Every prominent woman in America, it seems, has a story to tell about the time she met Ruth Bader Ginsburg and how transformative that encounter was. I met Ginsburg before she was elevated to the high court in the early 1990s, long before she morphed into the Notorious RBG. And if truth be told, she barely registered on my radar.

It wasn’t her fault. It was my failure to see beyond her reserve. And it had everything to do with my preconceptions of what a powerful woman should look and act like.