They said if I stayed in the orphanage for another month or so, I basically would not have been able to be alive.
Growing up in a very poor orphanage in Ukraine, there wasn't much food.
My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.
As a youngster in the little orphanage home in New Orleans, I was the bugler of the institution. When I got to be around 13 or 14 years old, they took me off the bugle and put me in the little brass band.
Oliver Twist has asked for more!
It was honestly like 'Annie.' One day I was alone in a cold, dark Eastern European orphanage, and then the next day I was in an enchanted, mystical land known as Walmart.
I grew up in different orphanages in Israel, and if they gave me a pair of shoes, a shirt, and pair of pants every year, I was lucky. The rest was handouts, leftover clothes. So I appreciated clothes because I only had one new shirt each year.
At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.
