When I was in high school in Los Angeles, my mother, who was a speech therapist, agreed to stay over the weekend with one of her clients and his little sister while the parents went away on vacation. She brought me along.
In high school, theater was all I ever wanted to do. I didn't see that I was going to set it aside for so many years and take a right turn into television. Of course, wanting to do theater is something you hear a lot from actors. I think I've been em...
When I was going to school, I just wanted to be like everybody else. I would pull at my hair to try and get it to lie straight. America was where I would consume and absorb black culture, buy Ultra Sheen and watch 'Soul Train,' but I still had that w...
I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea.
Perfect!" Wrath bellowed. "And this is a doctor saying it -- I mean, she went to medical school." ... "And Dr. Sam told me she's delivered over fifteen thousand babies over the course of her career -- " "See!" Wrath yelled. "She knows these things. M...
If you want to be an architect of change by raising great kids, God bless. If you want to do it by raising money for your kid's school, great. If you want to build a garden - whatever it is. Women like myself - they're complicated, and they have a lo...
I have a sense of urgency, of time. I am a woman and am always running between work, doctors' appointments, school meetings, filling up the fridge, then going back to work. Like everyone who combines professional and family life, I am always doing se...
We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we w...
I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, 'You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back, and we're happy, so w...
I wouldn't say that processed food, ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life, it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever b...
Stop trying to find something in food that will make you feel better. I used to have eating disorders; I'd binge and purge all the time: fried oysters, po' boys, muffulettas, beignets, coffee and doughnuts. I tried to medicate myself with food when p...
It's fantastic to strive towards a nice life where you eat nice organic food and your children go to a nice school and you can afford nice clothes and nice perfume and the hypoallergenic make-up. But there's never a day goes by, and I mean this from ...
We're adults. We're the ones who should teach the kids what's good to eat. I don't think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we're feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to f...
Having been kept pretty strict in prep schools, I guess I couldn't cope with all the freedom at Yale. I had a wild, wonderful time, got abysmal grades and was bounced out in my freshman year. I then came back the following fall as a repeating freshma...
I love my complexion, but like so many of us, in the early years at primary school, I grew up thinking that my dark skin wasn't a great thing. I've found freedom in music and songwriting, which has given me a freedom in how I present myself. I'm glad...
It's difficult because we tend to overrate the pain of failure. We fear it too much. That's research that emerges from psychology. We think it's going to be worse than it really is. And, I think, as we get a bit older, really after we leave school or...
Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that'...
This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn't want them to lose friends. He is ...
My favorite season was when I wrote every morning for three or four hours, then I would go and teach my classes at school, come home to my family and hang out with them, have dinner, and then, after everyone was tucked in, I would prepare for my clas...
My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own...
When I first began visiting West Germany in the early 1980s, I was startled by the contrast between Birmingham, where I went to school, and affluent Cologne. My host family, the lovely Schumachers, always had an opulent array of grapes on the table; ...
