By TARYN LUNA

At 10 minutes to show time, the stadium doors open at the Miami Seaquarium and hordes of people pour in. Children flock to the tank at center stage, eager to see the star: a 20-foot-long, 7,000-pound female killer whale.

“Look, Mommy, it’s Lolita!” a little girl shouts above the beat of Latin pop as she catches her first glimpse.

Lolita the Killer Whale is the main attraction, but by the time the show is over, what’s fired children’s imaginations is the thought of growing up to be just like Shanna Simpson, the senior whale trainer. After all, she’s the one who gets to swan dive into the water to perform “behaviors” with Lolita.

On a recent Friday, Simpson opens with a “pec stand,” a behavior that has her emerging atop the belly-up whale, her knees on Lolita’s stomach and her hand rubbing the whale’s tongue.

She can still remember the first time she rode Lolita and attempted this move.

“She’s coming at me to pick me up with her mouth open,” Simpson recalls, “and I’m not going to lie, your heart starts beating and it’s very intimidating. Underwater I had 5,000 things going on in my head.”

As a second-grader watching her first whale show at SeaWorld in San Antonio, Simpson, who grew up in Roswell, N.M., could only imagine such a moment.

“I just knew I wanted to do it,” Simpson said. “My family thought I was crazy, of course, but they supported my craziness.”

Though a little wary about her dreams, Simpson’s parents — Joe, a teacher and a football coach, and Janice, a nurse — sent their daughter to a SeaWorld Career Camp in San Antonio when she was 16.

The camp confirmed Simpson’s chosen path. Trainers advised her to major in psychology and zoology. Training animals is Psych 101, she said.

Two weeks after graduating from Western New Mexico University, in 2002, Simpson was hired by the Miami Seaquarium as a trainer working with seals and later dolphins, a career for which people are in high demand.

At 28, Simpson has worked at the Seaquarium for seven years. She met her husband, Brady, here, when he and fellow Coast Guardsmen came to a show. And she spends so much time at work with Lolita — the average day includes nonstop training, feedings and cleanings — that she considers the whale part of the family.

“I have two babies, the whale and my daughter,” she said. When she was six months pregnant, Simpson was performing two shows a week with Lolita.

“I videotaped my show to be able to show my daughter what she was doing when she was inside of me,” Simpson said.

Then she saw the video. “I looked like the other whale,” Simpson joked. “I was so big! I thought, ‘I’m done.’”

She decided to take a break from working with Lolita, but continued to work with other animals at the park until two days before she had her baby.

Now, Simpson’s 2 -year-old daughter lives the life her mother wished she’d had as a child.

“She comes here all the time,” Simpson said. “She just thinks coming here and hanging out with the dolphins is normal.” This year, the family’s Christmas card featured Aubrey sitting on one of the Seaquarium dolphins.

Days off are scarce, she says. Holidays are rare.

“You’re on your feet every day in the South Florida sun; it really takes a toll on you,” she said. “You’re swimming, you’re jumping, you’re flying through the air. It’s very physically demanding.”

And although she doesn’t have much free time anymore, Simpson gives the Seaquarium credit for a life she says she feels blessed to lead.

“It’s so surreal for me because this is what I wanted to be — the one on the killer whale’s face in the show,” she said. “And I am.”

Call it destiny for the little girl whose last name once foreshadowed her future.

“‘Oh, Shanna Whalen wants to be a whale trainer,’” Simpson laughed, recalling her maiden name. “Do you know how many times I heard that joke?”

But it’s no joke: The little girl from Roswell wanted to grow up to be a whale trainer. And now she is.