People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it.
In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.
As an actress, I think it's important to look back and realize that we aren't always quite as original as we think we are. There's this grand, textured history for us over the last 100 years of incredible writers, directors, and performers.
I get extremely nervous before performances. I pray and try to look at it as, 'I'll go out there and have fun,' but it's very nerve-wracking for me. I don't think that will ever change.
I'm worried because of my mother, she's going to see my performance and she's quite hard. She's going to see me naked. And my Dad, woah. Yeah, they're going to see me like a woman, you know?
I knew I really made it when my dad saw me in London and after the performance he had no notes to me and just said 'You are doing your own thing and I am proud of you.'
I wanted to perform well for my mom and dad, because in high school, I didn't have a job. My brothers, they worked at Pizza Hut or places like that, but sports, that was my way of giving back.
Whenever I did a good performance, my Dad and my uncles, who were rabid movie fans, took me to the movies. There began my underlying love affair with film.
I don't think my kids have to worry too much about me embarrassing them because that's not how I would want to grow up, with wacky dad showing up at school and performing for everyone.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
You see, it's actually very good that a human activity is performed very close to death, because that's where life is. Life is, at its most valuable and most full, very close to the boundary of life.
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.
It's always been a dream of mine to be Ginger Rogers or Cyd Charisse, and here I am performing alongside Robert Lindsay and being directed by a major Broadway producer. Who said dreams don't come true?
Gorillas are still wild creatures. That's made very clear when you observe them in nature. They charge and perform other displays that are terrifying by design. But they don't attack unless they feel threatened.
I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that's what I'm always looking for, a director that's going to help me go places I've never been before.
Any of Bette Midler's concerts should be required viewing for every actor/performer. She has the audience in the palm of her hands at all times and can switch emotions on a dime: Great singer, great actress, great comedian - fearless.
I think it's healthy for a person to be nervous. It means you care - that you work hard and want to give a great performance. You just have to channel that nervous energy into the show.
As a young performer, I didn't know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it's not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it's done.
It was very much about performances, the whole ensemble thing was just great - everybody working together. Sometimes it didn't feel like a film set. It wasn't technically driven, it was very, very enjoyable.
I'm never satisfied with my performance. I want to keep pushing myself. The great thing about being an actor is you're always learning. That's what excites me about the job and what continues to drive me.
The last great delusion is soon to open before us. Antichrist is to perform his marvelous works in our sight So closely will the counterfeit resemble the true that it will be impossible to distinguish between them except by the Holy Scriptures.
