When I first met my husband, he had a very good job - company car, pension plan, grudging respect from his staff - the lot. I, on the other hand, was badly paid and devoid of ambition. Then I had a couple of books published and confounded all expecta...
My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a fa...
I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was ...
My dad was pretty strict. We didn't even get to watch any of his movies until I was, like, 17 years old. I didn't even see his stand-up, really, until I started doing stand-up, and that was when I was 22. So he's pretty strict. We had curfews until I...
Corporate America was hurling offers at her. Thinking even bigger, wanting even more, she had dreams of starting a Martha Stewart magazine and starring in her own regularly scheduled Martha Stewart television show. Martha saw herself as Betty Crocker...
When I was 11 years old, I was bullied. It mainly started when I moved to California to pursue my dreams of being an actress. Kids back home in Texas, who I thought were my friends, were saying things behind my back. They said that I would never make...
If I'm with a man, is that going to prevent me from achieving my goal? What sacrifices will I have to make in terms of being myself, if I'm with a man? Something that young women find out really quickly is that when you start dating, all of a sudden ...
My husband's a little younger than me. When I first started dating him, I just fell mad for him. I made a deal with myself: I was like, 'I'm not gonna get weird about what the future might be. I'm just going to be in every moment I can and enjoy us t...
I'm not only a lawyer, I have a post doctorate degree in federal tax law from William and Mary. I work in serious scholarship and work in the United States federal tax court. My husband and I raised five kids. We've raised 23 foster children. We've a...
Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school ear...
I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parent...
When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L...
Growing up as an athlete, I started skating very young. My parents didn't know anything about the sport, so they went with the flow. I had two great coaches who gave great advice and gave guidelines for my parents. My parents let the coaches dictate ...
I think it's absolutely possible for any woman to use the moves I do with Lady Gaga. Just put on her 'Born This Way' video or turn on one of her songs, spend 20 minutes and get a routine down just by watching our choreography. You'll start to see a d...
I first started going to shows when I was about 16 - seeing local bands. I mean, I loved music before that, and I played a bit of guitar when I was younger and thought maybe I'd become a guitar teacher or something, but when I saw other kids doing it...
I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' ...
Seattle's got a great work force, relatively low cost of starting a company, and just a really good, innovative entrepreneurial DNA. To me it's less about Seattle tooting its horn and more about bold, confident, dare-to-be-different entrepreneurs gra...
I've been collecting photos for a long time, I mean since I started making money. But what you have had to go through to find a good photo is like a needle in the haystack sometimes. You'll drive from one gallery to the next gallery to the next galle...
When I went through the Simpson case, I was a cop. Then I was a good cop. Then I was a bad cop. Then I had the media camped out in front of my house when I retired. Then, you know, I am the evilest thing on the planet. Then I write a few books, and t...
I was probably 15 when I started going to the studio with the older cats in my neighborhood. They heard me rap outside one time; I was just freestyling. And they invited me to the studio. It's good when you're accepted, no matter what crowd. That's t...
We need to start training more primary health providers and fewer specialists. We will never be able to control health care costs unless we challenge the over-emphasis on medical research, specialists and technology and put more emphasis on deliverin...
