Hello I’m Tina, I’m born and raised Clearwater FL and have been in Florida my whole life except for the 6 years I lived in New York. I’ve worked with YTE for 7 years, I mainly do balloon art but I’ve recently begun to do facepainting and I occasionally do events as princess characters. Everyone always asks “how did you get started in this business?” Haha long story but basically I just enjoy learning new things and one day I was at a cafe and I saw someone had made a really impressive balloon flamingo and I thought to myself, wow, I would like to learn how to do this. So that was kind of in the back of my mind for a while, and at that time I was going to a Korean church in Tampa and in the summer of 2015 I went on a mission trip to Haiti. And like… I wanted to do something more than sing songs in creole and make sandwiches (what I really wanted to do was help build a water system or something like that but that’s not what our team was equipped for)… so I thought of bringing gifts for the kids in Haiti but I was poor and was only allowed to bring one suitcase so I was quite limited. That’s when the idea sprung on me to make balloon animals because all you need is a couple bags of balloons and a pump and that really goes a long way. So, I watched a few tutorials on YouTube, learned how to make a few simple things, and since then I’ve just continued to learn and improve. Then one day, I was at my day job as a substitute teacher and I used to do this thing I called “STEM trivia” basically I wrote a question on the board, sometimes it was a math problem or sometimes it was a question that came out of their assigned reading, and if a student got it correct then I would reward them by making a balloon animal for them. The kids loved it, you wouldn’t believe how competitive these teenagers would get over a math problem. Anyways, this was Fall 2015 and one day one of the math teachers came in and asked me if I was the one making these balloons, at first I thought he was going to yell at me, haha, but it actually turned out that he and his girlfriend also were balloon artists and they worked for YTE. So he introduced me to Jonathan Fudge and it has been a beautiful friendship ever since I think my favorite thing about the job, like Eddie said, is the people I work with. I’ve made a lot of (what I hope to be) lifelong friends and I like that we are part of this small community of balloon artists and entertainers, where everyone knows each other and I think for the most part we tend to be very supportive of one another. I always have more fun when I’m working with fellow entertainers, it’s especially fun when I work with someone who has a very big and colorful personality! A lot of our people are like that. I like to feed off their energy and laugh with them. But I’m also just as comfortable working alone which is most of the time. I also really like that it’s a very flexible job, which allows me to continue going to school (I’m studying engineering at USF). Though I don’t get to do it as often, I think my favorite thing to do is to perform as a princes character, because for that one or two hours I get to feel kind of like a celebrity. Everyone wants to take a photo with me, everyone is so nice to me, and the kids get so excited and they just love on me and it’s the best