Catherine Gigante-Brown

I go for checkups when I’m supposed to: every three months to the oncologist and every six months to the breast surgeon. I go to SHARE support group meetings to bolster myself. I try to get enough sleep, despite the occasional night spent wide-eyed with dread.

Makeup and I have always had a love/hate relationship: I love it; it hates me.

Having someone steal my cancer history and co-opt it for their first-person Facebook blog is unbelievably violating. Somehow, it feels almost as invasive as my mastectomy.

herbalist. shiatsu practitioner. healer.

Wrinkles or lifelines? Chunky or curvaceous? The choice is yours.

I saw my present mother-in-law in a whole new light the first time she held my newborn son.

Candida Royalle pretty much invented couples erotica. She made it socially-acceptable. Respectable. The women in her films looked like real women and had real, comfortable female bodies. And her movies actually had stories. Good stories. She hired her friends—adult legends like Annie Sprinkle, Veronicas Hart and Vera, and Gloria Leonard — to create Femme films too.

Instead of categorizing people as different colors, I proposed we might begin to think of each other as Earthtones—because our skin colors are based on hues from the earth. Just as the planet is made up of a myriad of shades, it’s still one cohesive entity. We can be thought of as one entity also.

You learn a lot about people when you live in their home. The Taylors seemed to lead a joyless, Spartan existence.

The heartbreaking saga of a 14-year-old Black prostitute who was murdered in cold blood by her (maybe) pimp on Christmas Eve in 1900 Savannah.