took it to the next level: competition. She placed third out of ten in the lightweight category at her very first one. Unfortunately, though, Ronnie herniated a disk in her neck while preparing for her second competition.

Life as she knew it came to a halt, as she was unable to attend school or work for a year while essentially paralyzed on the right side. She did rehab and took pain medications without results, until she met a physical therapist who “got me back in the gym”—silencing skeptics who said she’d never lift weights again. The disk eventually went back into place, and Ronnie lifts weights to this day, albeit in moderation.

The neck injury did cause a lifelong preclusion from bending over dental patients, however. Ronnie switched to business classes and in 1989 stumbled on a golden opportunity when a dentist friend invited her to manage his new practice in Berkeley. Ronnie found she liked it, and for the next few years, having ended an early and brief first marriage, she worked and enjoyed being “very, very single.” She bought herself a Fremont home and a Corvette, and took sports-themed vacations.

Then, in 1993, Ronnie met Jay Vigallon—“a jock like me”—at a dinner party hosted by mutual friends. When they began dating Ronnie says she was “very resistant” to the idea of commitment: “I really enjoyed being single…I was dating five guys at the same time…and I didn’t want kids.” Through charm and persistence, though, Jay eventually persuaded her to drop the other four guys.

After they married in 1995 Ronnie even had a change of heart about kids. Due to endometriosis, however, she had difficulty conceiving, and endured four years of painful fertility treatments until she and Jay decided to give in vitro fertilization a try. Bucking the odds, the first round was successful, and twins Aaron and Alyssa were born in 2000. Former carefree travelers Ronnie and Jay both then stayed home with the babies for a year. Jay had injured his back years earlier and already worked from home as a stockbroker, while Ronnie took a break to rethink her Berkeley job. When the year was up she found a new position as a financial administrator at a large Palo Alto cosmetic dentistry office, and she and Jay settled into a role reversal, with him manning the home front and her making the daily haul to the Peninsula, first from Fremont and then from Castro Valley, where they moved two years ago.

Overall their nontraditional arrangement has worked out, though “it’s been a bigger strain on me,” Ronnie says, mainly “because he’s not a woman. Things don’t get done the way I would do them.” Still, both have learned to compromise, and Ronnie is now thinking of starting her own dental office consulting business to have more flexibility, while Jay wants to get out of the house more, possibly doing real estate appraisal. Jay’s time at home with the kids has been a gift, though, and under his tutelage Aaron and Alyssa are already Little League candidates. But Ronnie has her sights set on another activity: the piano that resides patiently in their home, waiting for small fingers to stake their claim. —Lisa Crystal

 

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