“I have always been a pet person. For the longest time, I was into big dogs only…
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“As an artist, I was working in my studio one day. My dog, Dagger, came over and nudged me with his snout. I jokingly said to him, ‘Would you like to paint like Mommy?’…
WATCH NOW“I would write plays and movies in elementary school…
READ STORY“It’s funny how I got interested in gardening. My mother had a garden in the back of the house, but as a kid I was more interested in sports…
READ STORY“I would get onstage, and my voice would be quivering. I couldn’t breathe; my heart was pounding out of my chest…
READ STORY“I think I was always destined to end up in Hollywood. My childhood dream was to become an actress and/or comedian…
READ STORY“I was born in the Republic of Georgia and shuffled between orphanages until I was 4 and was adopted with my sister by our new family in Baltimore…
READ STORY“I’ve always been interested in history. When I was a teenager, I found myself really attracted to cemeteries…
READ STORY“I always loved the idea of the fading art on clothing, like the paint cracking after 20 years of it being washed…
READ STORY“Growing up, we had our challenges in a very impoverished area in Riverhead…
READ STORY“In January last year, I was pushing 300 pounds. My 2022 New Year’s resolution was to lose weight…
READ STORY“When I first started losing my vision, I had been a professor of English literature at LIU Post for over 50 years…
READ STORY“I’ve been dancing since I was 5. I grew up in the Bronx and went to the Paula Payson School of Dance…
READ STORY“When I was a kid, I didn’t really know I was adopted, but I felt like I was. It was a gut feeling…
READ STORY“I absolutely loved theater in high school, but I was never an actress. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t pretty enough to be an actress…
READ STORY“I was born in the Dominican Republic and came to America with my parents when I was 13 years old…
READ STORY“Our daughter Leah was diagnosed with scoliosis in 2004…
READ STORY“I grew up in Manhattan but spent most of my childhood summers in Montauk with my parents…
READ STORY“I was born and raised in Sweden and had never seen poverty there…
READ STORY“Growing up, I found it very difficult to relate to other children. I suffered from extreme separation anxiety…
READ STORY“I was working in higher education in career counseling when in 2010, I had a longing to return to the nonprofit community…
READ STORY“I-tri comes from my own experience. Even though I loved to swim and ride my bike as a kid, I never thought of those as athletic endeavors…
READ STORY“My journey with transplantation began when I was 13 years old. I made the first girls lacrosse team in Hicksville, and I was a competitive baton twirler, but I started to have these really severe stomach pains…
READ STORY“I grew up in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood when it was mostly Italian, Irish and Jewish. I was usually the only Black child in school…
READ STORY“My oldest brother, Marc, was 41. He was a surfer. He’d surf all the time, through the winter and the storms…
READ STORY“I’d already been playing basketball in Europe for 10 years before the WNBA started, but there were whisperings about something happening in America…
READ STORY“I go by many titles – I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a friend. I have had multiple sclerosis for 22 years…
READ STORY“A lot of times when we do paranormal house investigations, you have a family who’s really scared, and they have nobody to turn to…
READ STORY“I moved back to Long Island in 1986 with my kids after my divorce, when my son Scott was 4 and my daughter was 6…
READ STORY“Eileen’s Free Bodega started from a friend’s suggestion. I was volunteering in the South Bronx at a community fridge where people could get fresh food any time they needed…
READ STORY“An unlucky injury led me to a lucky thing: finding yoga. I got into yoga 12 years ago. I was playing lacrosse for Adelphi and I hurt myself after one of my practices…
READ STORY“I’m a licensed massage therapist and was treating a client who just had twins via Cesarean who was having back pain…
READ STORY“As a found-object artist, I like to work with things that have a history to them. I like the hunt. I’m always looking for interesting things…
READ STORY“I was born in Guatemala, and I was there until I was 9. I moved to the U.S. in 2001. There was a bunch more opportunities for us here in the U.S., so that’s why we migrated…
READ STORY“I dedicate my life to kindness and compassion; I met my husband, John, through mutual friends when we were teenagers and we stayed friends throughout our twenties…
READ STORY“I always wanted to help the populations who most needed it in this world…
READ STORY“I started cooking around age 5, fooling around in the kitchen where my parents lived in Queens…
READ STORY“I’ve loved cooking since I was 8. I would mix weird food combinations…
READ STORY“I suffer with social anxiety, but I think art helps that. I have three murals on the Long Beach boardwalk…
READ STORY“When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my best friend died. He and I were students at Ludlum Elementary School, which is now Barack Obama Elementary School, in Hempstead…
READ STORY“Always in search of exotic places and strange faces, I’ve had the good fortune to wander across six continents, from burning deserts to icy glacial mountains to the glories of the American West…
READ STORY“I always wanted to work in hockey some way. I was never a good player. I’m not a general manager kind of person. I just couldn’t get a job working in hockey. This was the next best thing…
READ STORY“I always loved the lighthouse. I loved fishing underneath it as a kid, surfcasting there, fishing in front of it with my dad, working on boats underneath it back when the Coast Guard ran it…
WATCH NOW“I was born and raised in the Village of Southampton. My parents came here in the late ’40s from North Carolina and Virginia as part of the great migration of Black people from the South who came here to work on the potato farms…
READ STORY“When I was 7, my mom took me to see ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ I had to get dressed up with a jacket and bowtie…
READ STORY“I watched Nickelodeon a lot when I was younger, but I never imagined that I would be on the channel, and everything happened by chance!…
READ STORY“The first time I remember not liking how I looked was when I was 7. I tried to eat healthier and join sports. In middle school, the self-hatred became overwhelming…
READ STORY“When I was a sophomore in high school, for a few weeks, I had been feeling not myself, in some pain and not sure what was going on…
READ STORY“I’ve had 11 surgeries on my left hip and I’m 47 years old. Initially, it started with a hip replacement gone bad on the left side…
READ STORY“Every year for Christmas, my mom got me the new Easy-Bake Oven. I never followed the directions on the little packets. Instead, I’d create my own cakes…
READ STORY“We met in our senior capstone class in college in 2019. I sat across from her on the first day. She thought I was annoying. I thought she was rude…
READ STORY“I found my life’s passion. I was in finance for many years, but it didn’t satisfy me. I always had an interest in psychiatry, so I took a job with The Jewish Association For Services For the Aged in Long Beach…
READ STORY“We were coming back from a party in early December 1996, and at the intersection of Glen Cove Road and Northern Boulevard there was a young woman driving eastbound on Northern Boulevard, and her car had stalled out completely…
READ STORY“I have always loved movies and dreamed of making them. I finally got inspired to actually make that dream a reality during COVID…
READ STORY“I struggle with learning disabilities still to this day. When I was younger, I was diagnosed with low tone and low muscle, which basically means I didn’t develop quickly…
READ STORY“Ever since I was 7 years old, I’ve been writing poetry…
READ STORY“After I graduated high school, I went right to work on the back of a garbage truck in Brooklyn…
READ STORY“I didn’t really pursue filmmaking until I was in a car accident and subsequently beat cancer…
READ STORY“I feel like it’s an honor to carry on the Fortunoff name. My grandparents worked hard to create their family business 100 years ago, and my parents spent their lives expanding it…
READ STORY“I was born on the island of Grenada and came here when I was 16 or 17 years old, wanting to make a better life…
READ STORY“One of the biggest questions people have about metal detecting is, ‘What is everything worth?’ I tell people, if you do it to make money, you probably couldn’t afford the battery in your metal detector…
WATCH NOW“During COVID, we opened our farm stand, and all vegetables were free. We did it in order to help support our neighbors who may have lost work during that time period…
READ STORY“I started drinking when I was 12 years old and was even thrown out of sleepaway camp for getting drunk…
READ STORY“There’s a lot of history in my life. It’s like 50 years of martial arts, so a tremendous amount of growth and change over the years…
READ STORY“It took overcoming depression and being an introvert to put my stuff out there. For a long time, my work was only found in my sketchbooks…
READ STORY“I grew up in a home that was very scary and unstable, but one positive outlet for me was the theater…
READ STORY“I never thought of being a fitness instructor. I was always an athlete growing up. I was going to school to be a teacher and then changed my major and ended up graduating with a communications degree…
READ STORY“When Macy’s was recruiting for volunteers at my college to help out at its Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007, I signed up immediately…
READ STORY“I am a locomotive engineer who runs freight trains from Brooklyn to Suffolk. I initially got interested in railroads because of my grandfather, who lived in Huntington…
READ STORY“I always knew I wanted to be a nurse from very early on…
READ STORY“The first year we did Stage the Change, a one-day conference that encourages theatre students to get involved in global issues, I dedicated it to my mother who was a Holocaust survivor…
READ STORY“I am a cancer survivor, a suicide-loss survivor and a Parkinson’s disease warrior. Steve and I met in 1981. We were partners for 33 years before he took his own life…
READ STORY“I have been an inventor for over 20 years and I hold 13 issued patents…
READ STORY“I am an artist who shouldn’t be alive. In 2013, I survived a car crash on the Southern State Parkway where my car was hit, went airborne, spun and landed on the grass median…
READ STORY“I’ve played basketball all my life, I played college basketball. I’m an assistant coach for boys varsity basketball and head JV coach at Half Hollow Hills High School East…
READ STORY“I survived a brain aneurysm in 2008; I’m blessed every day I get out of bed…
READ STORY“Nobody believes it when they learn I will be 101 in November…
READ STORY“I was always an artist. In high school, my art teacher would get frustrated with me for always doing my own thing in class. I even failed one semester. Now one of my paintings hangs in the main office…
READ STORY“I became an Islanders fan day one. My dad was a huge Islanders fan. Two or three days after I was born, he went to a game and caught a puck…
READ STORY“I have always stuttered, even as a small child. I was teased in grade school. They would imitate me and make fun of the way I spoke…
READ STORY“I grew up as the only girl in a house with two older brothers and an older cousin…
READ STORY“As a child, I had a lot of allergies and asthma. I didn’t know what going to the chiropractor really did, but I knew if I went, I was able to play outside…
READ STORY“When I was 3, my father and I found a turtle with a missing leg in a park near my grandmother’s house…
READ STORY“I’m the youngest of eight. My biological parents were not able to provide properly for us. That’s not a condemnation, just the reality of the situation…
READ STORY“I worked as a photographer for local Huntington papers. I became fascinated with the history of the town and started to write my own column on the subject…
READ STORY“This started because we used to decorate and dress up for Halloween at a campground for a competition. One woman said, ‘You’re not going to win.’ I went up there and I didn’t win, and I was so annoyed…
READ STORY“I started playing the djembe, an African drum, when I was 2 years old. My mom took me into a drum store in New York City, and it was the first instrument that I saw…
READ STORY“I went to the doctor more than a decade ago because I noticed a little raised bump on my head. I wondered if I should be concerned about it because my grandmother had skin cancer…
READ STORY“I have always found my footing in the arts, and I love the idea of merging the arts across all categories…
READ STORY“I started doing yoga when I was married with two small children. My sister-in-law inspired me to take classes at the Huntington YMCA…
READ STORY“My mom had a stroke when I was 8 years old, and my brothers and I had to grow up fast…
READ STORY“It started when I was 3, 4 years old. I used to go around my house interviewing my family, just asking random questions…
READ STORY“It was a regular night. I went to sleep, woke up, and when I was doing my morning activities, I noticed that my eyes were dry, and I couldn’t really move my face…
READ STORY“I was hiking in Hither Hills in Montauk in 2011 … That day, I was bit on my arm by a brown recluse spider, and later I became partially paralyzed from the chest down…
READ STORY“My dad calls me in from the living room and says, ‘You need to see this.’ He points to the TV screen of a singer who just got the Golden Buzzer and says, ‘See this kid? You’re gonna marry this kid’…
READ STORY“My son, Steven, is 12 years old and is a swimmer. This is his fourth year on a nationally ranked swim team. Last year, when everyone returned to school, he developed very severe allergies…
READ STORY“From the age of 7, I knew that I wanted to play piano for the rest of my life. I pursued it in college, thinking that I wanted to be a pianist and a music teacher…
READ STORY“It’s a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air two-door. It was called the Tri-Five era. Cars from those three years — ’55, ’56, ’57— are still very fashionable…
READ STORY“I met my husband later in life. I’m a serial monogamist. I was really into my career, and having a family didn’t cross my mind. When I was ready to start a family, it was a struggle for me…
READ STORY“I always think about my experience growing up being Shinnecock and how important storytelling is and knowing the truth of what happened here…
READ STORY“I’ve always been more comfortable in the water than anywhere else. It was something I was always interested in. We just didn’t know how to go about it because I have cerebral palsy…
READ STORY“I started working as a librarian in 2004. I was inspired by my best friend, Mary Robinson, who has worked in libraries since we were teenagers…
READ STORY“Growing up, I always wanted to write stories. Initially, I thought I would write the next Great American Novel, but then I realized that I was more drawn to comics…
READ STORY“I am the second child and first daughter of Igbo Nigerian immigrants. Nigerian parents and culture really value education…
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