I played piano in a covers band, but that didn't especially help with girls. There is never a piano around after the shows. Guys with the guitars were the ones who got lucky.
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
As a kid, I wasn't sure that I would ever get married - I was not the kind of little girl who played at being a bride.
I've had my share of villains and played some fairly nasty characters. But I've been acting for so long. I started out as the girl next door. Now I'm the grandmother next door.
It's a basic tenet you learn at drama school. If you're playing someone evil, you can't make an objective moral judgment. You've got to get inside the character and empathize as much as possible.
In Michigan, if you want to act, it's local theater, it's high school theater and it's going to camp and putting on plays in the summer, and I always loved doing that. There was something that just drew me to it.
I went down and played with Magic Johnson at his all-star game in Atlanta. I remember Magic stopped the game and said, 'We need you here with us in L.A.'
I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.
I did a 'Children of the Corn' remake for Sci Fi Channel. I play the Peter Horton role from the original, and Candace McClure from 'Battlestar Galactica' is my Linda Hamilton.
My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.
I like to play people that are real, a real person, and then something that's interesting with that person. I think it's a lot more challenging to do that than something that's extremely fantasy-like.
But I've been surprised over the years. I mean, someone told me the other day that maybe 360 million people have played this game in the world. That's a lot of people.
I got to play with ZZ Top and introduce Bryan Adams and George Michael. And to have it all topped off by me winning 'American Idol?!' It's pretty absurd.
With Whitesnake it would have been inappropriate for me to have played Deep Purple songs, although I did at the beginning because I didn't have enough Whitesnake songs.
Norah Jones is a breath of fresh air. Norah Jones can sing and play. She's got some talent. I was totally ecstatic that that girl got noticed, because she's wonderful.
While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.
I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.
For hundreds of years, that was the major form of entertainment: The grown-ups sat around and watched the kids play. Now they sit around and watch the television. The actors are the kids.
It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.
When I first played the guitar without plugging it into an amplifier, the people at Fender were blown away. They couldn't believe the sound. I said, 'See, gentlemen, the world is no longer flat.'
