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There’s always been something fishy about Ishama “Ish” Monroe. “Since I was 2 years old, there are pictures of me with a rod and reel. Everything I ever had to do—book reports, stuff like that—was about fishing.” His father taught him the sport during summers spent in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and as an 11-year-old, Monroe saw a televised competition where the winner took home $5,000. “Twenty years ago, that was a lot of money.”
But turning his love of fishing into a fulltime gig wasn’t so easy. While working several part-time jobs (UPS, selling cars, a sporting goods store), Monroe competed in local fishing competitions. “All of a sudden I was doing really good. A few sponsors approached me and started giving me product, but all the while I was thinking, I gotta get a real job. Then I qualified for the tour, and I had a phenomenal month [selling cars], so I took that money and went out and [joined the tour].”
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Tracey Moore-Marable loves actors, and clearly, the feeling is mutual. The affair, going on 20 years, began when the San Francisco native came to New York to be a movie director. Things took off a couple years later when she founded “The Joke’s On You” with actors who performed practical jokes for hire years before Ashton Kutcher had ever punk’d anyone. “’The Joke’s On You’ was about bringing humor to people. I had a victim’s bio and would talk to relatives and close friends to put together creative scenarios to stage on victims. I wouldn’t do anything vengeful or harmful. It had to be positive.”
Moore-Marable parlayed her connections from that venture into a fruitful career as a casting director that has spanned more than 15 years and includes work on Just Another Girl on the IRT and Spike Lee’s Girl 6. Her current focus is her Spirited Actor Workshop, which schools on the acting and audition process. “I was pregnant and had to slow down, so I started teaching,” she says of the workshop. “I wanted to empower actors and delete all the misconceptions about the audition process. I also wanted to connect with actors and motivate and encourage them on their journey because there are a lot of discouraging people in the business.”
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When Will Smith visited the Power 106 studios in Los Angeles back in 2002, he and DJ-actor Kurt “Big Boy” Alexander had an interesting conversation on the air. “[Will] said I had to take care of my health,” says the host of Power 106’s “Big Boy’s Neighborhood,” a successful morning show. At the time, Alexander weighed 511 pounds and had heard all the warnings before. “He wasn’t saying anything new,” Alexander remembers. “It was really out of concern.”
So Smith and Big Boy came up with a wager: For every pund Alexander lost, Smith would donate $1,000 to charity. In six months, Alexander lost 111 pounds through diet and exercise, leading Smith to give to various charities, including Children’s Hospital in LA. But, like millions of dieters in the U.S., Alexander gained most of it back before long. When his legs were swollen for two days after returning from a business trip, Alexander tried again for fear, he recalls, that “I was going to die.”
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