I was just different. When the other kids gravitated to football or basketball, I went fishing and skating. I was into trapping animals, pheasants and squirrels. Not only was I trapper, I was a taxidermist.
I always say that life is not easy for anybody. People hear about the young actors who have a rough life, but there are plenty of other kids who aren't actors who have a rough time, too, and I don't know if the ratio is any different.
I was kind of a bully, even though I'm tiny, 5' 2". As a child, I'd boss other kids around and dress my little brother up, just putting on shows, singing and dressing up.
I would play with numbers in a way that other kids would play with their friends.
I ended up being exposed to cinema that a lot of other kids wouldn't have been exposed to.
I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor.
With 'Tower Prep,' Cartoon Network wanted to go into a new area where no other kids' programming was going. There were a lot of kids' sitcoms on the air, but they wanted to really go with more of like an adventure/drama feel.
My mother sent me to speech classes, but the other kids still teased me. I was shy. I stooped. Instead of talking, I kept journals. That's where my love of words comes from. I majored in journalism.
I never had any plans to become a producer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a DJ, like most other kids at the time. Then my mum bought me a Casio keyboard and I started to sample sounds that I liked.
The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.
In junior high P.E., I was way too shy to take a shower in front of the other kids. It was a horribly awkward time - body hair, odors... So I'd go from my sweaty shirt back into my regular clothes and have to continue the day.
I think I'm trouble-adjacent. I remember hearing once that good girls don't get caught. I think that's sort of a lot of what my teen years were like. I skirted the stuff that other kids were doing because the idea of actually getting in trouble was not appealing to me, but I still wanted to have adventures.
I was a lot more cultured than the other kids in my high school. Because I traveled, I understood different cultures and had a more worldly view. Most of the people I went to high school with had never been outside of California.
When the other kids started calling me nicknames, I knew everything was all right. I have a pretty big mouth, so they hit on that and began calling me Gatemouth or Satchelmouth, and that Satchelmouth has stuck to me all my life, except that now it's been made into 'Satchmo' - 'Satchmo' Armstrong.
We lived on isolated farms and ranches, far from anybody, and when I was young I knew very few other kids, so I lived to a great extent in my imagination.
I was a bed wetter till very late. My mom used to hang my sheets out the window to dry, and I'd have to run home from school in order to beat the other kids to my house so they wouldn't see them.