Well, hello! Glad to meet you! Since this is the beginning of something new, I’ve decided to start at the beginning. I just want to share a bit of my background, so you understand why YES has come to mean so much to me over the years. Throughout these next few pieces, see if you can spot where I took on yes to step out into the unknown.

At 12 years old, my parents got divorced. It wasn’t necessarily a shock. In fact, it was inevitable. My father hadn’t been part of our lives since I was four or five years old. But the finality of this step made me incredibly sad. That deep sense of abandonment would dog me the rest of my life.

Ah, San Francisco you totally stole my heart. I arrived in summer and as Mark Twain so famously said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Freezing! But stunning. The way the fog rolls in at the end of the day is simultaneously eerie and wonderful. You get that sense that night is coming and something mysterious is on the way. All around the hilly city, lights start flicking on, winking on and off in the gloom. No matter how warm the day is you can’t afford to go out dressed in something light and breezy, it’s going to be chilly by the time the fog moves in.

In 1993, at 30 years old, I moved to New York City to pursue my love of writing fiction. I had a whopping $400, no job, and a bedroom in a tiny East Village apartment with an ex-theater owner friend from South Beach, Florida. I didn’t really have a plan but had always wanted to live in New York. My family was from the city - right off the boat at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century. My grandfather had so many stories about being a young man, hanging out in the West Village at the various speakeasies. Or playing golf on the island (Long Island). He was an awesome scratch golfer and would caddy in the summers when he was a kid.

2001 was an interesting time to launch a business. The U.S. was reeling from the twin tower attacks, consumer spending was down (America runs on confidence) and brands were cutting their budgets. I had something to prove to my new “owners,” so I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to pitch Revlon.

The first time I went to Europe was when I was 18. I was on my trip to Israel, studying Jewish history, one of only three non-Jews on the trip. We spent a night in London on the way over - a city that I had been longing to visit. I remember our plane descending over the UK, seeing all that lush, deep green. Oh England! At 12 years old I had become a Beatles fanatic.