Rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear it, on the concrete outside and on the old building above me. It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put u...
I remember at 16 years old, growing up in Queens, we were punks, but hey, when we went to the theater, we wore a shirt and tie! Similarly, I believe that to keep movie theaters in existence, they're gonna have to make 'em an event, have a couch, a ta...
You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there. You have to be humble as you execute but visionary and gigantic in terms of your aspiration. In the Internet industry, it's not about grand innovation, it's about a lot of little i...
I was never a joiner. I tried - I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago... I guess I wasn't a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as ...
Learn everything you can learn now while you are young. If you think you are old now, well let me remind you that NOTHING IS TOO LATE. If you will start it now, you are never too old to do it! Don't wait for another year older for you to learn someth...
He wasn’t my boyfriend, but he was something. Someone who made a positive impact on my life regardless of the negative. He changed my perspective for the better and made me who I am in this very second. I appreciate, cherish, and thank him for it; ...
As a girl, I used to zip myself into a snowsuit, fall into the deepest snowdrift I could find and sweep my arms and legs into the powder, making snow angels that would crumble within minutes of their genesis. Despite their rapid disappearance, someth...
My husband said to me while I was swooning in his arms, 'Why are all the longest dances the draggiest?' I took this to mean that he has not loved me for a very long time. Everything means something, or it does not. I have expressed an opinion. Every ...
And I think missing you hurts the most when something funny happens. Because in that one moment I find myself laughing, and within the next second I want to tell or text you what happened. And then it hits me again, every single time, that you aren�...
Longevity is something I never gave a second thought to. I guess it's the shadow of growing up in post WWII, but I never believed I would live past 20. Here I am though... a senior citizen... my voice and heart are stronger than ever, but boredom is ...
I made sure that instead of people making fun of me, like every comedian probably says, I made fun of myself first so they would get distracted and just laugh. I was pretty brutally picked on for a while growing up. It was always the really pretty gi...
And when I looked outside the window, something inside of me churned, swallowing hard I looked up and saw blue. I squeezed my eyes shut, holding back the tears and emotions that were swelling inside of me. And then I realized, the only time that I co...
I collect old portraits. They're all just interesting pictures of people, and you just kind of wonder who they were and what they were. There's a guy - I don't know who he is, but he's wearing a suit. He's got his arms folded, and he looks like he so...
Before I had kids, I thought you should never lie to a kid. But now I've had them, I realize you almost lie to them by definition, because if you're trying to summarize something for your 1-year-old, you put it in very simple terms. You only graduall...
The summer of 1991, I took $2,000 of my savings and a desktop program, and I asked my friends to write 800 words about something they cared about. I got eight or nine articles and put them together. It was no frills, black and white, no graphics. I p...
Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying,...
How would it feel if for an instance we stop being someone’s son/daughter, someone’s father/mother, someone’s husband/wife, someone’s lover, somebody’s employee, a countryman of some nation, a faithful devotee of some religion or a follower...
We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing. We played with a round ball, and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms, and we thought that we were making a contribution to ...
I decided to launch a fragrance because Aeropostale approached me about creating one, and it's something that I kind of always wanted to do but didn't think it would actually happen. So when I heard I had the opportunity to create my own perfume, I g...
I find that when I'm struggling to think of how a six-year-old would feel about something, I just have to go right down to the common denominator, find the simplest way that you can look at an object or a problem, and not muck it up with all of the s...
My parents were out of town and sent me to stay at my grandma's house. That's where I learned how to make pancakes. I served them to all the old ladies who lived on her block. After the meal, they each left a $5 bill next to their plates. I thought, ...
