ARCADIA, Calif. _ When she was a little girl, Mireya Mayor's parents wouldn't allow her to join the Girl Scouts, saying it was far too dangerous. An only child of Cuban immigrants, she was soundly protected throughout her youth, she says.
When she grew up she made up for lost time. Mayor earned her doctorate in anthropology, specializing in the study of primates. And that academic leap took her to the wilds of Madagascar, the jungles of the Congo and the forests of America's Northwest.
"The expeditions that appeal to me most are the ones where there's a possibility of discovery and deemed difficult/nearly impossible," she says. "Those are the ones that appeal to me the most."
Mayor's intrepid journeys have resulted in the co-discovery of the world's smallest primate and the unearthing of a new frog species.
"I feel equally comfortable and at home in the dense forest _ no running water, no electricity _ as I do in the big city environment. I love being there," she says.
During her forays, Mayor has survived a plane crash in the Congo, been charged by a 450-pound silverback gorilla and been pursued by an unpredictable forest elephant. "The scariest encounters have to do with people, not with animals," she remarks.
"I've been in some pretty hairy situations in Guyana, for example, with the miners who live out there and were following me down the river. In Congo, I had my passport taken away and thrown into a ditch because, apparently, it wasn't me. So I've had some scary encounters. With animals, I know enough about animal behavior to know what to expect."
But in her latest mission, she has no idea what to expect. Mayor is one of the team trekking the elusive Bigfoot in the wilds of Oregon on the Travel Channel's series "Expedition Bigfoot."
She hasn't lost her scientific integrity to do so, she insists. "My goal is not any different on this expedition than on any traditional expedition that I've been on, which is to find evidence. And that's all I am interested in. Science isn't based on belief, it's based on fact. There are moments where there is a lot of excitement about things found, and I am the inquisitive skeptic. I'm very open-minded," she says.
"I was a pre-law student, former NFL cheerleader, never your 'typical' scientist, and I've always kept an open mind. So I went into this with an extremely open mind also knowing there are more than 10,000 modern day eyewitness accounts. And those need to be taken seriously, because all of them may not be true. What you actually need is one of them to be true to warrant an investigation. In my work as a scientist, there have been endless times when I rely on accounts of the local people when I'm searching for an animal. And I've heard accounts of an animal being in an area when no other scientist believed it could be there, and I myself found it hard to believe, that turned out to be there. So you do need to listen to these stories."
It was her mother, a nurse, who sheltered her as a child, but later encouraged Mayor in her unconventional choices. "She was terrified I was going to Guyana in South America to one of the most remote regions of the Amazon, unexplored _ that I was going to get sick and die in the jungle," she recalls.
"So for many years she didn't understand why I kept going back and doing this. So when I had my first daughter, I thought, 'I guess that's it.' And it was mom, who initially didn't want me to do all this, said, 'You can't stop exploring. It's not what you're doing, it's who you are. And you do your daughter a disservice by not being who you are.' She was absolutely right. So I grabbed my baby and went off to Madagascar when she was 9 months old."
Mayor has six children, five by her first husband and a 4-year-old with her executive producer husband of six years. She manages her family with the same precision she applies to her work.
"I treat my life very much like an expedition _ even the logistical planning with six children is no different than what I do when I plan the porters, the food, the timeline, the contingency plans _ plans A, B, and C. You can plan and plan and then Africa happens. The same with kids," she laughs.
Filming on "Expedition Bigfoot" has been completed. And Mayor reports: "What I can say is this, without giving away too much, is that I walked away from Oregon with a completely different way of thinking about Bigfoot and its existence than when I walked in. I saw and experienced things out there that had no logical or scientific explanation, things that really took me by surprise, that perhaps if I hadn't seen with my own two eyes I wouldn't even believe."
ABC OFFERS STAN LEE SPECIAL
Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men and Black Panther all were creations of the great Stan Lee, who died of congestive heart failure a year ago.
Lee was the master of Marvel Comics, and ABC is celebrating his ink-filled life on Friday with its "Celebrating Marvel's Stan Lee" special.
A true innovator and creative spirit, when I interviewed Lee shortly before his death he recalled how he got started.
"I did have an imagination and read a lot," he said. "I loved radio and going to the movies. In those days you could go once a month. I loved to see movies like 'King Kong,' 'Moby Dick,' anything that was bigger than life and imaginative.
"When I was about 7 or 8 years old I used to draw stories for myself. But I couldn't really draw, so what I did, I would take a sheet of paper and draw a horizontal line. And that was the horizon. Then I would put little stick figures that I drew on that line, and I would just have a row of stick figures doing things. One would be running, jumping, punching another one in the nose. And I told myself little stories with these stick figures. I never thought anything of it. But I guess, in my own way, I was doing comics," he said.
"I'm a writer basically. I draw. In the Army I did posters and things. But I'm not a good artist. I can get away with doing a cartoon, that's about it," he said.
"I always hooked up with an artist. They used to credit me as the creator and I have a feeling some of the artists were getting annoyed. I said I don't want to annoy them. So even though I am the one who came up with the original idea and I told them what to draw and wrote the stories, I would call myself 'the co-creator.' So I would consider myself the co-creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men _ all of those."
TRUE TALE OF VALOR STREAMS ON DISNEY+
For anybody who's a sucker for a good dog story, Disney+ has one for you headlining Friday with "Togo." It's the true story of a brave, aging huskie who's charged with delivering an antitoxin serum to Nome, Alaska, 600 miles away when a deadly epidemic spreads throughout the town.
His owner and trainer, Leonhard Seppala, understands the hardships they will endure during the trek. Seppala is played by the cryptic Willem Dafoe and Julianne Nicholson portrays his wife in this awe-inspiring saga.
Dafoe, who's well known for "Spider-Man," "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "John Carter," tells me he's never been fond of being famous.
"I hear the word fame and I get nervous because it represents various things to me. People deal with fame in different ways. Sometimes I feel famous, sometimes I don't feel famous at all. From an actor's standpoint the only thing I can say about notoriety is when people start to have certain associations with you, you wonder sometimes if you lose your flexibility to be transformed in a role, for example," he says. "And also so much in the business nature of the industry, everything conspires to have you corner a market, to be the best at a particular thing or crystallize a persona. We're all obsessed by this these days. On the one hand, you see how that's useful. On the other hand, the more you crystallize this persona the more it restricts what you're able to do or how people can see you.
"I don't think acting in itself is about doing lots of different things or even being a chameleon, I don't think that's necessary, or sometimes it's not even an interesting aspect of acting."
TAYLOR SWIFT TEAMS UP WITH WEBBER
Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber may seem like an odd couple, but the pair has written a new song for Webber's classic theater piece "Cats," which is being released as a musical film on Friday.
The movie version's new song is titled "Beautiful Ghosts" and will be performed in the film by Royal Ballet dancer Francesca Hayward. Swift will do the honors over the ending titles. The film features an honor roll of actors including Idris Elba, Dame Judi Dench, Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, as well as Swift, who plays Bombalurina.
Webber, whose favorite composer is Richard Rodgers, says the storyline is his muse when he begins writing music. Sometimes he hears the music in his head, but most often it's the story that goads his creativity.
"Sometimes I write a piece of music and I might keep it. That's not uncommon for a composer to do that ... It's a very interesting fact that Richard Rodgers didn't write the 'Carousel' overture for 'Carousel.' He wrote it 20 years before. Normally everything that I do comes from the situation that the plot gives me."
