Teddy Wilson, I think, said a little while ago that it's much easier to come in and play whatever comes into your mind, without obeying any of the laws of bass line and harmony and so on.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
It's hard if you start believing that you should be really that perfect fantasy ideal, that people start believing because of all of the retouching. You can delve into that fantasy world and play with it, but when you walk away, that's not you.
There's an opportunity for the corner drugstore to play a much greater role. Pharmacists have been extremely well respected - they're one of the top two or three most-trusted professionals in opinion polls year after year.
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
Although there was a point with the Tijuana Brass where we were playing for such huge crowds that I kind of lost contact. At one point, the only connection I had with the audience was with people out there lighting cigarettes.
I went to school with a guy named Truxton. He and I played football together, and he knocked me out once because he's bigger and strong than I am.
I am looking forward to a series of productive meetings in both Austria and Estonia, particularly what role organized crime plays in the Baltic drug trade.
I try to read everything that's sent me - play scripts, movie scripts - but I've had to make a rule. If the author hasn't grabbed me by Page 25, the piece goes back with a note of apology.
Specifically, we talked about making the character of the prince not so charming, at least in the beginning, and I'm playing around with the preconceptions attached to a character. That's really what intrigued me as well because I thought it would be...
But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.
I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.
I was a very imaginative child, and my parents were very encouraging of that. My sister and I would put on plays; I would write my own stories.
My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.
We played a festival in Ireland once, and in the middle of 'New Slang,' the Scissor Sisters kicked in across the field on this mega stage. It was a little distracting. It was hard to keep track of what I was supposed to sing.
When I was younger - I don't do this too much now - but sometimes if I couldn't sleep, I would lie in bed and imagine all the characters I've played at a dinner table together.
But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
Whenever you're going to play a real person, you run the risk of well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework.
When I was eight and a half, my parents moved to a part of Queens where there was a club nearby. We joined, and if you believe in someone up above, I think I was meant to play tennis.
For me, the NFL is the thing that's always been, kind of somewhat like the Heisman, it's been a dream as a kid to be able to have an opportunity to even be talked about being able to play in the NFL.
My whole career strategy has been to build a base so that I could take the roles I want to play. I'd hate to think that a shorter part might not be available because I was worried about my billing.
