Kimberly Williams-Paisley Actress “Being treated as a dork will color who you are forever.”  From an adult’s perspective, mean-girl behavior all looks the same. But victims know better: Middle school and high school meanness is highly calibrated to its target. For Kimberly Williams-Paisley, star of Father of the Bride, We Are Marshall, and How to Eat Fried Worms movies and Dana on According to Jim, the suffering started just before seventh grade when she was about to enter Fieldston, a private school in Riverdale, New York, that she attended for two years. She was one of a handful of new girls entering the class (another was Sofia Coppola). Kimberly’s mother had met another mom, who invited Kimberly to a pool party in order to introduce her to the nice girls in class. “I was the only one who showed up with my mom,” Kimberly remembers. The girls decided to have a diving contest. Kimberly had not taken diving lessons but nevertheless decided to go for it. She stepped out onto the diving board and executed one of the worst belly flops of her life. She recalls slapping the water, feeling the horrible burn, and dreading coming to the surface to face all those girls looking at her. |
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Aimee Mullins Paralympic Athlete/Model/Actress “The more you try to tame the wild thing that you are, the less wonderful your life will be.”  I didn’t know what to expect when I met Aimee Mullins for lunch at Gemma, a bistro next to the Bowery Hotel in Manhattan. A yard-long list of accomplishments provided by her publicist included a predictably humbling array of feats (world record-holder athlete, president of the Women’s Sports Foundation) for a thirty-two-year-old. But it also displayed a remarkable range. Olympian athlete and runway model? Division I track competitor and actress? One of three students selected for a full academic scholarship from the U.S. Department of Defense . . . and named to Rolling Stone’s annual “Hot List”? Oh yeah, and all of this on silicone and titanium prosthetic legs. Aimee was born with fibular hemimelia, a condition in which the shin bones are partially or totally absent. Her parents decided to have both of her legs amputated below the knee when she was one year old, with the hope that she would be able to walk rather than use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. |
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Jessica AlbaActress “Adults are not always right.”  JESSICA ALBA may have a body that is foremost on the minds of adolescent boys and men who peruse E!’s Sexiest Celebrity Bodies list or Maxim magazine’s Hot 100 roll. But girls—and what’s on their minds—are whom the young actress actually cares about. “Because I felt so alone when I was a kid, I really love young women. I think they are incredibly underestimated,” she says. Her outsider status started with her mixed heritage. Her dad, who was in the U.S. Air Force, is Mexican, and her mom is white. When she was growing up in Mississippi, Texas, and California, Jessica said that people often thought her mother was her babysitter. “When you’re not racially defined, they don’t accept you in either culture,” she explains. But Jessica was also rejected by kids her own age, she thinks, because she was unwilling to follow the crowd. Neither smoking at lunch nor being a teacher’s pet really interested her. Occasionally when kids picked on Jessica, her father would go to school in an effort to intimidate the bullies. But it didn’t help. “I cried a lot. I didn’t smile very often,” she says of those years in sixth and seventh grade. |
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