BY MIKE LEONARD
Jill Bolte Taylor is not unfamiliar with glamour and glitz. When named by Time as one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2008, she walked the red carpet at the magazine’s gala and was honored along with the likes of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Oprah Winfrey, and Bruce Springsteen.
Recently, the Bloomington neuroanatomist and author of the best-selling book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, learned she’d been selected by New York’s Moves magazine as one of its 2014 Power Women and invited to what promises to be a similarly elegant red carpet banquet on November 14. “It’s quite a shock. I’m not sure how that happened,” she says. “I do know they go on the hunt for women in various fields.”
The glossy magazine is very New York-centric. “And I’m a Hoosier,” Bolte Taylor laughs. “I am not a New Yorker.
Women honored by the magazine over the last decade include Susan Sarandon, Gloria Allred, Kerry Washington, Andrea Mitchell, Ashley Judd, and Soledad O’Brien. Arianna Huffington will be Mistress of Ceremonies but honorees are not told in advance who will be joining them at this year’s event.
“I wish we did know,” Bolte Taylor acknowledges. “That way I can do my homework before I go.”
She plans to embrace the occasion and arrive in “a lovely red gown” with black accessories, accompanied by friend, Glenn Moulton, who will wear a tuxedo. But it wasn’t like the Harvard-trained brain scientist had a lot of red carpet-ready dresses to choose from. “I actually contacted a few of my friends on the hunt for the perfect gown, and a couple of them opened their closets to me,” she says. “So I’m kind of a community project.”
Click here to read our update on Jill Bolte Taylor’s time at the Moves magazine gala.
