You may remember Harper Finkle from Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place, Alex’s (Selena Gomez’s) smart best friend who’d often act as the witch’s conscience. It turns out the actor behind Harper, Jennifer Stone, also has a heart of gold. Stone, who grew up to become a nurse, is now preparing to save lives on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
After appearing on the Wizards of Waverly Place series finale in 2012 and some additional projects, Stone took a break from acting to go to college. Right before this, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. “More than learning the semantics of beta-cells and autoimmune disorders, I wanted to understand my body and the impact of Type 1,” she said in a 2016 interview with Beyond Type 1, a nonprofit organization that provides resources to those living with diabetes. So she switched from her psychology major to nursing.
Last year she shared an Instagram post celebrating receiving her degree. “It’s been a long road of blood (mostly other people’s), sweat, and tears (those were mine), but I can finally call myself a nursing grad,” she wrote.
And now she says she’s “ready to join” those on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19.
“A very good friend of mine (@maiarawalsh ) pointed out to me that today is #worldhealthday. It is also the day I went from a volunteer, then a student nurse, and now an RN resident,” she wrote in a new post showing off her new resident badge.
She continued, “I just hope to live up to all of the amazing healthcare providers on the front lines now as I get ready to join them. #worldhealthorganization #supportnurses #westayhereforyou❤️pleasestayhomeforus #covid2020.”
After receiving a ton of positive feedback on her post (including some from WOWP fans, of course), Stone shared another image on Wednesday, April 8, encouraging her followers to wear nonsurgical masks like she does when she’s not working. “I’m wearing a mask to flatten the curve,” she wrote in the caption. “You can’t see me smiling out of gratitude for hitting 300,000 followers! Thank you guys for all of your love and support.”
Reese Witherspoon has basically grown up in front of the world. She starred in her first film—the wonderful Man in the Moon—in 1991, when she was just 14 years old. Now, at 43, she’s not only a successful actress but an acclaimed producer who’s helping shepherd interesting stories about all different kinds of women through the Hollywood machine.
Even though she works in an industry that has long been focused on women’s looks—and struggled to know what to do with them as they get (gasp!) older—she’s not afraid of aging. In fact, she’s proud of the physical signs of getting older. “I have a point of view because I’ve been on this planet for 43 years, and I didn’t feel that same way when I was 25,” she says in a new interview with Allure. “I didn’t have the same things to say. I’m 43 and I’ve had a whole bunch of experiences, and I can speak with a thoughtfulness about the changes I’d like to see in the world, and…I just feel like I earned that gray hair and my fine lines. I like ’em. I so prefer 43 to 25.” As a fellow 43-year-old woman myself, I very much agree with everything Witherspoon says here.
But she also gets those grays touched up by her longtime colorist, Lorri Goddard, and that’s OK too. “It takes three hours to have my highlights done, no joke. I go every seven or eight weeks,” she said. “I’m starting to get gray around the edges of my hairline. Lorri doesn’t like to call them grays, though. She says they’re ‘hyper-blonds.'”
Obviously, Witherspoon has looked fabulous at every age, but she does have some beauty regrets from the nineties—including dark brown lipstick, which she wore to get her driver’s license at 16, and ultra-thin eyebrows. “In the nineties, we plucked our brows really thin. I said ‘we’…at least I did. And it just looked awful. Thank God they grew back, but, I mean, who knows what they might look like now if I hadn’t plucked them into oblivion!”
Saturday night brought the sad news that Republican senator and Vietnam war hero John McCain died after a battle with brain cancer. “Senator John Sidney McCain III died at 4:28 p.m. on August 25, 2018,” his office said in a statement that evening. It was just on Friday that McCain’s family revealed he was discontinuing treatment for the aggressive form of cancer.
There are no shortage of moments in McCain’s storied career that led him to be affectionately dubbed “The Maverick,” but it’s his lasting legacy as someone who wasn’t afraid to reach across party lines—a nonconformist as his nickname suggests—that his colleagues remarked on the most in his last days. One might not have always agreed with him, but you’d be hard-pressed not to respect him and, in many ways, the principles he chose to live by.
Yes, he is the man who chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election that eventually led to Barack Obama’s first term in office. But he is also the man who staunchly defended Obama when a woman at one of his rallies derided the former President, saying, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, he’s not—he’s an Arab,” both an insult to his opposing candidate and those of Arab descent.
McCain quickly responded with grace: “No ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about. He is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as President. If I didn’t think I’d be one heck of a better President I wouldn’t be running, and that’s the point. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments; I will respect him. I want everyone to be respectful, and let’s make sure we are. Because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America.”
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During the past two years, McCain became a beacon of light to those, both conservative and liberal, who opposed President Donald Trump. Take for example, in June, when the president seemingly picked fights with a number of American allies at the G7 conference. McCain tweeted: “To our allies: bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization & supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values. Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.”
Trump, himself, famously said in 2015 of the man who spent five-and-a-half years as a POW in Vietnam, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
McCain never shied away from criticizing the president and his administration. He was the lone Republican to vote against Mick Mulvaney, the president’s choice for budget chief. When Trump seemed to equate actions of the United States to those of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, McCain said, “That moral equivalency is a contradiction of everything the United States has ever stood for in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
He also warned that suppressing the press is “how dictators get started.”
Then there was his iconic “thumbs down” during the Senate’s Affordable Care Act vote back in July of 2017. In the days leading up to the vote, it was unclear whether McCain would side with his own party to pass the “skinny” repeal of one of President Obama’s signature pieces of legislation. In the end, he did not.
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“I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict party-line basis without a single Republican vote,” McCain said in a statement after the vote. “We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people,” he said. “We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve.”
He also called for a return to the regular legislative order that would allow proper debate on the issues. “I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other to learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us,” he said. “Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood.”
“Let’s trust each other. Let’s return to regular order. We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. That’s an approach that’s been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires.”
Of course, McCain was a Republican, and he voted along party lines more than he did not. But in a time when it feels like the country has never been more divided, and even those on the right in Congress who oppose what Trump stands for seem to do so only in tweets, we’d all do well to remember what a maverick truly is—and how one can make change for the better.
