An average person like me does not know about stuff like chasing absentee ballots.
I feel greatly honored to have a ballpark named after me, especially since I've been thrown out of so many.
They could never beat me in Springfield. I loved that old ballpark. If I could have pitched there all my career, I'd be a 300-game winner.
For me, I'm not going to be hitting the ball out of the ballpark. I know that.
The biggest thrill a ballplayer can have is when your son takes after you. That happened when my Bobby was in his championship Little League game. He really showed me something. Struck out three times. Made an error that lost the game. Parents were throwing things at our car and swearing at us as we drove off. Gosh, I was proud.
I got involved in the underground world known as ballroom culture, and I used to walk a category called 'face,' and it was a very heavily Latino culture - it's black and Latino - and they used to call me 'cara,' which means face in Spanish, so I started putting 'cara' on everything: hats, jackets.
It's a blessing that I have my family in my life and they were supportive, but there were times when I needed to find an outlet for me to understand my people and my own journey, and I found that through my chosen family, which was the ballroom community.
When I was in high school, I was doing a fashion show, and my House Father would host fashion shows at the school. He was great at it. He saw me and said, 'That's my daughter.' The rest was history! We went to New York City to rehearse and go to balls, and I was in the ballroom scene until I was 17 years old.
Then there's Johnny Pesky, hit me countless number of ground balls and improved my fielding so much.
I always have my Biore strips because they're fun. I always have Crest White Strips. I always have lip balm, and I'll bring concealer with me.
Humor has been the balm of my life, but it's been reserved for those close to me, not part of the public Lana.
Making a bougie, expensive beauty brand wasn't helping the mission or very fun for me. We can all be united by that $12 coconut balm. You don't need to charge an arm and a leg.
I'm really proud of myself because I've pared my beauty regimen down to a cream blush and berry-tinted lip balm, which has saved me so much time.
We've had Vice President Pence visiting Tallinn, where he met not only with me but also with my other Baltic colleagues - Lithuanian President Ms. Grybauskaite and Latvian President Mr. Vejonis. And, of course, Vice President Pence has been very clear that NATO acts as a whole. Attack against one is attack against all.
I could have ended up a casualty of a broken family, like so many of the kids around me in inner city Baltimore. But my life was forever changed the year I turned 10. That was the year my dad turned to Jesus.
I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore that was like a war zone, so I never learned to trust that there were people who could help me.
When I was with the Yankees in 1978, we were playing Baltimore at Yankee Stadium, and the score was 3 - 3 going into the bottom of the ninth inning. I led off against Tippy Martinez - a little left-hander who always gave me trouble - and the count went to three-and-oh.
It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.
Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
The thought of eating rabbit and squirrels doesn't appeal to me. And that was on our table quite often as a kid. In your uppity restaurants, they serve a lot of rabbit. But I just can't help but think of Peter. And deer, I can't go there, because of Bambi.
