I was popular in high school. I smiled, and I laughed, and I talked, and I wasn't bad-looking, but I was never considered beautiful - never, ever.
This was 1978, when flying was still an occasion, a special grand event that took planning and care. I worked as a TWA flight attendant then. I stood in my Ralph Lauren uniform at the boarding door and smiled at the passengers through lips coated with lipstick that perfectly matched the stripe on my jacket. Mostly, the passengers smiled back.
My people would love it if I smiled more, if I was more 'approachable.'
Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.
When I first asked my boxing coach, two-time Olympic champion Hector Vinent, what made the Cuban style of fighting distinct from the rest of the world, he smiled and told me to sit on a bench in Prado and watch the Cuban women walk.
I pressed my father's hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life. My father smiled and passed away to the spirit land.
I truly hope readers learn to believe in their imaginations and their ability to shape their own lives. That's what 'The Girl Who Smiled Beads' means to me.
The house I've bought in London, the holidays, everything has been bought from making people laugh, and if you'd said to me when I was 14 that's how I was going to make my living, I would have smiled from ear to ear.
His work isn't all glower. Even though he hasn't smiled in a movie since the underrated 'Proof' in the early 1990s, Mr. Crowe is given to a hurt swallow when he's uncomfortable and to a look of suffering in his eyes.
I became famous so quickly and so young - it was daunting. I was immature and I used to say some really stupid things in interviews. I never smiled on stage so I looked really serious, but it was because I hated my teeth and was incredibly nervous.
