Catherine Gigante-Brown

raunchy renaissance woman. multimedia artist. probably a slut.

My husband and I agreed: raising a child with an independent spirit who made decisions for himself was a good thing.

I’m a firm believer that Tiny Kindnesses can change the world, one sweet, loving gesture at a time.

BCBs are loud and proud and refuse to go down easy. And quietly. We have things to say. We have things to teach. We still have life to live. And damn it, we are and we will. With one breast. With no breasts. With reconstruction surgery.

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.

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.

After I got over the initial devastation, I pulled myself up by my big-girl panties and got on with it. Chemo was no picnic—but it was do-able.

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

Were you going to run into that cute guy John Williams on the way home? Would you see Anne Marie by the lockers and sort out what to do for the weekend? It was hit-or-miss, and that was the beauty of it. The breath-holding chance of it all. Now, our kids’ friends are as close as a keyboard stroke away. It’s too easy.

I realized my father was from a generation that never said those three little words. He was saying he loved me without them. But I didn't realize it then.