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Frank Gehry
Award-Winning Architect
My house was strange. I mean some of the things I did, like the chain-link fence. It wasn't about what people thought it was about. The chain-link fence, so much of that material is made and used and absorbed by the culture, and there is so much denial about it. I was fascinated by the denial, and I was trying to humanize it, so that if you are going to use it, at least use it, find some way to use it right or aesthetically more pleasing. Well, that backfired on me. Everybody thought I was making some kind of great "stick in the ribs" kind of thing about it. Also, the house was me trying to find my middle class self in a middle class neighborhood. How do I relate to this? I guess I am here. I am with them. They have their cars on the front lawn. They have chain link. They have corrugated metal. They have all these things, and how am I going to? So I dealt with it, but when I dealt with it, it was like the neighbors thought I was making fun of them, which I wasn't.
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Vince Gill
Country Music Hall of Fame
Vince Gill: When it happened -- it happened I think in 1989 or 1990. And he came to see me play in New York. I was a huge fan of Mark Knopfler's and the band (Dire Straits) and loved their records, and loved the way he played the guitar. Once again, that common bond that would have drawn him to me and me to him was that we liked the way each other played. So there was that, we had something in common. And at the time it was a fork in the road. And the obvious choice, because of what had happened up until then, would have been go and go play with this nationally known band, do a world tour, make a bunch of money, get your family healthy and pay for your house and all that. But I chose the other one, just because I believed in myself. And it was not the decision that would have probably made the most sense for the circumstances that I was in. But once again, I just felt like making that decision was the acceptance of failure.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The dean in those days had a dinner early in the term for all the women in the first-year class, and I think he kept it up until the number of women exceeded 20. In any case, after dinner he brought us into his living room, and each of us sat next to a distinguished professor, invited to be our escort, and he asked [us] to tell him what we were doing in the law school occupying a seat that could be held by a man. Now he did not mean that question to wound. Harvard had only recently begun to accept women, didn't accept women until 1950, 1951, and I came there in 1956, only five years after they started to admit women. There were still some doubting Thomases on the faculty, and the dean wanted the women's answers about what they were doing in law school to arm him with responses to those members of the faculty who still resisted admitting women. So he wanted women's stories so he could report those to his faculty colleagues.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
The hardest thing for my colleagues to accept was when we -- and by we, I mean the ACLU women's rights project, which I helped to found -- challenged the TIAA CREF program, and the retirement program used by most colleges and universities, because they rigidly separated the policy beneficiaries by sex. So they used mortality tables for men, for women. And the women would get less when they retired than a man with equivalent salary and time in service. The reason was that on average it's fair, because women on average live longer than men. And my view was, "Yes, that's certainly true on average, but there are some men who live long and some women who die early." And the whole notion is that you don't lump together women simply because they are women, and that TIAA CREF should merge their mortality tables. Well, the immediate response was, "Horrors! We just couldn't do that. Then all the men would desert the plan and get private insurance." Well, TIAA CREF was such a good deal that when they did finally merge the tables, nobody left. But that was the most worrisome thing to my faculty colleagues. Even so, they supported a class action that was brought -- with 100 named plaintiffs -- on behalf of women teachers and administrators at Columbia, charging that maintaining separate mortality tables essentially denied women equal pay, and was in violation of our foremost anti-discrimination law, Title VII.
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