Saturday, May 31, 2008

Tyra Banks - Banksable - NYTimes.com

YOU THINK I'M JUST A MODEL? WELL, THEN, LET ME SHOW YOU: It is nigh impossible to make a transition from Bee Week to normal blogging on this site, and before we turn the frozen donkey wheel I want to again thank Shonda, Heather and Raf for lending their expertise and exuberance to the past two days on this site. We try our best to treat the kids with respect and to honor their efforts, to treat the competition seriously but not solemnly, and I hope we succeed this year. What we saw last night in the finals was a dodecamerous embodiment of the American dream (and I don't just say that because all the Canadians were eliminated in Round 5), and there are so many competitors whom we hope to see again and/or read about their post-Bee exploits in the years to come.

[As always, Bee veterans are invited to contact us if they ever want to share their stories with a wider audience.]

So. Speaking of the American dream and hard work [transition alert!], I approached this weekend's NYT Magazine piece on Tyra Banks with some trepidation, but as it turns out Lynn Hirschberg takes Banks and her work ethic quite seriously, and it's a great, admiring profile:
Lasting, mainstream success has always been her biggest priority. “I could do the job, but I never truly identified with the fashion world,” Banks said. “It’s so fabulous, and it’s so speaking in European accents when you’re from Oklahoma. I’d have on a $30,000 gown, but it felt like Halloween to me. I saw that the mass girls with cosmetic and swimsuit calendars made more money than the high-fashion girls. I started looking at Cindy Crawford. She had been a high-fashion girl, and then she segued into being this Americana girl. No black girl ever attempted to be Cindy Crawford. Supermodels like Iman were intimidating divas — they weren’t like: ‘Hi! Here’s a Pepsi!’ I wanted Cindy’s career — I wanted to be the black girl next door.” ...

When she was 20, she wrote in one of her notebooks: “If Michael Jordan can sell tennis shoes and Magic Johnson can sell cars, I can sell cornflakes. I can and I will. So just sit back and relax because here I come. . . . I’m going to hurt and abuse.” Banks looked pleased when she read that passage aloud. “It was a moment,” she said now. “When I showed that to my mom the other day, she said, ‘You didn’t just happen overnight.’ ”
To learn more about her growing tv empire, Tyra's foodie ways and a condition occasionally referred to as "I.B.S.", keep reading.

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