UNIVERSAL HUMAN VALUES -Harmony in the Human Being
They Said I Was Crazy
1. 84 more.com | february 2010
BY DANA HUDEPOHL
PHOTOGRAPHED BY CHRIS BUCK
MAYBE YOU HAVE TO HAVE A
SCREW LOOSE TO DREAM THIS BIG.
MEET FIVE WOMEN WHO WOULDN’T
TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER—AND DEFINED
EXTREME REINVENTION
3. A LONGTIME TEACHER,
SHE WALKED AWAY FROM A
LUCRATIVE JOB OFFER
TO BUILD A SANCTUARY FOR
ABUSED FARM ANIMALS
sanctuaries, which are permanent
homes for creatures who’ve been aban-
doned and abused, and I thought, oh,
that sounds right.” When Stevens told
her family and friends they were dumb-
struck. “They used a lot of S words, like
safety, stability, sanity,” she says. “But
the only S word that’s ever held sway
with me is short, as in ‘Life is short.’
I’ve followed my heart my entire life. It
has never failed me.”
Stevens cashed in her retirement
account and started touring sanctuaries.
In fall 2000, she held a public meet-
ing in upstate New York, near the town
where she owned a summer home. “All
I showed up with was a mission state-
ment of what the philosophy of Catskill
Animal Sanctuary would be,” she says.
“I had in my head a very clear knowl-
edge that this would happen. I just had
no idea of how.” The vision was enough:
Many in the crowd of 60 signed up
to be volunteers; one woman offered to
let Stevens use her small farm while
she looked for a larger place.
The first animal to arrive was Dino,
a pony who had kicked down his stall
door to escape a fire that killed 23 other
horses.“Hedidn’twanttodie,”shesays.
More animals poured in as word spread,
and the sanctuary outgrew its space.
One member tipped Stevens off to an 80-
acre property for sale. It was derelict—
littered with farm equipment, a heap of
tires, El Caminos on cinder blocks—but
it was available for cheap. Since 2003,
AFTER STORM waters ruined much
of Angela Logan’s home in 2006, she
hired a contractor to do the repair
work. But he botched the job badly.
“He put in $20,000 of plumbing that
had to be redone,” Logan says.
“Our utility bill hit $2,000 one month.”
At the same time, Logan’s work as
an actress—she had appeared on Law &
Order and in commercials—was drying
up. She enrolled in classes toward a
nursing degree and meanwhile brought
in money by substitute teaching,
helping out at a hair salon and selling
her specialty apple cake. But the cash
she earned wasn’t enough; she couldn’t
keep up with the payments on the home
she’d owned for more than 20 years. By
July 2009, she was facing foreclosure.
A credit counselor helped her get a
mortgage modification: Logan could
avoid disaster if she could find the
money for three $2,600 do-or-die pay-
ments, the first of which came due in
three weeks. “I said, ‘I am not going to
lose my house,’” she remembers. To get
the money, she decided to set a goal
for the number of apple cakes she would
sell: 100 cakes in 10 days at $40 each.
That would cover buying ingredients,
PREVIOUS
PAGES:
HAIR
AND
MAKEUP:
STEPHEN
RAMSEY
FOR
ARTISTSBYTIMOTHYPRIANO.COM.
STYLIST:
ALEXA
RYAN
FOR
ARTISTSBYTIMOTHYPRIANO.COM.
THIS
PAGE:
HAIR
AND
MAKEUP:
STEPHEN
RAMSEY
FOR
ARTISTSBYTIMOTHYPRIANO.COM.
STYLIST:
ISE
WHITE
FOR
ARTISTSBYTIMOTHYPRIANO.COM
THE FIRST ANIMAL TO ARRIVE WAS DINO,
A PONY WHO HAD KICKED DOWN HIS
STALL DOOR TO ESCAPE A FIRE THAT KILLED 23
OTHER HORSES. “HE DIDN’T WANT TO DIE,”
STEVENS SAYS. MORE ANIMALS
POURED IN AS WORD SPREAD.
KATHY STEVENS
SAUGERTIES, NEW YORK
ANGELA LOGAN
TEANECK, NEW JERSEY
FACING FORECLOSURE,
SHE RAISED MONEY BY SELLING
APPLE CAKES. NOW SHE
HAS AN ENTIRE PRODUCT
LINE AND DONATES PART OF HER
PROFITS TO HELP OTHERS
and guests; she also has plans for a vegan
cooking school and a children’s camp.
Catskill Animal Shelter (casanctuary
.org) has two and a half years’ expenses
locked away and has just received a
$1.5 million grant. “I’ve always known
that if you listen to the truest part of
yourself you will succeed,” she says. “I
am living a dream.”
into my lap, I turned it down,” she says.
“I loved teaching, but I realized I was
ready to move on—I just didn’t know to
what. I thought, good lord, what am I
going to do for the rest of my life?”
She took time off to figure it out, go-
ing for long walks with Murphy, her
yellow Lab. “I asked myself, ‘Kathy, what
speaks to the deepest part of your na-
ture?’” she says. “Then I was poking
around online and discovered animal
Stevens has been transforming that junk-
yard into a haven for 300 once unhappy
creatures. “When you get there and try
to open your car door, there’s a good
chance a pig will be in your way or a
sheep will paw your thigh asking for a
massage,” she says. “This is the most joy-
ful place I’ve ever experienced.”
Stevens recently purchased a Revolu-
tionary War–era house on the prop-
erty to convert to a home for interns
KATHY STEVENS was five the day she
rescued an animal for the first time.
She and her three-year-old sister were
exploring the dirt roads near their fam-
ily’s 300-acre horse farm in Hanover
County, Virginia, when a stray dog
started following them. Kathy brought
him home and named him Frisky, add-
ing him to the Stevens menagerie: Pet
goats roamed freely in and out of the
house, and Stevens got her own pony,
Mr. Red, as a Christmas gift when she
was still in preschool.
As an adult, Stevens moved to Bos-
ton, completed a master’s degree in
education and public policy at Tufts,
and started teaching high school Eng-
lish. In 2000, she received a six-figure
job offer to be the principal of a new
charter school. “Much to my surprise,
when the opportunity was plopped
86 more.com | february 2010
4. month 2008 | more.com 000
PHOTO
CREDITS
HERE
For Angela Logan,
baking apple cakes
every day kept
foreclosure away.
5. HAIR
AND
MAKEUP:
IVAN
MENDOZA
FOR
WORKGROUP-LTD.COM.
STYLIST:
MICHELLE
HARTNETT
FOR
WORKGROUP-LTD.COM
making her first $2,600 payment and
bringing all of her bills up to date (an-
other condition of the loan modifica-
tion). She asked her fiancé and three
sons, ages 16, 23 and 26, to help and they
agreed. One son suggested a name for
her baked goods: Mortgage Apple Cake.
At school, Logan stood up in physi-
ology class, explained her predica-
ment and asked her classmates to buy
a cake. “I was standing there like
the emperor in his new clothes,” she
says. “I felt naked.” But she received
42 orders and started baking around
the clock. Seven days passed before
she realized she had done nothing to
secure the additional 58 orders she
needed. Two friends contacted the local
newspaper to tell them the unusual
way she was trying to save her house.
The morning the article came out,
before Logan even had a chance to read
it, there was a news van in her drive-
way. “By seven am, we were on TV,
by 11 we were whisked away in a limo
to the Fox station, and by noon we
were on the national news eating my
cake,” she says. In one day, she
received orders for 400 cakes. “It
IN 1967, WHEN Amelia Morán Ceja
was 12, her family moved from a small
village in Mexico to a one-bedroom
cottage rental in Napa Valley, where
they hoped to find a better life. “My
parents nurtured me with the confi-
dence and conviction that I could
do anything I wanted,” Ceja says. She
hadn’t yet learned to speak English
when her dad took her to the vine-
yard where he was the foreman and
let her taste a grape straight off the
about a dream come true,” Logan says.
In August, Logan sent in her first
house payment just in time. By October,
she had sold more than 3,500 cakes.
Now she has developed a whole line of
cakes with Bake Me a Wish! (bakeme
awish.com/angela-logan-mortgage-
apple-cake.php) and is in talks to sell
them on QVC; five percent of the prof-
its are donated to GreenPath Debt So-
lutions, a nonprofit credit counseling
service. “By helping someone else out
of a bind, I hope I can relieve in them
even an ounce of the fear and anxi-
ety that I felt in my heart,” she says. “I
want to pay this forward in any way
I can. This apple cake will forever be
the cake that gives back.”
LOGAN COULD AVOID DISASTER IF SHE
COULD FIND THE MONEY FOR THREE
$2,600 DO-OR-DIE PAYMENTS,
THE FIRST OF WHICH CAME DUE IN THREE
WEEKS. “I SAID, ‘I AM NOT GOING TO LOSE
MY HOUSE,’ ” SHE REMEMBERS.
was this surreal thing out of a TV
movie,” she says. “I was like, where is
the background music?”
The local Hilton hotel invited her
to use their kitchen to handle the vol-
ume of orders. Her fiancé, sons and
friends mobilized, helping to chop
apples, frost, box and process orders.
“We didn’t know how we were going
to get these cakes to people all over the
country,” Logan says. She almost didn’t
answer an incoming call from an 800
number, thinking it was a bill collec-
tor. Instead it was Bake Me a Wish!,
an online service for delivery of gour-
met cakes. The president came over,
tasted the Mortgage Apple Cake and of-
fered to bake and ship her cakes. “Talk
AMELIA MORAN CEJA
NAPA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
AS A CHILD, CEJA, A MEXICAN
IMMIGRANT, PICKED GRAPES
FOR 10 CENTS A CONTAINER. NOW
SHE OWNS HER OWN VINEYARD
Amelia Morán
Ceja at her
vineyard in the
Napa Valley;
she was only
12 when she
fell in love with
wine grapes.
88 more.com | february 2010
6. february 2010 | more.com 89
HAIR
AND
MAKEUP:
SUZY
GRAHAM
FOR
CNINE
vine. “It was so sweet and succulent,
it determined my future,” she says.
Every summer and holiday, Ceja
worked in the vineyards picking grapes.
She went to the University of Cali-
fornia at San Diego on an academic
scholarship and studied history and
literature. When she graduated, she mar-
ried Pedro Ceja; they’d met as children
on the day she tasted her first grape. He
worked as an engineer in Silicon Val-
ley while Ceja stayed home with their
children. Determined to own their own
vineyard one day, they spent most week-
ends hunting for property in Napa,
even though they had little savings.
sparkling wines, in return for the root-
stock needed to start the vineyard.
“The whole family and all our friends
worked with us every weekend,” she
says. “That’s all we did.”
As their reputation grew, they built
a successful business selling grapes to
high-end wineries. In 1999, Ceja, her
husband and her brother-in-law were
finally able to open their own winery,
Ceja Vineyards (cejavineyards.com),
making her the first Mexican-American
woman in the world to be the presi-
dent of a wine production company.
In 2002, Ceja Vineyards was named
Best New Winery (their wines are
served at such restaurants as French
Laundry and Le Cirque) by a group
of 90 wine writers, and in 2005, Ceja
was named Woman of the Year by the
California legislature. This summer,
the Cejas are breaking ground on a
26,000-square-foot Mission-style win-
ery on the original 15 acres. “I have
been the face of a collective effort,”
Ceja says. “We are the perfect poster
children for the American Dream.”
TANA POPPINO STARTED dreaming
about competing in the National Fi-
nals Rodeo when she was only eight
years old. She won a rodeo scholarship
to Oklahoma Panhandle State Uni-
versity and qualified for the college
national finals her junior and senior
years. When she graduated in 1985, she
got married and took a job at the
Grand River Dam Authority, intend-
ing to work a few years before go-
ing pro. “When you’re young, you have
big dreams,” she says. “And then reality
In 1983, with their family, they took
out a jumbo loan at 19 percent in-
terest to buy 15 acres filled with cows,
not grapes. “Everyone thought we
were nuts,” she says. “If we’d had a busi-
ness plan, we would have never bought
the property. It spelled failure. But we
had to start somewhere.”
They gave up their rented house in
Silicon Valley, and Pedro commuted 90
miles each way from Napa to his
engineering job. “It was a sacrifice I
wouldn’t wish on anyone,” Ceja says.
They couldn’t afford to plant vines, but
they agreed to supply grapes to Domaine
Chandon, a large producer of
IN 1983, THEY TOOK OUT A JUMBO LOAN AT
19 PERCENT TO BUY 15 ACRES FILLED WITH
COWS, NOT GRAPES. “IF WE’D HAD A BUSINESS
PLAN, WE’D NEVER HAVE BOUGHT IT,”
CEJA SAYS. “IT SPELLED FAILURE.
BUT WE HAD TO START SOMEWHERE.”
Tana Poppino
gave up
office life to
pursue rodeo
dreams; here
at her ranch,
in Oklahoma,
with her
horse Goose.
TANA POPPINO
BIG CABIN, OKLAHOMA
SHE QUIT HER JOB AS A CORPORATE
MARKETING EXECUTIVE TO
BECOME A PROFESSIONAL RODEO
BARREL RACER
7. HAIR
AND
MAKEUP:
STEPHEN
RAMSEY
FOR
ARTISTSBYTIMOTHYPRIANO.COM.
STYLIST:
ALEXA
RYAN
FOR
ARTISTSBYTIMOTHYPRIANO.COM
90 more.com | february 2010
sets in and you have to pay the bills.
Two years turned into 20 years.”
By day Poppino worked at her mar-
keting job, and in the evenings she
trained with her horses. Each week-
end, she and her husband, who also
competed in rodeos, traveled to am-
ateur competitions. Finally, in 2003,
Poppino thought she was ready. She
worked overtime and weekends at
her job and then, using her leave time,
took off for an extended unpaid pe-
riod to compete. After three years of
pursuing this exhausting double life,
she was told by her boss that she
needed to choose between rodeo and
her job. “It was very tough to walk
away from a guaranteed paycheck
with great benefits to be on the road
24/7 under lousy working conditions,”
she says. “I prayed a lot, and God
gave me peace that it was time to do
what had been my passion my en-
tire life.” Now she travels 220 days a
year, puts 5,000 miles on her truck ev-
ery month, and lives in the front half
of a 30-foot horse trailer, seeing her
husband and 19-year-old son less fre-
quently than she’d like. “I didn’t want
to look back and say, ‘What if?’ and
have regrets,” she says.
At first she wasn’t winning and her
money started to run out. “The thought
of going back to work crossed my
mind every day,” she says. But just as
she was about to give up, she and her
horse found a groove. Over the next few
months, she won close to $40,000. She
qualified for the Wrangler National Fi-
nals Rodeo in 2006 and then again in
2007, fulfilling her childhood dream.
At the Calgary Stampede, she won
$100,000. (Read her blog and see her
schedule at tanapoppino.com.) “When
it came time to make the jump, as scary
as it was, I had to decide: Did I want
to settle for a good life—or did I want
the best life?” she says. “You’ve got to
search your heart and take the risk.”
IN 1990, NEAR the height of a 20-year
career in journalism, Laurie Sue Brock-
way answered a New York Times ad for
a part-time job editing sexy novels.
Over the next four years, she worked
on 30 of them, then wrote five of her
own. The publishing company was part
of the same organization that owned
Playgirl, and in 1994 Brockway was
named editor-in-chief. “I was a big hit
at cocktail parties,” she says. “We always
had gorgeous men hanging around.”
Then in 1997, as she was finishing her
book How to Seduce a Man and Keep
Him Seduced, her father became ill.
“When doctors made it clear he would
not recover, I focused on helping him
have a good death,” she says. Brockway
turned to a priest, a rabbi, even an au-
thor who wrote about near-death expe-
riences. “My father’s dying opened me
up spiritually in a way I had never been
before,” she says. Her father left no in-
structions for his final arrangements,
AFTER LEADING AN EXHAUSTING
DOUBLE LIFE FOR THREE YEARS, POPPINO
WAS TOLD BY HER BOSS THAT SHE HAD TO CHOOSE
BETWEEN RODEO AND HER JOB. “IT WAS
VERY TOUGH TO WALK AWAY FROM A
GUARANTEED PAYCHECK,” POPPINO SAYS.
and Brockway decided to do the grave-
side service herself with the help of
friends. After the funeral, a minister
who was there with her uncle asked to
speak with her privately. “I thought I
had done something horribly sacrile-
gious and was going to hell,” she says.
Instead he asked if she’d thought about
becoming a minister. “It was hearing
the right words at the right time,” she
says. “In those months of losing a par-
ent, my heart had opened and my life
had been transformed.”
She was the single mother of a six-
year-old son and by that time had quit
Playgirl to be the editor-in-chief of a
magazine called Single Living. She
earned a stable salary doing something
she knew well, but the minister’s words
had made an impression. With $1,000
that her mother gave her from her
dad’s life insurance policy, she put down
a deposit to attend an interfaith semi-
nary. At the same time, Single Living
folded. “That was a sign for me that it
was meant to be,” she says. “It was al-
most like media was kicking me out. I
did a great job at it, but I was done.”
She was ordained in 1999, and since
then has married hundreds of couples,
performed baby blessings and funerals
and volunteered as a chaplain for the
Red Cross. She has also written several
spiritual books (find them at laurie
suebrockway.net). In 2008, Brockway
found a way to combine her media
expertise with her spirituality when
she took a job as the inspiration editor
for Beliefnet.com. “I always say I went
from Playgirl to the pulpit and my fo-
cus from the sexual to the spiritual,”
she says. “I got a call into a field I wasn’t
planning on and yet it was the right
one for me. When you let go of precon-
ceived fears and follow your heart and
soul, only good can come.”
AFTER THE FUNERAL, A MINISTER ASKED TO
SPEAK WITH BROCKWAY PRIVATELY. “I THOUGHT
I HAD DONE SOMETHING SACRILEGIOUS AND
WAS GOING TO HELL,” SHE SAYS. INSTEAD
HE ASKED IF SHE’D EVER THOUGHT
ABOUT BECOMING A MINISTER.
REV. LAURIE SUE BROCKWAY
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
SHE WROTE EROTIC NOVELS
AND SERVED AS PLAYGIRL’S EDITOR-
IN-CHIEF—THEN SHE WENT
TO SEMINARY AND HAS MARRIED
HUNDREDS OF COUPLES AS AN
ORDAINED INTERFAITH MINISTER
Web extra: To read about another extreme reinvention and to share your
own, go to more.com/crazy.
8. month 2008 | more.com 000
After her father’s
death, Laurie
Sue Brockway
(here in Brooklyn)
found her calling
as a minister.
