Catherine Gigante-Brown

From New York to LA, this lady knows a good story.

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

I fumbled with my lace bra, hoping my silicone form wouldn't fall out from the left cup. I wasn't exactly ready . . . yet I was.

I left Cuba in 1949, when I was 11 years old. Back then, I didn't understand why my mother sent me away. I still don't.

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.

Alas, I am the lone female in a house full of men. Only two men, but they take up a lot of space.

To the tattoo artist, I was a flesh canvas that she could transform into something beautiful.

In the photograph, my great-grandmother, Margarita Cirigliano, is sitting at a small table on the front porch of the family home in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Food can be more than nourishing; it can be healing.

What Stephen didn’t know –– what no one knew –– was how weak my knees grew when I pushed through the swinging doors of the ICU.