Fame! I'm gonna live forever...

... Or at least for the duration of the Winter 2010 edition of Latter-Day Woman magazine, because I am IN it! Which clearly means that I am now famous! Baby remember my name. (Remember. Remember. Remember. Remember...)

I know I just went on a small tirade a few blogposts back about my loathing of fake fame and those who seek it, but... I'm going to have to take that all back. Fame ROCKS, whether short-lived or long, fame-ish or famous. Andy Warhol knew what he was doing, in his quest for it. (and look how good he turned out--)

I myself was first introduced to the sweet nectar of fame by the musical, Fame. There I was, 12 years old, in my first mature stage production-- playing the part of Marianne, with 14 speaking lines and a position as Lead Dancer-- ...ahh, I can still remember the choreography we did to the title song. (Some of you have been lucky enough to see a re-en-dancement of it, in recent years.) It brought the house down then, and I'm pretty sure it would do the same now. I at least love viewing the VHS recording of the performance and marveling not only at my triangle-shaped perm and pre-teen body, clad in an eighties' leotard, tights and legwarmers, but also at the impressive ad-libbed "warm-up" moves I did to the opening bars of the song. Man I was good. I did make it to heaven, I did light up the sky like a flame. Fame! And today, people would see me and cry.

Since then I've had tastes of fame here and there, like that one time I reached 1,000 views on LDSLinkup during the early days of the site and got in the "Stars" column for a day or so. That was big. Then there was the time I went to an open casting call for Martha Stewart "Apprentice", and was interviewed by the San Diego NBC news when I tried to sweet-talk the authorities into letting me cut to the front of the line. That video clip was online for a while, along with a few quotes by me in an article ("All my friends said I should try out for this. Because I AM Martha Stewart"), but is gone now. Weird-- I'm sure they get a lot of demands for it to be put back up, but whatever.

Most recently, I thought I'd reached real fame by gunning my way into the Top Five of scores on Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters at Disneyland, but that only lasted maybe a few hours before I was bumped off the winner's platform. And not enough people around me realized they were in the company of true sharpshooting genius.

Man... Stacy did HORRIBLY that day. It's still a sore point between us.

But this time--I'm in (digital) print! And it will last not only for a month, but live forever in the archives of the Information Superhighway (thanks, Al Gore, for inventing the Interweb!) And while Fame and Martha Stewart and Buzz Lightyear all sound like worthy causes for self-recognition, this one actually is a nice thing to be a part of.

A writer for Latter-Day Woman magazine, doing an article on Rising Star Outreach, found my India blog linked to the RSO website and contacted me with some questions and a request for photos. I was only too happy to oblige, since I love Rising Star and am passionate about what the organization does, and always want to help get the word out. 

So-- here I am! More importantly, here is an article about volunteering with Rising Star, in a section of the magazine called "Choose to Give". What a lovely way of putting it.

Table of Contents page-- the photo in the "40" box is one of my special favorites
from the summer, because one of my favorite ladies is not only actually SMILING
for a photo (usually they remain austere), but she was laughing at that moment.
We were communicating without speaking the same language, and it was great :)

Two-page spread for the actual article. I love the main photo they chose, of my good friend Dani and one of the artists at the Bindu Art School of the Bharathapuram (leprosy) Colony.  Once again, there's a language barrier, but smiles abound :)

To see and read the actual article, rather than my ghetto yes-I-took-pictures-of-my-computer-screen images, click HERE

You can also read it in post format on the main website, HERE

and then do two things: go to Facebook and "like" Latter-Day Woman magazine (it's really a great publication!), and then go to the Rising Star website and learn MORE about what you can do to help the leprosy-affected of India! Oh-- that reminds me-- I appear to be actually even MORE famous, because I'm on that website, too... there's a photo of me, as well as a photo I took, on the volunteer page...  and I had nothing to do with those (they were put up without me knowing), but-- man. All this fame could go to my head.

If, in fact, I really cared. I actually don't. Fame is fleeting. Mock-pretend-fame (what I've got :) even more so. But what you do for others, is lasting-- THAT lives forever. I don't know about you, but it's the people who go about quietly giving to others, never for the fame of the world-- those are the people I look up to, those are the ones I want to be like, not those whose faces and trivial lives grace the pages of popular culture. So to echo the words of the magazine, CHOOSE TO GIVE.

Thanks, Latter-Day Woman, for helping to get the word out about Rising Star! :)