I was bused to a school in Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn in 1972. I was one of the first black kids in the history of the school.

It's funny but when I arrived in California to start college I was much more interested in becoming a surfer and cruise along in life from one beach to the next. I didn't plan out any huge career for myself.

The funny thing is that I'm the girl who no one sees at the beach. Ask anyone who's traveled with me. Normally I'm in so many layers I look like Lawrence of Arabia!

Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.

A mere forty years ago beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it and that's what freedom is all about.

They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes or fisherman's octopus and shrimps fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.

My only failure was the restaurant in Myrtle Beach. I kept it open for four years. It was in a tourist town it was only busy four and half five months of the year. But the bills kept coming all year.

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Australia is so cool that it's hard to even know where to start describing it. The beaches are beautiful so is the weather. Not too crowded. Great food great music really nice people. It must be a lot like Los Angeles was many years ago.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.