Catherine Gigante-Brown

The santero sent us off with a shopping list of ite

I thought cancer was behind me. Until I had a weird pain near my left ovary which lasted for several days. It felt a lot like ovulation...Only, at 56, that train had left the station a long time ago.

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

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.

herbalist. shiatsu practitioner. healer.

At first, I felt like an abandoned ten-year-old, dropped off at a remote summer camp—with the extra added attraction of no cell phone reception or Wi-Fi. I thought the hardest part of the weekend was going to be picking out a robe. Boy, was I wrong!

raunchy renaissance woman. multimedia artist. probably a slut.

Mindel and Maria were young teenagers when the horrors occurred—but they remembered the tiniest details with crystal-clear intensity.

"Bring over a meal—and leave. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, from soup to nuts. And coffee. Plenty of coffee."

That’s the thing about being a breast cancer survivor — it’s always there: it never goes away. The scars, the fear that lurks in the back of your mind like a boogeyman. You’re going along nicely, living your merry life, and you’re fine, until you’re not.