Parenting & Family Quote by Cathy Rigby

Rigby’s line lands like an offhand joke with a shadow underneath it: the kind of thing a grown-up athlete repeats because it’s funny, but also because it’s faintly alarming. A kid telling a famous gymnast, “I’ll leave my bedroom window open for you,” is innocent in intention and cinematic in imagery. It’s Peter Pan logic applied to celebrity: admiration so intense it wants to become physical proximity, a secret entrance, a private bond that bypasses parents, schedules, and reality.

The genius of the quote is that it exposes how fandom works at its youngest and least guarded. Children don’t have the social armor adults develop; they speak their desire for closeness as literal access. The bedroom window is both sweet (trust, welcome, belief in magic) and a boundary crossed. Rigby, as an athlete who performed in a pre-social-media era of public mythmaking, becomes a figure who can plausibly “drop by” like a friend or a storybook hero. It’s the same impulse that fuels autograph lines and backstage passes, distilled into a child’s domestic architecture.

Subtextually, Rigby is pointing to the peculiar responsibility of being admired: you’re not just winning medals, you’re inhabiting kids’ imaginations. The remark also hints at the thin line public figures walk when affection is offered in forms that are tender but not appropriate. She repeats it as a safe anecdote, but it quietly reminds you that celebrity is, at heart, a relationship people feel entitled to make real.