Greg Page has found his smile again, he tells Jacqui Lang, thanks to two of the girls in his life.
Meet the two lovely females who’ve put the spring back in the step of former Wiggle Greg Page: beloved new wife Vanessa, and adorable baby daughter Lara.
For the first time, a very private Greg and Vanessa are revealing their happiness at finding one another.
“Until Vanessa came along, on a lot of levels I was a pretty sad and lonely guy,” admits Greg, cradling little six-month-old Lara.
Nods Vanessa, “It was obvious to me that for a lot of reasons you were very unsettled in your life when I met you.”
Looking at the relaxed, happy couple today, it’s hard to imagine that when they first met up for an innocent coffee a couple of years ago, both were in a fragile state. “We were both undergoing big life changes – but it was our similar approach to life that really brought us together,” Greg reflects.
Newly widowed, Vanessa was still dealing with the loss of her beloved husband, the father of her two children, Hayden, then four, and Claudia, then two.
Greg, who’d been living on his own for several years, was battling the debilitating effects of orthostatic intolerance, the dizzying disorder which had forced him to quit The Wiggles.
“Leaving the group was a major life change. I guess for a while, I lost my direction. The Wiggles had been my career for 16 years, since leaving school,” he says. “Suddenly, everything I knew was changing.”
One day, Greg heard through friends that his old classmate, Vanessa, was mourning the loss of her husband of eight years, who’d died after a lengthy battle with cancer.
“I decided to send her some flowers and a card,” Greg recalls. “I hadn’t seen Vanessa for many years, but our mutual friends had kept me in touch perdiodically with what she’d been going through.”
Vanessa and Greg, both 38, attended the same Sydney primary and high schools, where they remember each other as “good people”, but mixed in different circles.
Several weeks after sending the flowers, Greg got Vanessa’s number from friends and telephoned her; they got talking.
For the story see this week’s Woman’s Day, on sale April 26, 2010.
