Dominique Moceanu, a member of the 1996 Olympic gold-medal-winning US women’s gymnastics team, received the biggest bombshell of her life. As her father was dying, and weeks before she gave birth to her first child, she got a letter fro, Jen Bricker, saying that she her biological sister. As ABC’s 20/20 reported last Friday, Bricker revealed that their parents gave her up for adoption when they found out that she had no legs. Dominique Moceanu 20/20 Interview The news was equally shocking to Bricker, who grew up idolizing Moceanu, the youngest member of the US Olympic teams “Magnificent Seven.” “I wouldn’t shut up about Dominique!” said Bricker, who incredibly had no idea at the time that the gymnastics champion was her sister. “I knew she was Romanian. I knew we looked alike. Her biggest fan!” Amazingly, Bricker, now 24, is a gymnast too. Having no legs didn’t stop her from excelling in volleyball, basketball and softball in her youth. But, just like her sister, 30, her true passion is gymnastics. Bricker even made it all the way to the Junior Olympics as a power tumbler. When Bricker was 16, her parents, an Illinois couple who adopted her as a baby, revealed to her that Moceanu was actually her older sister. Four years later, Bricker sent a letter to Dominique. Published in Moceanu’s new memoir Off Balance , the letter included photos and Bricker’s adoptive papers. Bricker wrote to her sister: “I feel that I have one chance to show you I’m not some crazy person, but I’m sure after seeing all of the papers, you’ll see that I’m serious.” Moceanu recounted to ABC her reaction to the letter: “It was the biggest bombshell of my life. Rage was my first emotion, had my life been a lie? I had this sister that was born who was given up for adoption, and I never knew it.” When she confronted her parents, they told her that Bricker was in fact her sister and was born one day after Moceanu’s sixth birthday. Her mother, Camelia, said that her husband, Dmitry, forced her to give up the baby, saying that they couldn’t afford the medical care. “I never saw my baby. I never held her, never touched her, never even smelled her. I desperately wanted to, but your father told me we had to give her up and that was that,” Camelia told Dominique. Moceanu had had a tumultuous relationship for years with her parents, who had been athletes and put her in gymnastics at age three. At 17, Moceanu legally emancipated herself from her parents, whom she claimed had repressed her and squandered her fortune. She also had a restraining order against her father, who had stalked her and who she feared had hired someone to kill two of her close friends. They later reconciled, however, and Dmitry even walked Moceanu down the aisle at her 2006 wedding before he passed away in 2008. The sisters now have a close bond and continue to marvel at their similarities. “The tones in our voices, our handwriting, the way we laugh and chuckle. It’s mind-blowing,” Moceanu said of Bricker, who enjoys a strong career as an acrobat and aerialist and has even toured the world with Britney Spears !
Presumably Erykah Badu was conscious when she stripped down and climbed into a bathtub while filming the video for “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,” her collaboration with Oklahoma freak-pop collective The Flaming Lips . And it’s a safe assumption that her sister Nayrock Badu was also aware she was being filmed when she smeared her totally nude body with glitter, fake blood, and a suspiciously jism-esque (how often do you get to use that word in a sentence?) substance. But despite this, Erykah’s got herself all worked up about the nude content of the video, which apparently was leaked online by Flaming Lips fontman Wayne Coyne without securing the R&B diva’s approval. And as divas are prone to do, yesterday she lashed out at Coyne in a public takedown on Twitter . Here’s some highlights: then… perhaps, next time u get an occasion to work with an artist who respects your mind/art, you should send at least a ROUGh version of the video u PLAN to release b4 u manipulate or compromise the artist’s brand by desperately releasing a poor excuse for shock and nudity that sends a convoluted message that passes as art( to some). .. You begged me to sit in a tub of that other shit and I said naw. I refused to sit in any liquid that was not water. But Out of RESPECT for you and the artist you ‘appear’ to be, I Didn’t wanna kill your concept , wanted u to at least get it out of your head . After all, u spent your dough on studio , trip to Dallas etc.. Sooo, I invited Nayrok , my lil sis and artist, who is much more liberal ,to be subject of those other disturbing (to me ) scenes . I told u from jump that I believed your concept to be disturbing. But would give your edit a chance. You then said u would take my shots ( in clear water/ fully covered parts -seemed harmless enough) and Nayrok’s part ( which I was not present for but saw the photos and a sample scene of cornstarch dripping ) and edit them together along with cosmic, green screen images ( which no one saw) then would show me the edit. . Instead, U disrespected me by releasing pics and rough vid on the internet without my approval. (Contract breech ) That is equivalent to putting out a security camera’s images of me changing in the fitting room… O, And on behalf of all the artists u have manipulated or plan to manipulate, find another way . These things have been said out of necessity. And if you don’t like it you can KiSS MY Glittery ASS . O and Nayrok told me to tell u to kiss her ass too . Almost forgot. Peace Ohhhhhhh, cornstarch ! That’s what it was! Coyne has responded to Erykah’s anger in characteristically cheeky fashion, tweeting a picture of himself with glitter-covered lips along with the caption: “Yessss!!! Nice ass!!!!” Our thoughts exactly, Wayne. See all the good parts of the now-infamous Erykah Badu /Flaming Lips “The First Time I Saw Your Face” video right here at MrSkin.com!
This week’s episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, “Uncivil Union,” had nothing to do with the upcoming gay wedding and everything to do with the family drama between friends and siblings … what else is new. We break down all the crass comments and wardrobe disasters in THG’s +/- recap! Caroline’s brother Jaime is getting married to his partner Rich at their place in Chicago which looks like a cross between a Swiss chalet and a miniature golf course. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like it but Plus 20 to the happy couple. Too bad the rest of their family and friends can’t follow their example. The dress code for the big day consists of floral prints and pastels and an emphasis on hats for the ladies. Plus 10 because who hasn’t wanted an excuse to wear one of those ridiculous looking English hats.
This is a powerful story, and if this kid can achieve what he has, there isn’t anything that you can’t achieve. Homeless High School Student David Boone Accepted To Harvard David Boone had a system. There wasn’t much the then-15-year-old could do about the hookers or drug deals around him when he slept in Artha Woods Park. And the spectator’s bench at the park’s baseball diamond wasn’t much of a bed. But the aspiring engineer, now 18 and headed to Harvard University in the fall, had no regular home. Though friends, relatives and school employees often put him up, there were nights when David had no place to go, other than the park off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. So he says he made the best of those nights on the wooden bench. His book bag became his pillow, stuffed with textbooks first — for height, he says — and papers on top for padding. In the morning, David would duck into his friend Eric’s house after Eric’s parents left early for work so he could shower and dress before heading to class at Cleveland’s specialized MC2STEM High School. David expects to graduate from there next month as salutatorian of the new school’s first graduating class. “I’d do my homework in a rapid station, usually Tower City since they have heat, and I’d stay wherever I could find,” he said. David says that giving up would have left him stuck in a dead-end life, so it was never an option. “I didn’t know what the results of not giving up were going to be, but it was better than nothing and having no advantages,” he said. “I wanted to be in a position to have options to do what I want to do.” David was born to a young mother, who divorced his father when David was a little boy. When David was a student at Sunbeam Elementary, medical problems put him in the hospital regularly, said Mary Solomon-Gatson, the school’s former nurse. Even then, she said, he impressed her as a bright child. He was one of the school’s few students to pass the state’s achievement tests, she said, despite missing classes constantly. Even at that school, which covers kindergarten through eighth grade, David said he was pushed to join gangs. He refused, fueling tension with gang members. Once, he says, they tried to jump him. Because his older sister dated a member of a rival gang, he said, the situation was that much worse. “There was a lot of pressure for me to join. That was the life they lived, so it was the only life to live and they thought if I wasn’t with them, I was against them,” David said. In the summer after eighth grade, he said, gang members shot at his family’s Eddy Road home. He attributes that mostly to the issue of his sister’s boyfriend, but his whole family was affected. No one was injured, but the family split up. His mother went to stay with a boyfriend, he said. His three sisters went to stay with friends and he went to his friend Eric’s house — for a while. Though Eric’s family took him in for a short time, he said, he couldn’t stay there permanently. “We’ve been through a lot as a family,” said his mom, Moneeke Davis. “There’s been a lot of challenges and adversity.” But she said David was determined to build a better life. “He’s so focused, so driven and so humble,” Davis said, adding that she is grateful for the people “the Lord put in [David’s] path” to help him. Sometimes he stayed with Solomon-Gatson, sometimes with Eric, sometimes with other friends and relatives, and sometimes in the park. “It’s a lot to take someone in, particularly a teenage boy,” David said. “I was kind of upset that no one would, but I was never upset at any one person.” Though the park baseball diamond was mostly isolated from crime in other parts of the park, he soon decided it wasn’t safe to sleep there. He says he developed a new plan: When he wasn’t in school, he would sleep in parks during the day and roam and study at night, so he’d be awake and alert to trouble. “If you sleep in the daytime in the park, people don’t bother you,” he said. “You’re just taking a nap. It’s acceptable.” In between studying at Tower City, he’d work at a now-closed boutique, he said, to buy food. Before leaving Sunbeam, David had applied to several district specialty high schools, including the John Hay School of Science and Medicine. But he was intrigued after attending a meeting at the Cleveland Public Library about the newly created MC2STEM High School, which teaches science, technology, engineering and math with a hands-on, projects-based program. David likes tinkering and learns best by pulling things apart to see how they work. When he was 6, he says, he took apart the family television set and put it back together in working order. His favorite part of school, pre-high school, was an eighth-grade project about solar electricity. That let him dive in and make plans for a combined solar and wind farm that he was excited about. MC2STEM caught his eye because it would allow him to work on projects at the Great Lakes Science Center, with General Electric at the Nela Park campus and with companies across the region. With a nudge from Solomon-Gatson, he applied and was accepted. Instantly, he was hooked by an early project on alternative energy. That covered material he had worked on for his solar and wind farm project and had him working on it with GE engineers. MC2STEM also pushed him — hard. “They don’t accept mediocrity,” he said. The school requires students to master a subject before moving on to the next. In the first two years, students receive an A in a class or an incomplete and keep taking the class until they earn an A. MC2STEM also has longer school days and a year-round schedule with classes most of the summer. Through the school, David has worked at Lockheed Martin and Rockwell Automation and landed a spot last year at the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like many students at MC2STEM, he took classes at Cleveland State University this spring, in subjects such as differential equations, calculus-based physics and an introduction to computer science. MC2STEM Principal Jeff McClellan praised David’s appetite for learning and his ability to connect with people who can help him learn what he needs. “If you tell him that ‘a person can help you with your calculus, make the call,’ he’ll do it,” McClellan said. “He was getting up at 5 a.m. and coming in early to get caught up on his work.” Over time, McClellan learned one of the other reasons that David was coming in early was because he was bouncing from place to place to place. So McClellan and his wife took in David. He lived with them for more than a year — parts of 10th and 11th grade. “My wife and I talked it over and said that we can’t do everything for everybody,” McClellan said. “But we could help him. It was just the right thing to do. He needed somewhere to go.” David is now living with his friend Eric again but said he was thankful to McClellan for the home when he needed one and for continuing to offer help after he left. “There’s nothing I can’t call him for,” David said. Now the school and the district can brag about David’s success. He turned down places like Yale and Princeton to go to Harvard, where he will study engineering and computer science. He also landed a Gates Millennium Scholarship, which will cover all of his college costs not covered by other aid. “It wasn’t all easy,” David said. “It wasn’t all fun and games. It was a lot of hard work and I just made it happen.” What an amazing story. It is kind of hard to understand why his mother or one of his sisters wasn’t able to care for him — but times have been hard and when they are that hard people really struggle to take care of themselves, so much so that they can’t take care of others. Source
Philadelphia band gets an assist from Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams on standout new album, in Bigger Than the Sound. By James Montgomery mewithoutYou’s Ten Stories cover art Photo: Pine Street In September 2009, Hayley Williams gave me a tour of her home in Franklin, Tennessee. It wasn’t the usual kind of rock-star pad, for about a million reasons (there were a lot of “I Love Lucy” Barbie dolls), most notably what was playing on her Michael Jackson turntable at the time: a copy of mewithoutYou’s It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright. I only mention it now for a couple of reasons: One, it led to the first — and, to this day, only — conversation I’ve ever had with someone about mewithoutYou (they aren’t exactly what you’d call a “unifying” band), and two, because as luck would have it, they have a new album out Tuesday (May 15), Ten Stories, which features Williams on a pair of tracks and is probably the best thing they’ve ever done. Or at least the most recent. That’s the thing about mewithoutYou, who, in case you aren’t aware (and you probably aren’t), hail from Philadelphia, have been making albums for a decade now (in between losing members to grad school/ their frontman threatening to quit and donate all his possessions to the poor ) and have fashioned a sort of anti-career out of coming dangerously close to success, only to veer away at the last possible second (usually into an embankment or something): They are not exactly an easy band to like. Or pin down. Wait, that didn’t come out right. What I meant to say is that they are a challenging band to like. And an impossible one to pin down. Which is, I suppose, why I only know two people who are actually fans. Their first two albums, 2002’s [A→B] Life and ’04’s Catch for Us the Foxes, were careening, crashing exercises in sheer volume (I think the kids called it “post-hardcore”), the latter of which featured the sorta-single “January 1979,” brought them a fair amount of mainstream attention and was, according to me at least, one of the best rock records of the past decade . They started wandering off the leaden path with ’06’s Brother, Sister and then fully embraced lead singer Aaron Weiss’ spiritual voyages (and Sufi mysticisms) on It’s All Crazy, ditching the wattage in favor of hushed tones and a genuine grace. Of course, they also thoroughly confused what remained of their core fanbase in the process, but that was almost beside the point. Because with Ten Stories (which, in true mwY fashion, features 11 tracks), they’ve made it clear that they’re never going to be the same roaring act they were in the early aughts. Instead, they seem to have stumbled into a kind of beatific balance: Sure, they still call songs stuff like “Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume” and “Grist for the Malady Mill,” and, yes, on occasion Weiss still sings/shouts/spouts like a freegan preacherman, but there is a honed focus to the album, a willful maturity and a confidence that only comes when bands realize they can pack as much of a punch with instrumentation as opposed to sheer volume. Part of this was probably inevitable, of course, but it bears mention that Ten Stories draws thematic inspiration from a book Weiss read about a circus-train crash in Montana (hey, why not?) and as such earns the distinction of not only being their most cohesive record, but the first where they don’t seem all that concerned with converting the masses (sample quote from Weiss, circa the Brother, Sister album: “I want to tell people God is love. That’s my eternal, unchanging reality”). Instead, this time out, they just seem content. And that’s exactly where they should be. From the pastoral guitar work of “Cardiff Giant” and the plaintive drift of “Aubergine” to the woozy dramatics of “Bear’s Vision of St. Agnes” and blooming surge of album closer “All Circles,” Ten Stories is very much an album born out of quiet confidence, of willful resignation. Sure, Weiss is still on his lifelong spiritual quest — on “East Enders Wives,” he keens, “I’m still counting on you like an invisible rosary” — but he’s mellowed significantly as the decade has worn on, perhaps finally finding some semblance of inner peace. They even manage to weave Williams into the mix with startling restraint (she is unquestionably the biggest name they’ve ever collaborated with, unless you could Sunny Day Real Estate’s Jeremy Enigk): Her voice is less of a main attraction as it is an additional instrument, another part of the sonic flourish. It’s a truly great album — the kind only a group like mewithoutYou could make, and only at this point in their career (or whatever you want to call it). Call it maturity, if you want to, I prefer to think of it as artistic growth: an accomplished, beautiful record from an equally accomplished (if not severely overlooked) band. But who knows, with Ten Stories, that last bit might change. Hey, Hayley Williams is on it. What do you think of mewithoutYou’s latest music? Let us know in the comments! Related Videos Bigger Than The Sound: Stories Behind The Bands Related Artists Mewithoutyou
haha sorry for all the weird-ness at the beginning but im in love with Justin Bieber … and well this was my reaction to his concert tickets in Newcastle. Me, Katie( my younger Sister) and my wonderfull mam is going ! xx Please no Haters. thank you xxx http://www.youtube.com/v/rhN-zGD6050?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Read more: Getting Justin Bieber Tickets for Christmas
