Ballet rats. That’s what they used to call kids like Agota Gabor.

We first meet her as a rat in the Budapest pack, in the Hungarian Opera house, dreaming of becoming a prima ballerina and starring in Swan Lake. Dancing is her life. But polio crushes her dreams of classical ballet.

Through gruesome therapy and iron will, she learns to walk and even dance again, well enough to make a living in Canada, her new country where she and her mom flee after the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

You’ll next see Gabor as a glamorous chorus girl at the Bellevue Casino in the swinging Montreal of the late 1950s. Soon after, she joins a CBC concert party entertaining the UN troops in the Middle East, Europe, and the North Pole. She also becomes Canadian TV’s dance instructor as she teaches ballroom dancing on CBC’s Take 30. 

Gabor then goes back to school to get a journalism degree, gets married, and as a TV Journalist with her foreign correspondent husband lives the glamorous expat life of the mid 20th century. He covers Vietnam and Northern Ireland while she works as a television reporter in Hong Kong, Bali, Jakarta, London and Budapest. They divorce and re-marry.

It is a roller coaster life full of adventure, made complete by the arrival of a premature daughter she adores. She stops travelling and starts a public relations company. Through its success and some smart real estate moves, she becomes set for life as the matriarch and anchor of her family.

Then, the poliovirus attacks again in the form of the post-polio syndrome and Gabor needs to fight it again and forever.

Forever On Pointe: A True Story (Glissade Productions, April 2022), is a fascinating account of a journey from the intense world of professional ballet to the bloody streets of the Hungarian Revolution to the glittering nightclubs of Montreal.

Gabor takes readers on the adventure of her life and paints a rich historical picture of the world at the time.

Bio

Agota Gabor, empowers women to chase dreams, reinvent themselves, and succeed against all odds. Gabor grew up as a ‘Ballet rat” –a ballerina to be- at the Budapest Opera. She contracted polio, which shattered her dreams and after the 1956 revolution she sought refuge with her mother in Canada, Gabor recovered from polio, and became a nightclub performer in swinging Montreal. She later earned a journalism degree from Ryerson University and worked in television in Canada, the Far East and Europe.

Gabor began her career in Public Relations in Hong Kong, at the Mandarin Hotel, doing publicity for visiting heads of States, and celebrities (Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, The Shah of Iran, Shirley Bassey, Lee Radziwill), and continued PR in London England as Public Relations Manager of the London Intercontinental Hotel. 

In 1981 she founded The Gabor Group, a Communications Company in Toronto, which she is still running today. Gabor lives life to its fullest despite having post-polio syndrome. During the COVD-19 pandemic, 2021, she released the handbook, Public Speaking, Presentations, Media Interviews—proving that age does not determine relevancy.