Catherine Gigante-Brown

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.

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.

I immediately developed a hot-and-heavy girlcrush on the wild, wacky, brash, candid, feminist, rubber-faced comedian—and you should too.

sex sage. fetish specialist. author.

Who says feminists don't love alpha males and cooking?

herbalist. shiatsu practitioner. healer.

If the odds of getting cancer are like Powerball, why couldn't I be a scratch-off millionaire?

raunchy renaissance woman. multimedia artist. probably a slut.

The Daily News quoted one painted lady as saying, “People come up to us sometimes and say what we do is disgusting,” she said. “But what is disgusting about the female body? They shield their kids sometimes, and I think, ‘Kids come from the female body.’”

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