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It was the first day of my first real job in New York City, and there she was: my first real boss. Pat Cooper wore a dress-for-success suit and pearls as if she were the star of The Women. She had dark, curly hair that was tightly cropped, and she walked and moved with confidence. As director of creative affairs at Paramount Pictures in 1973, she was willing to give me a tryout as her assistant. I was thrilled.
"I have a dream job," I wrote my mother.
Under Pat, I learned about well-written scripts and great stories from the same movie titans who had made classics like The Godfather. Pat's mantra was this: quality.
Quality was for her everything that our smart band of script readers believed in and those philistines in Hollywood did not.
After returning from a business lunch, she'd wave her hand and say to me, "None of this is real. Trying to change the world is what matters. Wake up. Look around you every day. There are wars in Bangladesh and criminals in the White House. Why are you here when you could be out there, trying to tell people what's going on?"
And two years later, I was suddenly out there, out here, struggling to make my way as a reporter. Pat helped show me the way.
Cancer activist Dee Dee Ricks on cycling champion Lance Armstrong
Early last year, I was packing for spring break with my kids when I felt a lump in my breast. That was odd: Only months before, I'd had a routine exam and there were no abnormalities. I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and they said one breast would have to be removed quickly. I thought about watching my boys graduate from college and opted to have a double mastectomy. I remember that a Tim McGraw song was playing in the car on my way to the hospital, "Live Like You Were Dying."
I was a single working mother.
My first thought was, What about my children? My second thought was, What man is going to want me without breasts? But whom could I relate to? I got tired of all the Hallmark survivor stories. Not for me. Finally I happened upon Lance Armstrong's book It's Not About the Bike, and there I found a superhuman. He was a child of a single mother, as I was.
After my mastectomy, I joined forces with Lance and others to help change our health care system. Through all the charitable work he does with his Lance Armstrong Foundation, Lance has inspired me to use my voice to promote cancer awareness, especially for the poor who are diagnosed too late. This is our connection. Cancer patients are dying not because we don't have a cure but because we don't have enough preventive medical care. To have hope, we must have access to health care.
Lance is not just an athlete to me. He's a role model. He achieves everything he sets his mind to. In our generation, there are few whom I hold in high esteem. Lance makes me want to reach higher for myself and especially for others. And he is always out to win. That's what I love about him.
It's spooky because in 1999, when I was visiting Paris, he was cycling in the Tour de France. And I was one of the people who stood in the crowd and held up a sign that said "Go Armstrong. U.S.A. rules!" Who knew that just a few years later, his cancer mission and mine would unite us?
Lance Armstrong on his mother, Linda Armstrong Kelly
My mother is my hero. She once told me, "If you can't give 110 percent, you won't make it," and I've never forgotten that. She is my best friend, my motivator, and my most loyal ally. I wish everyone had at least one person who inspires him or her the way my mother inspires me.
Novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard on actress Jamie Lee Curtis
While sitting in a Los Angeles hotel lobby in 1996, I noticed the racehorse legs of the woman who was next to me. I turned and saw actress Jamie Lee Curtis, the "scream queen" who tended to display her perfect body a bit too readily, in my view, and who was, at that moment, a proud and happy children's author. I blurted out to her that her earlier book, Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born, was lovingly worn-out at my house: I had adopted a daughter and read the book to her constantly. It was our guide, our comfort.
Jamie Lee had just adopted her second child, so we two mothers began chatting away about husbands too devoted to the kids for romantic getaways (she said she told her husband, "It's our anniversary! Come on!").
When I asked Jamie Lee to autograph a napkin for my son, a wannabe actor, she said, "I can do better than that." She pulled out her only copy of a publicity still and wrote on it, "With love to Martin, from Jamie Lee."
Years later, I was among a crowd of people who heard her say, "I had a rough childhood. I don't write these books because, hey, acting offers aren't rolling in. I want to make a kid feel better, the way I would have liked to feel better." I admired this. In 2002 she further inspired me with what she called her "apology to women" for all those years of showing off-a now-famous unretouched photo of her in her underwear, showing how movie stars really look. It was her way of telling women everywhere that she never meant to make them feel lesser.
-- Jacquelyn Mitchard's latest novel is The Midnight Twins (Razorbill).
Writer A. J. Jacobs on former NY Governor Mario Cuomo
When I was 13, I met Mario Cuomo for five minutes. I don't imagine he spends a lot of time reminiscing about our talk. But I do. What he told me in those five minutes changed my life.
It was 1982, and Cuomo was running for his first term as governor of New York, a position he would hold for the next 12 years. My grandfather took me to a party for him. There were a lot of people at the party who could help Cuomo more than I could. Even if I had donated my entire allowance, it would have barely paid for a lawn sign. But Cuomo talked to me like I was the most important bigwig at that fund-raiser.
First he answered my inane questions. Which hockey team did he like better, I wondered, the New York Rangers or the New York Islanders? He said, "Officially, I like them both. But just between us, I prefer the Rangers." When I ran out of queries, the famous orator bent down and gave me some advice I still remember practically word for word 26 years later. "In this life," he said, "you should read every-thing you can read. Taste everything you can taste. Meet everyone you can meet. Travel everywhere you can travel. Learn everything you can learn. Experience everything you can experience."
Over the years, I've tried, as Cuomo advised, to experience the world in all its magnificent, overwhelming, sometimes baffling variety. I've tried to sample everything on life's pupu platter. Mario Cuomo has given a lot of soaring speeches since then, but this is one I won't forget.
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