I Wanted To Be Blondie. Now I write for Colbert.

For our launch, Double X approached a number of women we admire—actors, writers, Supreme Court justices, athletes—and asked them to answer the question, "Who did you want to be when you grew up?" You might be surprised at some of the answers. They range from guilty pleasures close to home (the domestic goddess Donna Reed) to Olympian heroines of ancient times (the Greek goddess Athena). Check out the answers from Amanda Peet, Dominique Dawes, Jane Smiley and others here (or in slideshow form here), and from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Rhee, Linda Greenhouse, and others here.

Allison Silverman, writer, The Colbert Report

I knew a boy named Will who used to whip his jacket around his head and hit kids with the zipper. One day after school, I pushed him into a ditch. This was in 1980, and a lot was happening. My teacher picked me to be Athena when our class acted out Greek myths, and Blondie released "The Tide is High." All the girls sang it. We danced to it outside the lunchroom before our first sex ed class. I desperately wanted to be both of them: Debbie Harry-Athena. Debbie had godlike qualities. She could sing in French. Plus, she and Athena knew the same horrors. Athena's mother being swallowed by Zeus was not all that different from being swallowed by a man from Mars who eats guitars. But most important, Athena was a warrior for justice, and Debbie, who wasn't "the kind of girl who gives up just like that," had the sense of fairness to "wait, my dear, ‘til it's my turn." Both would surely agree that, after all those zipper attacks, Will deserved to taste ditch. When I got home, Will's mother called my mother. I did not push him into a ditch again.

Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University

When my memory turns to the time when I began school, the palette of colors recalled is one of many vibrant hues. I associate these vibrant colors with the presence of my first teacher, Miss Ida Mae Henderson. She was to me as a rock star might be to a young person today. Though she demanded the best effort of her students, her open, inviting style put us at ease.

This first encounter with education was perhaps the defining moment of my life. Miss Ida Mae's respect for books, the power and openness of her expression, and the self confidence she exhibited as a woman suggested to me that learning must be more powerful than anything I had yet imagined. In those days, women were expected to be subservient and blacks were forbidden to have any hint of an independent uppity voice. Yet her strong, confident and happy voice bespoke a power that I too could access through education.

From that moment on, I was convinced that excelling in school was the key to a wider world than I could imagine. As a 6-year-old, I could never have independently reasoned that to be the case. It was the vivid example of a teacher that showed me what I could one day be.

Nora Ephron, writer, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman

I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was thirteen or fourteen. I don't have any memory at all of what I wanted to be before that, but in my freshman year of high school we had a vocational day, and a woman sports writer from the Los Angeles Times spoke at it, and she was very charming. From that day on, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, and everything about journalism that I'd been exposed to previously—like Lois Lane and Brenda Starr—seemed to have been put in on Earth in order to inspire me to that ambition. I took journalism in my junior year of high school, and I had a wonderful journalism teacher. That clinched it.