[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.” ...To learn more about her growing tv empire, Tyra's foodie ways and a condition occasionally referred to as "I.B.S.", keep reading.
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.’ ”
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